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Dario Argento
By L. Andrew Cooper
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07874-3
Chapter One
Dario Argento Doing Violence on Film
Dario Argento's films push the limits of visual and auditory experience; they offend, confuse, sicken, and baffle. Never complacent, Argento approaches each work as an experiment, and over more than four decades of filmmaking, his commitment to innovation has produced a broad range of styles applied almost unwaveringly within two closely related genres—crime thriller and supernatural horror—with results that are sometimes brilliant, sometimes muddled, and sometimes both. The films are not to everyone's taste. Their violence is often so extreme that even hardened horror veterans will avert their eyes. The extremity goes beyond gore, reaching previously unrecorded levels of pain, suffering, and mental anguish. Even more disturbing than the extremity is that Argento makes the combination of carefully arranged details, from the sets' colors and shadows to the cameras' angles and movements, so fundamentally pretty. Viewers who can stand to look at one of his films once might very well want to look again.
The problem of looking, of the desire to see, is central to all of Argento's films. From his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), in which a man watches helplessly as a woman is apparently attacked, to Giallo (2009), in which cop and killer both appreciate photos of murder victims a little too much, characters watching violence reflect viewers watching the film, and nobody involved in the exchange escapes complicity in the horrific spectacles. Argento's films challenge a viewer's accepted ideas about film spectatorship, meaning, storytelling, and genre. The violence they do reaches beyond their minced murder victims: they do violence to film itself.
Argento has worked as a writer, producer, director, composer, and/or editor on more than forty films. He comments in an interview included on the Blue Underground DVD of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, "I was practically born into the cinema because my father was a producer." His initial exposure to the chaotic world of film production lacked appeal, so he became a film critic instead, a role that taught him "all the theories about cinema" and thus provided a foundation for the critical engagement with cinematic conventions that this book traces throughout his oeuvre. Argento enjoyed working as a critic, but gradually opportunities lured him into screenwriting. His most notable early effort was collaborating with Bernardo Bertolucci on the screenplay for Sergio Leone's classic western Once upon a Time in the West (1968). This success helped to create the opportunity for Argento to direct Bird, which his father, Salvatore Argento, produced. He continued to collaborate with his father as producer or executive producer on all of his features through 1982's Tenebre, and his younger brother, Claudio Argento, has served in production roles in the majority of features since 1973's The Five Days of Milan.
Through the production company Opera Film Produzione, Dario and Claudio Argento have produced a number of features that the elder brother did not helm, including the directorial debut of Dario's daughter Asia Argento, Scarlet Diva (2000). Asia's own career as an actress began in the Argento-produced film Demons 2 (1986); she later led the casts of the Argento-directed features Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), The Phantom of the Opera (1998), Mother of Tears (2007), and Dracula 3D (2012, projected). Although she has pursued a career in fashion rather than film, Dario's elder daughter, Fiore, debuted as an actress in the Argento-directed Phenomena (1985) and had major roles in the Argento-produced Demons (1985) and Argento-directed The Card Player (2004). These familial connections suggest a thin, permeable boundary between Dario Argento's personal life and his artistic work. Indeed, he has often commented on the pleasure of seeing his daughters grow up on film, and as this book's discussion of The Stendhal Syndrome suggests, Asia's identity as his daughter becomes a crucial aspect of the film's rhetorical challenges to film norms.
While the collaborative roles of his father, brother, and daughters are important aspects to consider when approaching Argento's works as a whole, the most significant collaboration of his career has arguably been with Daria Nicolodi, his onetime girlfriend, Asia's mother, and the star of many of his most successful films, including Deep Red (1975), Tenebre, Phenomena, and Opera (1987). Nicolodi also cowrote Suspiria (1977), considered by many to be Argento's masterpiece, taking inspiration from rumors of witchcraft in her own family history. She continued to be a creative influence on Suspiria's sequels Inferno (1980) and Mother of Tears, both of which feature her as an actress. This book does not focus on the sort of biographical criticism that Argento's collaborative relationships invite, but observing the centrality of collaboration, particularly with family, in Argento's work could help to qualify any illusion of the film director as a solitary author responsible for the works that this book associates pervasively with a possessive form of his name. The works that bear the Dario Argento brand are in some ways profoundly cohesive, which justifies approaching them as a meaningful collection, but the approach of Dario Argento should not occlude considering that "Argento's" works contain facets that far exceed the efforts of Dario Argento the man.
To establish the cohesiveness that makes Argento's oeuvre meaningful as such, the critical essay that forms the bulk of this book examines sixteen films that feature Argento as writer and director. While it includes a fairly comprehensive overview, with discussions of stories and performers as well as details about production, it does not attempt exhaustive treatments of these works, all of which deserve further scholarly attention. In focusing on how Argento's films function as rhetorical interventions against dominant views on film criticism, interpretation, narrative, and conventions, the essay aims to open up interpretive possibilities that connect the films to broader tendencies in film history. Even as it shows connections between Argento's works and works by canonical filmmakers, the argument relates the films to a broader turn away from the "high-art" and "high-theory" traditions of film and film studies. Argento's films inhabit the cinematic worlds of the popular director Mario Bava, Argento's closest predecessor in Italian film, and of the canonized artists Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Thus they have helped reevaluate cinema, especially "genre" cinema, in terms derived outside traditional aesthetic and critical paradigms. As this essay demonstrates, the films have strong roots in romanticism and aestheticism, but their relentless self-reflection also makes them distinctly postmodern, so even in their most "traditional" moments of aesthetic flourish, they wield an iconoclastic, deconstructive edge. The present argument differs from other studies that have influenced it, especially Maitland McDonagh's groundbreaking Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds and the collection of essays published in the journal Kinoeye, through a consistent focus on the films' overarching tendency to challenge the norms of film as an art form. This tendency emphasizes Argento's status as a sensationalist and provocateur whose work uses aesthetic impact to create, comment on, and at times resolve contemporary controversies.
The essay begins where Argento's films depart from some of the normative assumptions that have driven film criticism throughout his career, particularly those derived from psychoanalysis. It then explores the films' aesthetic challenges to narrative structure, and finally, it considers how Argento's later works respond to the new norms that his earlier works helped create. Although the essay explains these norms through emphasis on films bearing the Argento brand, it could just as easily illustrate them through discussion of the many films and filmmakers Argento has influenced, including the acknowledged masters George A. Romero (who has collaborated with Argento on multiple projects), John Carpenter (who pays homage to Argento's 1975 Deep Red in 2005's "Cigarette Burns," an episode of the TV show Masters of Horror), and Quentin Tarantino (who thanks Argento in the credits of his 2007 film Death Proof). Argento's international influence is also clearly visible in the aesthetic excesses of Japanese horror, exemplified in the works of Takashi Miike (Audition; 1999), as well as in works by a new generation of filmmakers represented by the French filmmakers Alexandre Aja (High Tension; 2003) and Pascal Laugier, who acknowledges his debt to Argento through the dedication of Martyrs (2008).
Despite its emphasis on the unity and influence of Argento's oeuvre, this essay eschews a traditional auteur approach: beyond those already mentioned, biographical details are relatively few, as the extent to which the films express Argento's "personal" vision is not a primary question. When the essay cites interviews, it treats Argento as an interpreter rather than the authoritative voice on what his films mean. Implicitly, it demonstrates the usefulness of approaching film as rhetoric and the cinema as a public and intellectual forum, but the essay's construals of specific films should not limit their possibilities for additional or even contradictory significance. Ultimately, the films speak for themselves, but they say things that are often ambiguous, equivocal, and difficult. If they were susceptible to a "final word," they would not be as worthy of consideration as they are.
Against Criticism: Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome
Accusations of sadism have condemned people who create and enjoy horror fiction, no matter the medium, for as long as horror fictions have existed, or at least since the Marquis de Sade put his stamp of approval on Matthew Lewis's eighteenth-century splatterfest novel The Monk (Cooper, Gothic, 48). Contemporary critics who want to frame horror's viewers as sadistic voyeurs often turn to Laura Mulvey's foundational 1975 article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," later incorporated into her book Visual and Other Pleasures, which explores "the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form" (14). Using the films of Alfred Hitchcock as a model, Mulvey describes how, in the representational strategies of many films, "the power to subject another person to the will sadistically or the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both" (23). By interrogating ways that film reinforces patriarchal norms that objectify women, Mulvey seeks a "break," an "alternative" that uses the language of patriarchal oppression in a gesture of resistance. She proposes an "alternative cinema [that] must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions" (15–16). By reacting against these norms, Mulvey's alternative would expose, condemn, and ultimately replace the perverse gaze of the sadistic voyeur.
Over time, critiques of this kind of "perversion" have risen to a position of dominance through the works of feminists who have taken up Mulvey's call. For example, Mary Ann Doane considers Mulvey's scant treatment of female spectatorship and concludes that certain films by Hitchcock and others summon female subjectivity only to negate it, condemning female spectatorship to a state that is merely virtual, an absence (80–81). Also focusing on Hitchcock and seeking a habitable position for the female spectator, Tania Modleski acknowledges Mulvey's essay as "the founding document of psychoanalytic feminist film theory" but argues for more variable gendered identifications with onscreen violence against women (1). Modleski sees "a thoroughgoing ambivalence about femininity" manifested through "the misogyny and the sympathy [that] actually entail one another" in murderous male characters like Norman Bates in Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho (3–4). Building on her own earlier work, Mulvey provides a more nuanced view of female spectatorship, which she claims is masculinized through identifications with the cinema's endemic male gaze (29–30). While these theoretical approaches to spectatorship suggest possibilities and pleasures beyond the misogynistic sadism Mulvey originally described, they still affirm the dominance of sadistic male voyeurism in representations of violence against women.
In Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol Clover explains that people rarely challenge claims about sadistic voyeurism in the horror film "because to do [so] would be to take on one of the most entrenched ... and status-quo-supportive clichés of modern cultural criticism" (226). Clover's work takes on this cliché, arguing that the horror film allows its viewers to identify with both killer and victim, sadistically and masochistically, regardless of gender; she does "not, however, believe that sadistic voyeurism is the first cause of horror," favoring instead both male and female masochistic identification with the victim (19). In keeping with Clover's assertion, Dario Argento's films contradict anyone who claims that they predominantly rely on the audience's sadistic identification with the violence his camera captures. Two years before Clover first published her ideas about sadistic and masochistic identification, Argento made a similar argument in the 1985 documentary Dario Argento's World of Horror. Speaking of his point-of-view cinematography, he explains, "I want the spectator sucked into the scene. I want him to approach objects, or people. In the end it is you, the spectator, who kills or who is murdered." Argento expects his audiences to identify with his films in varying and multiple ways that go beyond simple determinations of gender. Discussing how Argento's films reflect on gender through the identities of their killers, Adam Knee concludes, "Argento's killers, in their variety and obscurity, tend to frustrate most such generalizations about gender" (215). With his characters as well as his camera, Argento's films represent gender and gendered identifications self-consciously, seldom making them simple or predictable.
Critical responses to Argento's work provide one explanation of this self-consciousness. As Chris Gallant states, "Accusations of misogynist characterizations ... have surrounded Argento's output since the beginning of his career" (65). Increasing self-consciousness does not, of course, exculpate Argento from charges of misogyny. Though she gives Argento little specific treatment, even Clover includes him in the company of Hitchcock and Brian De Palma as an artist who has made misogynistic statements about the roles of women in his art. Argento's own words seem particularly damning and have reappeared in many critical assessments of his work—Clover takes them from William Schoell's Stay Out of the Shower (1985): "'I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man'" (Clover 42). Argento might very well have been thinking of one of his heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, who, after considering the importance of beauty in poetry as well as the supremacy of melancholy as a poetic quality, concludes, "[T]he death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" ("Philosophy" 425). The idea that a man attracted to women would prefer to represent beautiful women is not necessarily misogynistic, but having roots in Poe's aesthetic philosophy does not make Argento's representations of women's death (and what Julia Kristeva would call women's abjection) any less problematic. However, Argento's awareness of his critics' charge of misogyny serves as a starting point for considering how his 1987 film Opera works against such criticism and responds to horror's detractors.
Opera
Opera's storyline is partially a reimagining of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. It centers on the experiences of Betty, a young opera singer who unwittingly rises from the rank of understudy to a lead role through the intervention of a killer. On the night of her successful debut, after an aborted attempt at sex with her boyfriend Stefan, Stefan steps out to fetch some tea. Seconds later, a hand grabs Betty's mouth from behind; the killer binds her hands and places tape over her mouth. He ties her to a pillar and takes out two sets of needles held together by strips of tape. When he fastens the needles beneath Betty's eyes, they extend perfectly from lower to upper eyelids. Wide with terror, her eyes, in extreme close-up, dart back and forth behind the almost evenly spaced rows of needles (figure 1).
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Excerpted from Dario Argento by L. Andrew Cooper Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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