Thursday 22 March 2007
Grand guignol / fumetti neri / Inferno
Today I was at a conference on film audiences. One of the presentations included some images from Theatre du Grand Guignol that I thought were interesting in relation to its Italian variant and the iconography of Kriminal and, though it, Argento's Inferno, of the skull mask, the “come sweet death, one last caress” etc.:
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3 comments:
spill some details on this conference? what was the context/direction of it? I'll trade you an Argento story in return! ps - check your blog regularly and enjoy it!
It was a conference called "Who are these people," in my home town, Edinburgh. I basically went to it because I knew one of the organisers; it was convenient to attend, and looked to have some interesting presentations about film audiences.
One of these was some preliminary findings from some research on audiences and sexual violence, which I had taken part in a couple of focus groups for. Another was about fan responses to the recent remake of The Wicker Man.
My own work doesn't really have anything to do with audiences - I'm more interested in analysing the film texts than the fan culture around the giallo or Argento for instance - but I like to try to keep things in context, as I find that to be one of the failings with a lot of overly-theoretical work.
Hope this helps, and look forward to hearing your story.
oh yeah - i promised you a story....
Back in 1987, Argento came to Toronto for the North American premiere of OPERA at the Toronto International Film Festival. His films have always had a rocky time up here in the province of Ontario with the Film Review Board hacking his films apart.
So for the introduction at midight in a 900 seat cinema (with balcony), he said something like this...
Here I am in Toronto. Last night I have this dream... I see hands... in black gloves. They take the phone book and find names of... film censor people. Each one dies a horrible terrible death by these gloved hands (makes stabbing motion). I wake up all of a sudden and ask myself, "Is this a nightmare... or just a dream?" (smiles a big Argento smile...)
There you go. He can up again for TRUAMA. If its any good, maybe he will be back in September for THE THIRD MOTHER...
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