Today's question

Are there any examples of Dario Argento's film criticism from the 1960s readily available, whether in Italian or English? I'm not talking so much about paraphrases or references, as with reading in Christopher Frayling about how he liked A Fistful of Dollars or elsewhere about his liking for Bava and Freda and questions over Blow-Up, more whether there's an unexpurgated piece or three, sort of like some of the early pieces in Tom Milne's Godard on Godard or The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut collection; the kind of thing that would hopefully give an idea of his position at that time.

The reason I ask is that I'm intrigued to know how an Italian critic pursuing a post-Cahiers kind of line - always assuming that's what it was, of course; I may be wrong - could work when the national cinema of the previous generation(s) was not a Cinema du papa that relatively few were prepared to defend, but the revered neo-realists and their successors.

Where did these critics find their opposition - the easy target of the fascist-era telefono bianco types? Or was it possible to pursue a neutral course, going on a film-by-film and directory-by-director basis, that there are fundamentally two sorts of cinema - the good and the bad? Freda, after all, seems at times to have situated himself in opposition to neo-realism and out and out fantasy; while we all know about the giallo as the telefono rosso film...

Random thoughts on Sleepless

I watched Sleepless again earlier this evening. It's a film I can appreciate but have not been able to quite embrace whole-heartedly. I think I'm starting to understand why: I just find it to be too calculated, too concerned with giving the audience what it wants. I realise that this was what Argento needed at that point in time, coming off the disappointing critical and commercial responses to Trauma, The Stendhal Syndrome and Phantom of the Opera – the first two being films I think are much maligned, perhaps on account of being more authentic and personal works, and which I find continue to get better with each additional viewing and passing year.

What also struck me this time is how the film seems very much like the inverse of Phenomena, as a similar exercise in revisiting past themes; that way in which with both films you can almost go through them scene by scene, picking out the intertextual reference points and allusions.

One difference is that with Phenomena, I get the sense Argento was making a film for himself and trusting that his core audience would have faith and come along for the ride. With Sleepless, 15 years later, I gets the sense that he was no longer confident of this audience – if indeed it even still existed, or had not changed composition dramatically – and accordingly sought to make a film for them, for better or worse. (Trauma would, I suppose, be midway between these two positions, for its simultaneous adoption of elements of the slasher film and its subversion of the same with the giallo and an overriding seriousness.)

Another difference is that with Phenomena I still get that sense of a film-maker going forward or at least underscoring a phase in his career. With Sleepless, however, it at times seems more like a scoring out of the previous decade's work, of saying that it represented (perhaps necessary) dead ends and digressions.

There is one significant exception: with the character of Ulysses Moretti I think we see Argento – no longer of course, a young man, even if my (our?) mental image of him remains as such – addressing issues of ageing and mortality in a new, genuinely mature, way. Perhaps its the Bergman influence exerting itself through the presence of Max Von Sydow in the role, perhaps the expressionist influence on both filmmakers, but for some reason I'm reminded of Wild Strawberries...

L' Ultimo uomo della terra / The Last Man on Earth

Dr Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) is the titular Last Man on Earth. A plague has swept the world, killing much of the population and transforming the remainder into vampires.

Every day he goes through the same routine, carrying out his undending search and destroy mission against then returning to his boarded up, garlic, mirror and crucifix-festooned home before night falls and the undead, including his former colleague and friend Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) gather outside and taunt him to come out...

A faithful adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic 1951 horror novel I Am Legend - the author had a hand in the writing under the pseudonym Logan Swanson - this 1964 Italian-American co-production would seem to have exerted a considerable influence on the imagery of George A. Romero's Dead films and The Crazies, the sequences of gas-mask wearing soldiers pitching bodies into burning pits also being the kind of things that would not look too out of place in a documentary on Nazi atrocities.

Benefitting from a strong performance from a cast-against-type Vincent Price - his sophisticated, suave manner has no place in a world where all that matters is to survive - and good use of the distinctive architecture of the EUR region of Rome, as also seen in Antonioni's L'eclisse and Argento's Tenebrae, The Last Man on Earth is a surprisingly good film that deserves to be better known.




The post-apocalyptic landscape of the EUR

One also wonders if the depopulated world of Tenebrae, as another science-fiction film set a few years into its future - now our past, of course - might not have been affected by a plague like the one depicted here, leading to the emergence of a new, post-human order. (After all, weren't Demons and Phenomena in part Argento's musings on a world where fascism had triumphed and Opera a meditation on the impossibility of love in the era of AIDS respectively?)

Cimitero senza croci / Cemetery without Crosses

I've been on a bit of a spaghetti western binge at the moment. The best new discovery has been Robert Hossein's Cemetery Without Crosses, co-written by a certain Dario Argento and dedicated by Hossein - who produced, directed, wrote and starred in the piece, remarkably without compromising it - to Sergio Leone.


From one auteur to another?

While it might be possible to seek common elements between the film and Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West - as the Leone film co-authored by Argento, along with Bertolucci - that are not in evidence in Leone or Hossein's other films as possible Argento-isms, in truth I think that would be a largely futile exercise.

One thing that did leap out, however, was the way in which Cemetery's Manuel takes his black gloves out of a musical box and invariably dons the right one before going into action; at one point he even gets an opponent to back down by simple virtue of putting it on. It's classic unimportant prop to signifying fetish material.


The glove box also plays a tinkly music box theme like Mortimer's and Indio's watches in For a Few Dollars More or the killer's tape in Deep Red


Let's go to work...


No, not the infamous panty-ripping murder in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage but some Italian western black glove action

There's also a well staged suspense sequence where Manuel, having schemed his way into the home of the family whose daughter he intends to kidnap, is seated at the dinner table with the rest of their hired hands. Nobody speaks, the only sounds those of cutlery and typically messy spaghetti western eating. Everyone turns to look at him - has he been rumbled? As it turns out, no, with the release of tension coming not through a moment of violence, Leone style, but a Hitchcock style gag, as the family and their hirelings play a practical joke on the new recruit.

More generally, the film made me think about what seem to be the fundamentally different ways in which spaghetti westerns and gialli deal with trauma. In gialli trauma is more likely to induce insanity than a desire for revenge, which often also takes a somewhat confused and generalised form in which the society as a whole or certain groups within it are to blame. In spaghettis trauma usually leads to straightforward vendetta, even if the path to its fulfilment may well be just as convoluted and strewn with flashbacks and mystery elements.

Art of Darkness

Something I chanced upon while browsing: an art installation inspired by Suspiria:

http://p-l-m.blogspot.com/2007/03/stan-douglas-suspiria-2002.html

Comizi d'amore / Love Meetings

Although this blog is nominally about the giallo film and Dario Argento, I think it is important to maintain a sense of perspective and try to watch a variety of cinema. You can never tell when something is going to prove relevant, or provide some new insight or idea.

This 1965 documentary from Pier Paolo Pasolini is a case in point. In it the director goes round Italy, microphone in hand, conducting vox populi interviews in which he asks ordinary Italians for their views on such topics as divorce, homosexuality and the whether the closure of brothels via the 1958 Merlin Law was a good or bad thing.

As such, it provides a fascinating insight into the kind of discourses around modernity that Mikel Koven argues - I think correctly - that we see in gialli five or ten years later. Putting it another way, I think anyone who enjoys – say – the debates between Marc Daly and Gianna Brezzi in Deep Red as much as the set-pieces would get a lot of out this.

Another link

A nice little introduction to Argento; it perhaps will not tell anyone visiting here much they did not already know, but does have some trailers and a piece of art for The Stendhal Syndrome that I do not think I had ever seen before:

http://nosmokingintheskullcave.blogspot.com/2006/07/great-film-icons-1-dario-argento.html

Via Fritz Lang

I was recently reading Reynolds Humphries book Fritz Lang, a study of the German director's American period films. While I find Humphries' approach too psychoanalytical for my liking - no surprise really, considering that it is an English translation of a thesis produced under the supervision of none other than Christian Metz in the 1970s - there are some useful summary descriptions and insights in there:

“[I]n the Langian textual system [...] all manifestations of vision and representation are bound up with questions of relativity and truth. Things may never be what they seem, but this tends to be elided in a desperate striving to pass belief off as knowledge in an attempt to maintain the ego as the center of a fixed network of concepts whose ideological nature is patent.”

“The Langian textual system is concerned first and foremost with the spec(tac)ular nature of the image and how we see it. [...] [T]his theme is often inscribed into the diegesis via the search of an investigator who believes that knowledge is a question of clear vision but who fails to understand that such vision is a matter not just of seeing things as they are but of grasping one's place in a discourse as subject of desire, of the unconscious.”

Substitute Lang for Argento and it seems to me you also have pretty good descriptions of the “textual systems” of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red and Tenebre.

Plus Ministry of Fear has both a seance sequence and a character named Neale...

Old but good

A couple of links to extended discussions of Argento and his cinema:

Jigsaw Lounge: http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/argentolounge.html
Slant: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/darioargento.asp

Words and pictures #4

“Scholars are only now beginning to work their way into its [Benjamin’s Arcades project’s] labyrinthine structure, a structure Adorno claimed only Benjamin himself could fully explain. Let us simply note two important aspects of this project. The first is that Benjamin based it on the revolution in architecture that the use of iron and glass had made possible. Here, commentators have noted in particular than Benjamin was fascinated by the new spatial relationships between interior and exterior that the use of glass made possible: the street could be brought inside, and the inside was opened up to the public. The difference between private and public was thus becoming problematic...”
From John Lechte's entry on Walter Benjamin in Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers

The Phantom of Soho

This 1964 krimi presented me with something of a dilemma. It was a film I eagerly wanted to see on account of a Tenebrae connection made by Tim Lucas in The Video Watchdog Book, but which I was wary of approaching through Alpha Video's DVD

And, now, turning to write about the film, I face another version of this dilemma. It is a film I want to recommend, but on a DVD which I cannot – its quality is shockingly poor, the sort of thing for which there is really no excuse and for which Alpha do not deserve your hard-earned money for the simple reason that they do not seem to have done any work themselves.


Bryan Edgar Wallace; note how the image is also slightly cropped

The film itself was one of those produced by Artur Brauner's CCC from a story by Bryan Edgar Wallace, who appears in the credits sequence. Nevertheless, despite a few concessions to contemporary tastes, most notably some exposed breasts in a night-club routine, the setting is otherwise that comfortably familiar krimi neverwhen, the 1920s and the 1960s colliding in a German studio set evocation of an imaginary London populated by outmoded stock types.


Is that a Suspiria-like Bird with a Crystal Plumage?


Whatever the case, that is certainly Werner Peters


A voyeuristic / exhibitionistic ecdysiast performance

The case begins when Archibald Bissell, a prominent businessman, is dispatched by a silver-gloved, knife-wielding assassin. The motive was not robbery. Indeed, rather than taking the £100 Bissell had on him – a tidy sum whether the year is 1924 or 1964 – the killer left a distinctive African fetish doll.

It is the latter feature that causes Sir Phillip to assign the case to Inspector Patten (Dieter Borsche; that and the fact Patten was also Bissell's batman when they were in the colonial service in Africa together and so may also have a personal interest in the case.

His investigations soon uncover a mess of blackmail, white slavery and insurance fraud, all centred on the Soho night club Sansibar. Quite how this all relates to the Phantom – as Sir Phillip's crime writer friend Clorinda Smith (Barbara Rutting) dubs the killer, who soon strikes twice more, first assassinating an Italian posing as a Bedouin knife-thrower(!) and then an MP, to futher add to the confusion over motivation – seems almost another matter entirely.




Some of Franz Josef Gottlieb's striking compositions, ably photographed by Richard Angst and all but destroyed by Alpha's non-presentation

Without wishing to give too much away – but let us face it, if approaching the film with Tenebrae as primary reference point there is a strong sense of deja vu to dialogue like “You must admit: mystery writers have it easy compared to us [...] But the fact is you know from the very first who the culprit is, we criminologists rarely know up to the very end.” – the resolution to the whole mystery revolves around the crime author, allowed to participate in the investigation in the hope that she might provide the Scotland Yard men with a fresh perspective, that of the amateur who has hitherto dealt solely with fiction.

This said, what is different about the films, as another reminder of The Phantom of Soho's krimi status, is the downplaying of the psychosexual element to the killer's crimes. He – or she – is motivated neither by a desire to wipe out “human perversion” nor the legacy of traumatic sexual experience, as with Tenebre's multiple maniacs; unless, that is, we decide to extend the sexual to the point of being all-encompassing and thereby, I would content, fundamentally useless as explicatory tool.

Franz Josef Gottlieb's approach as director can basically be summed up as never to use a straightforward shot if he can find a more imaginative and visually striking one, including mounting the camera on the rotating wheel of the knife-thrower's assistant. It is a strategy that certainly sustains interest should the plot convolutions get too much and helps to create the desired atmosphere most of the time, albeit with the odd moment that is perhaps too self-indulgent or mannered for the good of the film as a whole.


The Phantom about to strike...


... and to be unmasked; note that at least in the version I saw we do not see the Phantom's mask until this point

Thus, if the old-fashioned black and white cinema-photography and Martin Bottcher's excellent crime jazz score further distance The Phantom of Soho from the impossibly modern feel of Argento's film, this same attitude also leads one to suspect that Gottlieb would happily have incorporated “unmotivated” Louma crane shots or machine-driven synthetic rhythms had the technology been available.

To sum up: a very good and interesting self-referential krimi, marred by an abysmal presentation.

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.:

Some telling dialogue from Tenebrae

Gianni: “I was on my way back to the house. I know there's a piece of the puzzle there if I can only remember it, see it.”

Or, the expectation that a Bird with the Crystal Plumage / Deep Red dynamic is about to develop, as Gianni revisits the scene of the crime, the haunted house.

Peter Neale: “I'm sorry Gianni, I'm really sorry that you had to get caught up in all of this.”

Or, Neale's admissions of guilt and another signal that Argento is playing by a different set of rules to his more celebrated earlier gialli, that the (young) man who just about knows too much is about to die; the dynamic being more akin to Four Flies on Grey Velvet, where Arrosio is allowed the pleasure of knowing that he was right and had solved the mystery, albeit “only at the moment of dying”

Who says Argento cannot write effective, multi-layered dialogue?

Infernal Affairs

In his essay on Deep Red, Aaron Smuts proposes a Humean “principle of association” operating within the film, intensifying the visceral impact of its murder set-pieces amongst other things. By this he means the way in which Argento and his co-writer Bernardino Zapponi try to associate the film's horrors within everyday experiences that the viewer is likely to have had and then intensify or amplify them to operatic proportions.

Another type of association is found within Deep Red's own diegesis, as events and pieces of dialogue foreshadow the later murders: Marc's pseudo-Freudian interpretation of how when playing the piano he is “really” bashing bashing his father's teeth thus associate with Professor Giordani's having his teeth smashed against the fireplace by the killer; Marc's being blasted with steam by an espresso machine (“hey”) with Amanda Righetti's having her head immersed in boiling water, and so on.

It is an idea that also seems to have considerable mileage in relation to the internal logic of Inferno in particular. I am not just thinking of the way in which Sara cuts her hand on the taxi door and Rose hers on a broken doorknob prior to their murders, on the same night, one in Rome and the other in New York, but also some of the otherwise inexplicable inserts that Argento includes.




In time but not place?






New York, the very same night...

Might the perplexing shots of black-gloved hands snipping the heads off paper dolls refer to Rose's guillotining with a window pane in particular (if you look carefully a statue of Napoleon can be seen in the window of Kazanian's antique shop, among the more usual giallo/surrealist dolls; while the guillotine also appears more obviously in Trauma) and the lizard eating the butterfly to the stuffed animals that she finds in what appears to be a deserted and dilapidated version of the alchemical laboratory Sara discovers in the library in Rome?

There is no definitive answer, of course, but that is the whole point and why the film so frustrates when approached with a conventional meaning seeking and fixing mindset.

“There are more things in heaven and earth [...] than are dreamt of in your philosophy” and, indeed, to the Argento text, where "beauty will be convulsive or not at all"

Words and pictures #1

"Let us define the screaming point in a cinematic narrative as something that generally gushes forth from the mouth of a woman, which by the way does not have to be heard, but which above all must fall at an appointed spot, explode at a precise moment, at the crossroads of converging plot lines, at the end of an often convoluted trajectory, but calculated to give this point a maximum impact. The film functions like a Rube Goldberg cartoon mechanism full of gears, pistons, chains and belts – a machine built to give birth to a scream."
Michel Chion – The Voice in Cinema




The finale of Tenebrae

The Cat o' Nine Tails - some existential questions?

In Cat o' Nine Tails does the killer leave his victims “all cut up” because he is insane or to lead the police into searching for a madman and thereby less likely to connect the break-in at the Terzi institute with his other crimes?

Is the fundamental difference between the killer and the blind investigator how they respond to the hands fate has dealt them, that the former cannot see past his possession of the wrong genetic combination while the latter has never let his becoming blind define his being as blind man and nothing else? (This is something Maitland McDonagh alludes to.)

Is part of the problem that many commentators have with the film, besides the probable influence of Argento's own retrospective dismissals of it, that its emphases, which I would identify as the aural, the tactile and what might be characterised as existential questions, are at odds with those of the dominant theories, which are visual and concerned with the unconscious? When Argento says the film is “too American” is he partly also saying it is too 1940s film noir and too little 1970s giallo in its thematics?

Some thoughts on the first two sequences of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

The impact of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's gallery sequence is such that commentators often begin their discussion of the film at this point. I would argue, however, that the general excessiveness of the film – an excess which, as we will see, takes a different form from that of the director's later films – means that the two sequences which precede it do more than just introduce the two main characters, the killer and amateur detective Sam Dalmas.

In the first sequence, which plays over the film's credits, the killer prepares for the murder of 'his' next victim, who is also seen being stalked and photographed, neatly signifying the camera as assaultive weapon. The sequence introduces Argento's characteristic emphasis on textures through the shine of the black gloves and raincoat, photographs and knives; a shine that also, by happy coincidence, further foregrounds the director's introduction of a heightened fetish element to the giallo film killer's accoutrements in relation to Freud's famous formulation of fetishism in relation to the “Glanz auf der Nase” or “shine on the nose”. Nevertheless, although agreeing with Needham's assertion that the film sees what was primarily a fashionable disguise in Blood and Black Lace transform into something more replete with fetishistic meanings here, one also feels that his analysis perhaps neglects to consider the longer history of black gloves and raincoats in films such as M, where they are not particularly fetishised, and Death Laid an Egg, where they are.


Le mani sulla citta - the black gloves as normal attire in Fritz Lang's M and within the krimi tradition


The black glove and blade fetish combination in Death Laid an Egg (1967) prefiguring The Bird with the Crystal Plumage by three years.

In other regards, however, this sequence is less successful. Whilst the unclear chronology, superimposition of the camera frame, freeze-frames and snapshots of the victim in black-and-white certainly serve to alert audiences to the fact that they are watching an explicit re-presentation of the world; to Argento's strategies; and the idea(l) of becoming alert, active participants, their diegetic meaning remains unclear. Why should the killer chose these particular victims and be compelled to document things in this manner, even going to the lengths of typing away whilst wearing the gloves.

While we could invoke a psychoanalytical rationale, such as the killer's attempting to master their original traumatic event through ritual and repetition, the remainder of the film does not really seem to support this. Though the killer's fourth victim / the film's second is photographed before her murder, the fifth / third is not. One possibility here is that the last victim is murdered by the killer's protector-accomplice, but this is not made explicit. Likewise, no reference is made to the killer's documenting their crimes in the analysts summing up of the case at the end of the film.


Photography or cinematography?


The shine of the photograph and the gloves; the killer touching the surface of the image


The fetishisation of the murder weapon

The obvious questions that then emerge is why they are there and why the sequence does not just show the killer's preparations, then the murder. (Indeed, the minimal representation of the murder here, the screen momentarily going black whilst a single scream rings out, also testifies that Argento's rarely recognised facility for restraint, most evident in his more recent films, was present from the outset.) One answer is that by foregrounding the constructedness of the image in this way Argento was better able to allude to one of his key influences, Antonioni, and specifically Blow-Up.

As such, these images seem to open themselves up to analysis in terms of the Barthesian framework of excess meaning proposed by McDonagh. They are excessive signifiers, or signifiers of excess, that only really make sense in relation to their own systems of meaning. Crucially in this case, this sense is also fundamentally external to the film itself, intertextual rather than intratextual.

This, in turn, is something that distinguishes the intermittent and less controlled excesses of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which McDonagh downplays, from the more consistent and disciplined excesses of Deep Red, as Argento's most thorough-going working through of the problematic established by Blow-Up, which she emphasises.

In Deep Red the excesses are more multi-layered and thereby better able to meet the requirements of both “readerly” / popular cinema and “writerly” / art cinema approaches, providing a combination of textual, subtextual and intertextual meanings and reference points. Thus, to give one example, the bizarre puppet with which the killer torments and distracts one of her victims functions at the readerly or more surface level to amplify the shock moment and at the writerly or deeper as something associated with – for instance – a characteristic Surrealist motif and, by extension, notions of “convulsive beauty”.

Here, however, what we seem to have is a would-be “writerly” fragment that likely comes across as too self-conscious and mannered to really work in art cinema terms and as too confusing and nonsensical in those of popular cinema. (Though, as Sobchack's deconstruction of the term confusion to emphasise the co-mingling and co-presence of the senses shows, sometimes it is not necessarily a bad thing; the point here is that we seem to have a confusion that hinders rather than helps our understanding and appreciation of the film.)

What has rarely been recognised, however, is thus the importance of certain key sequences in The Bird's much-maligned follow-up, The Cat o' Nine Tails in offering a more successful initial interrogation of Blow-Up's (rhetoric of the) image. Part of the reason for this, one suspects, is that this is also achieved at the cost of being integrated more into film itself, with a concomitant diminution of the apparent scope for the critic to interpret. Put another way, Cat o' Nine Tails is a more classical and readerly film than The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (or, for that matter, the little-seen Four Flies on Grey Velvet).

In Cat o' Nine Tails it is actually a Blow-Up style professional photographer who captures the vital detail that reveals an apparent accident to be a deliberate act of murder. Waiting at the train station to record the arrival of a starlet – a sequence that itself perhaps allowing for a reference to Antonioni's L'Avventura and La Notte alongside the paparazzi of Fellini's La Dolce vita – the photographer happens to catch the hand of the assassin pushing the would-be blackmailer in front of the oncoming train.


The moment of death is captured by the photographer


But after a brief look at the body he remembers why they are there: “Hey, we've forgotten about the starlet – come on.”




Though the death continues to affect him: “That's right – smile, smile. A man is dead!”

Reflecting his inability to truly see – i.e. to see within the framework of the filmmakers' emerging sense logic – he does not, however, notice this until prompted to interrogate the photograph more closely by one of the film's protagonists. It is Arno, the blind ex-newspaperman, the one who sees, who is a seer, that asks the pertinent question of whether the reproduction of the blackmailer's fall (itself another recurring theme in Argento's cinema, as Thoret emphasises) reproduced in the newspaper was perhaps “cropped,” emphasising / framing it at the expense of excluding / deframing the remainder.


The photograph as it appears in the newspaper


And the detail that, working within the framework of an unfortunate accident, no-one sees

The second sequence in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is less excessive – though not totally lacking in this regard – but also more successful. Following the cut to a black screen and scream, the first thing we see is an announcement of the mysterious murder of a young woman, the third in a month. As the camera moves out, we then get more of the detail, that this is an advertising hoarding for Paesa Sera (the newspaper on which Argento himself worked) and that the other headline is a train crash in England, with many dead. Neither event, however, particularly concerns Professor Carlo Dover as he buys a newspaper from the kiosk and scans though its pages – “ah, the same old rubbish” – nor his friend Sam Dalmas – “come on Carlo, or we'll be late.” This indifference will of course prove deeply ironic in the light of the events about to unfold.




From the specific to the general; note the gialli paperbacks on the edicola

The way the scene is constructed, opening on a detail and then moving out to give the wider context, rather than using the more classical approach of providing an establishing shot, then breaking the scene up into smaller details once spatial relationships have been identified, soon emerges as one of the characteristic features of the film. This also, of course, gives it a distinctly modernist edge that distinguishes it from the likes of Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, if not Questi's lesser-known, more experimental Death Laid an Egg.

As the two men walk along, we learn that Sam is an American ex-patriot writer, who came to Italy in search of inspiration. It has not emerged, however, and he has instead found himself writing a manual on the preservation of rare birds for as a work for hire. Besides introducing the common giallo theme of the foreigner or outsider and representing the first in a long line of Argento's creative figures, Sam's existential situation, his desire to be doing something authentic and meaningful, seems to parallel that of Argento himself at this point in his career. While quickly establishing himself as an in-demand screenwriter and script doctor after Once Upon a Time in the West, Argento had also rapidly become frustrated at the way his work was often treated by directors, his ideas failing to emerge onto the screen in the manner as he had hoped. Indeed, in large part it was his sense that the directors proposed to helm The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, such as Terence Young and Duccio Tessari, would be unable to appreciate its novelties – more, to repeat, in form than content – that led to his decision to direct the film himself. Perhaps surprisingly, however, he has indicated that he did so without any real thoughts of pursuing a career as a director rather than writer.




Portrait of the artist as a young man

Carlo: “Don't you want a copy?” (of the book)
Sam: “Who needs it – I have this!” (the cheque)

What also seems curious here is co-producer Goffredo Lombardo's sense that he had made a mistake in agreeing to part-finance the film with Salvatore and Dario Argento's own company, SeDA Spettacoli. For while one could understand the film's rushes not “making sense” in classical cinema terms by virtue of the more modernist approach Argento was taking, the extensive storyboarding he has indicated he undertook in developing the film might suggest that Lombardo ought to have known what the new director was aiming for.

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud

One of the staple locations in the giallo filone is the elevator. Yet, the more you think about it, the more you realise that not all elevators are created equal and, indeed, how they express different things about their distinctive worlds, much in the same way as human character might – the way in which, for instance, the Edwige Fenech protagonists of Sergio Martino's The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh and All the Colours of the Dark convey a very different model of the modern woman than the Susan Scott protagonists of Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks on High Heels and Death Walks at Midnight.

Thus, for example, the elevator in a film like Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage – and, at this level at least, its many imitators – operates according to an impersonal and mechanistic logic, in accord with the scientifically understandable modern world in which it is squarely situated.

It simply does not care whether a maniac awaits a passenger at the other end; whether a passenger is a maniac, perhaps about to spatter its confines with his / her victim's blood; or indeed if it will subsequently open up a chasm for the killer to fall into or remorselessly descend to crush them.

In Argento's more fantastical films – and here subsuming them within the giallo because of the presence of black gloved killer and amateur seeker protagonists – elevators seem however to have personalities and minds of their own, subordinate to the occult powers they serve and operating according to their rules.

Note how, for instance, following her sojourn into the basement of the witch-house Rose Elliot must take the stairs after the elevator fails to arrive and she hears some of its other inhabitants coming in Inferno, or the way in which the distinctive design and décor of the building in which Sonia lives retrospectively signal it to be part of Mater Suspiriorum's domain and thereby no place of safety for the fleeing Pat Hingle in Suspiria.






Still in the belly of the beast (the Tanzacademie building is actually called 'The Whale')




Like the rest of the building the lift obeys its mistress's logic

The finale of Deep Red perhaps presents the tipping point here, the moment when the scientific logic of the Animal Trilogy transforms into the associational / magical logic of the Three Mothers films, as the lift “conspires” with Marc Daly to decapitating Martha, but perhaps only so that he can gaze into the pool of her blood and recognise his own irrevocably altered being.




Again, albeit probably coincidentally, triangular formations






How did she produce such a perfect pool of blood; a deep / shallow reflecting surface of hidden profundity?