The mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides

One of my favourite Argento tropes is the way in which, rather than zooming in on a detail, he will instead close in on and isolate it by a series of two or three cuts. What it means is another matter, though I’m currently leaning towards it being an indication to the viewer to “look closer” or “listen closer”. (Admittedly this assumes there is always a meaning, a tendency we must also guard against...)

In Inferno there’s a particularly nice instance of the three shot variant in the montage that is intercut with the build up to Sara’s murder, as we get three shots of the full moon:







Here, I think Argento is alluding to the power of Mater Tenebrarum, “the defiler of God [...] the mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides,” according to De Quincey, noting that a hanging woman – a suicide – follows shortly afterwards within the montage:

Random Inferno point

In Inferno there's an odd moment when we and Mark hear a woman's laugh on the soundtrack. He asks Elise if she heard it, but she did not. Our perspective and Mark's are thus shared, perhaps creating suspicion over Elise's identity and function within the narrative. Did she really not hear the sound or is she lying and, if so, why?

Earlier, however, on the discovery of Sara's body, there's a scream as it rips through the curtain, half in the non-diegetic soundtrack, half not, the film being one which has a complex sound design that, as is often the case in Argento (cf. the 'turn it down' moment in Tenebrae, Edda Dell'Orso's vocalism in the gallery sequence in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) blurs and confuses such boundaries. It is not Sara, as she is already dead. So who is it, why does Mark not seem to hear it and what, if anything, is the reason for the difference between the position and response to these screams?

Random Inferno thought

One of the many little details within Inferno that has long intrigued me is the woman in the library who sneaks a conspiratorial glance at Sara as she passes. The reason for this is that in an absolute, constructed film like Inferno, where nothing is left to chance, even a two or three second shot like this is there for a reason – even if this reason is the intepretive enigmas it poses.







Watching the film again, and comparing it to the scene in Suspiria where Suzy is caught in a beam of reflected light by one of the Rumanian “ogres” as she moves through the main hallway of the Tanzacademie, I have a theory: this woman is yet another of the three mothers' minions and this is the point at which Sara falls under their influence of their malign power as she uses the evil eye or similar on Sara. There are three keys here:

First, that Alfred, the sinister child, also seems to momentarily smile in the Suspiria sequence at the point when Suzy is transfixed in the beam of light, only for his face to return to normal once the spell has been cast.













Second, that immediately after this moment, Sara steps into an area of unnatural red light and inquiries as to the whereabouts of Varelli's Three Mothers, which just happens to be right behind her.





Third, as she takes and opens the book (accompanied by a camera movement around and isolating her) time seems to vanish as, despite only seconds passing on screen, the next thing we hear the library is about to close and is now empty; it is at this point, attempting to leave the place, she gets lost in its red and blue coloured labyrinth and encounters another of the Mothers' minions.

Words and pictures #2

How can any-space-whatever be constructed (in the studio or on location)? How can any-space-whatever be extracted from a given state of things; from a determinate space? The first way was shadow, shadows: a space full of shadows, or covered with shadows, becomes any-space-whatever. [...] Expressionism operates with darkness and light, the opaque black background and the luminous principle: the two powers couple together gripping like wrestlers, giving space a great depth, a prominent and distorted perspective, which will be filled with shadows, sometimes in the form of all the degrees of chiaroscuro, sometimes in the form of alternating and contrasted streaks. A 'Gothic' world, which drowns and breaks the contours, which endows things with non-organic life in which they lose their individuality, and which potentialises space, whilst making it something unlimited.
Gilles Deleuze - Cinema 1






The neo-Gothic, neo-Expressionist colourised any-space-whatevers of Inferno's New York Witch House, with colour as a third term to black and white; note the way the door on the right is now and now is not depending on the light / colour

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"