A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, September 8, 2023

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

Jessica Harper in Suspiria

Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Cassini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé, Barbara Magnolfi, Susanna Javicoli, Eva Axén, Rudolf Schündler, Udo Kier, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett. Screenplay: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Production design: Giuseppe Bassan. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Dario Argento, Goblin (Agostino Marangolo, Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli, Claudio Simonetti). 

I've seen movies in which the sets were more interesting than what's going on in them, but I don't think anyone would say that about Dario Argento's Suspiria. At the very least, in the competition of setting and action for the viewer's attention, it's a draw. When Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) tells a cab driver to take her to Escherstrasse, I should have been alerted to the visual phantasmagoria that is to come. It's clear that Argento means us to pick up on the allusion to the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, known for his plays on perspective and visual puzzles; Argento has the surly cabbie force Suzy to repeat the street name twice before saying it himself. But Escher's work was in black and white; Argento's, and that of his production designer, Giuseppe Bassan, and his cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, is in color -- the most lurid Technicolor seen in a movie since the heyday of the MGM musical. Not that Suspiria has much in common with those musicals: The dominant color in Suspiria is red, and a lot of that red is blood, often artfully splattered. (One large blood splat looks like a Rorschach test.) I can't say that I was shocked by anything in the movie, although the many murders in it verge on overkill. It's too gaudy and noisy -- the background music by Goblin is the aural equivalent of the decor -- to build much tension. I could wish the dubbing of the dialogue didn't have the depthless quality, the lack of ambiance, of speech recorded in a studio -- even the English-speaking actors were post-synched in the manner of many Italian films of the era. But then the dialogue doesn't matter much: It's nonsense about witches, and the plot is only a device to hang horrors on. Still, Suspiria is a one-of-a-kind movie -- maybe we should be grateful for that -- and a landmark in its genre.  


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