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Dario Argento

L. AndrewCooper

Publication Year: 2012

Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. _x000B__x000B_L. Andrew Cooper uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, Cooper places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes De Sade, De Quincey, Poe, and Hitchcock. He reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms._x000B_

Published by: University of Illinois Press

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

The thinking behind this book has spanned almost a decade, and thanking everyone who has influenced me through discussions of Dario Argento would stretch these pages and my memory beyond their capacities. First, I’d like to thank the students who took my course Dario Argento in Context at Georgia Tech in the fall of 2010. I hope I influenced their ...

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Dario Argento: Doing Violence on Film

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pp. 1-148

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 ...

Interviews with Dario Argento

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pp. 149-154

Filmography

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pp. 155-171

Bibliography

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pp. 173-179

Index

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pp. 181-186

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About the Author

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L. Andrew Cooper is an assistant professor of film and digital media at the University of Louisville and the author of Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture. ...


E-ISBN-13: 9780252094385
Print-ISBN-13: 9780252037092

Page Count: 216
Publication Year: 2012

Series Title: Contemporary Film Directors

Research Areas

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Subject Headings

  • Argento, Dario -- Criticism and interpretation.
  • Argento, Dario -- Interviews.
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