Dario Argento

Dario Argento: Doing Violence on Film

Dario Argento Doing Violence on Film 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 related genres—crime thriller and supernatural horror—with results that are sometimes brilliant, sometimes muddled, and sometimes both. The films are not to everyone’s taste. Their violence is often so extreme that even hardened horror veterans will avert their eyes. The extremity goes beyond gore, reaching previously unrecorded levels of pain, suffering , and mental anguish. Even more disturbing than the extremity is that Argento makes the combination of carefully arranged details, from the sets’ colors and shadows to the cameras’ angles and movements, so fundamentally pretty. Viewers who can stand to look at one of his films once might very well want to look again. The problem of looking, of the desire to see, is central to all of Argento ’s films. From his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), in which a man watches helplessly as a woman is apparently attacked, to Giallo (2009), in which cop and killer both appreciate photos of murder victims a little too much, characters watching violence reflect viewers watching the film, and nobody involved in the exchange escapes complicity in the horrific spectacles. Argento’s films challenge a viewer’s accepted ideas about film spectatorship, meaning, storytelling, and genre. The violence they do reaches beyond their minced murder victims: they do violence to film itself. Argento has worked as a writer, producer, director, composer, and/or editor on more than forty films. He comments in an interview included on the Blue Underground DVD of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage , “I was practically born into the cinema because my father was a producer.” His initial exposure to the chaotic world of film production lacked appeal, so he became a film critic instead, a role that taught him “all the theories about cinema” and thus provided a foundation for the critical engagement with cinematic conventions that this book traces throughout his oeuvre. Argento enjoyed working as a critic, but gradually opportunities lured him into screenwriting. His most notable early effort was collaborating with Bernardo Bertolucci on the screenplay for Sergio Leone’s classic western Once upon a Time in the West (1968). This success helped to create the opportunity for Argento to direct Bird, which his father, Salvatore Argento, produced. He continued to collaborate with his father as producer or executive producer on all of his features through 1982’s Tenebre, and his younger brother, Claudio Argento, has served in production roles in the majority of features since 1973’s The Five Days of Milan. Through the production company Opera Film Produzione, Dario and Claudio Argento have produced a number of features that the elder brother did not helm, including the directorial debut of Dario’s daughter Asia Argento, Scarlet Diva (2000). Asia’s own career as an actress began in the Argento-produced film Demons 2 (1986); she later led the casts of the Argento-directed features Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), The Phantom of the Opera (1998), Mother of Tears (2007), and Dracula 3D (2012, projected). Although she has pursued a career in fashion rather than film, Dario’s elder daughter, Fiore, debuted as an 2 | Dario Argento actress in the Argento-directed Phenomena (1985) and had major roles in the Argento-produced Demons (1985) and Argento-directed The Card Player (2004). These familial connections suggest a thin, permeable boundary between Dario Argento’s personal life and his artistic work. Indeed, he has often commented on the pleasure of seeing his daughters grow up on film, and as this book’s discussion of The Stendhal Syndrome suggests, Asia’s identity as his daughter becomes a crucial aspect of the film’s rhetorical challenges to film norms. While the collaborative roles of his father, brother, and daughters are important aspects to consider when approaching Argento’s works as a whole, the most significant collaboration of his career has arguably been with Daria Nicolodi, his onetime girlfriend, Asia’s mother, and the star of many of his most successful films, including Deep Red (1975), Tenebre, Phenomena, and Opera (1987). Nicolodi also cowrote Suspiria (1977), considered by many to be...