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Epilogue
- University of Minnesota Press
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EPILOGUE In the final analysis films are films and dreams are dreams:noone canreasonably denythatthey're the endresults of different processes, with different life-spans, frames of reference, and spheres ofinfluence. And yet there are respects in which they resemble one another, and horror films - more than any other genre - flirt with the patterns of enunciation associated with dreams. In this respect youcan hardly resist the temptation to speak of Dario Argento's films as dark dreams of death and night and blood, to borrow Yukio Mishima's rapturously apt phrase. Argento can be fairly articulate about his work, particularly in interviews given after the making ofSuspiria. He's spoken persuasively about the ritualistic aspect of Tenebrae and about the way in which that film generates a network ofdeceptive, disquieting erotic signals that entangle the unwary viewerin a web of contradictory seductive messages. He's alluded to his use of images that defamiliarize the process of seeing as far back as The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, and about the systematic construction ofan artificial mythologybased onDe Quincey's ideas for the Three Mothers films. There's no question butthatArgento is highly self-aware and has -particularly since a substantial segment of the European (especially French) press began accordinghis films serious consideration engaged in a conscious critical discourse through his films. Nevertheless, he prefers to write in an aggressively unanalytical way. Argento has spoken often about his extensive use of storyboards, usually the sign of an intensely control-oriented filmmaker, but he admits at the same time that he regards the script as a blueprint from which he feels free to deviate. Even as he refers to the structure of Tenebrae (in a 1983 interview with Angelo Nicolini,Fabrizio Bettelli and Antonello Grimaldi in Mad Movies) as "mathematical and geometrical," he also stresses that during the actual process of writing his screenplays he's generally in one altered state or another. "Little by 231 Broken Mirrors I Broken Minds little, I work myself into a frenzy; in New York writing Inferno I was truly frenzied," he told the same writers, later explaining to Alan Jones (Cinefantastique, Volume 13, No.6): "I lock myself away for months on end. Nothing usually happens at first, and Ijust end up staring at a blank wall and waiting for inspiration from imaginary ghosts or shafts ofmoonlight. If I don't come up with something, I punish myselfand denymyself everything. Eventually my second soul gives in and I come up with something." In fact, he toldVincent Ostria (inStarfix), his method ofworkingis "a little like that ofthe surrealists, using automatic writing." The language is melodramatic, but the sense is clear: Argento's screenplays boil up from the subconscious and are brought to the screen with a minimum of dramatic shaping; he's said that his primary concern is to preserve the images that come to him in these states, rather than to construct plausible narratives. It's certainly easyenough to see whythe plots ofArgento's films often leave somuch to be desired, and equally easy to see why the quality of their imagery is often so arresting: it's tough to fake dreaminess, to produce its disturbing effects through logical, rational processes . This isn't to say Argento's workis interesting onlybecause it represents an especially unrefined look at the goings-on of a fairly lurid subconsciousmind. Fortifiedby his years as a film critic and, later, as a screenwriter, Argento's sensibilities are sophisticated; but he's managed to retain an openline into the realm of the subconscious and through it material seems to pour out at an alarming rate. Argento has also taken advantage ofthe fact that the horror genre, because ofits guaranteed box office appeal, has always leant itself to freedom of formal experimentation deniedtoless economically stable genres. You often read ofthe "stylization" ofthe horror film... what exactly does this mean?At its worst, "stylization" describes the formulaic repetition of grossly cliched elements demonstrated in many of the stalk-and-slash pictures made in the wake of Friday the 13th (1980, Sean S. Cunningham): a group of nubiles proceedsto an isolated location and, one by one, they are slaughtered by a monster/mutant/maniac. This is stylized 232 [35.171.159.141] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:23 GMT) Epilogaue in the sense that it adheres to a rigid and pre-acknowledged pattern, but it's not particularly interesting. At its best, the stylized nature of expectations in the horror film permits a certain...