Suspira (1977)

 

Suspira (1977)

 

I remember as a child I only started to understand the importance of a film Director when I watched Alfred Hitchcock films, which were always advertised by the TV station as a “Hitchcock film” in a way that the cinema of Jack Arnold of John Ford was not. Since I was actually told it was the same guy, I was able to start drawing the connections, seeing how his hand effected the film-making.

 

Then came the first Director who I was able to recognize without being told. I saw Dario Argento’s “Deep Red” (1975) on TV, and sometime thereafter, “The Bird with Crystal Plumage” (1970). Perhaps I was more attuned to these because they were both referencing Hitchcock (“The Bird with …” was essentially a Hitchcock pastiche) I knew at a glance, both movies had the same Author. I’ve been a devoted Argento fan ever since.

 

Argento cut his teeth in the Horror sub-Genre of the Giallo: Hyper-stylized, exceptionally lurid, mixing Mystery/Crime/Thriller plots to disguise films that were really Body-Count-driven. Argento (a successful Screenwriter before turning to Direction) always seemed to be pushing against the limits of story mechanics and developed a skilled hand in captivating the audience with deft plot devices dangling off of films that had very little plot for them to hang on to. It was a weird mutant cousin of “Art for Art’s Sake” recognizing that the Devices are our Desires, and all the rest is just filler.

 

“Deep Red,” my personal favorite of his and was his sixth film. His seventh, and most honored, was “Suspiria” In it, he tossed aside Giallo in favor of a Surrealist Epic disguised as a conventional Supernatural Horror film, stripping the narrative cohesion to its barest minimum (perhaps stripping a bit beyond the minimum), and radically altering his already a distinctive visual style.

 

It’s set in an exclusive Girls’ School ruled by Evil Witches. Utilizing beautiful, and improbable, sets, Argento experimented with color composition. It was one of the last films to be shot using the Technicolor Three-Strip film process, which meant three strips of film running through the camera, each photographing a separate color spectrum, when processed it created color of exceptional brilliance. Argento (and his Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli) exaggerated this with primary color lightening. The colors got deeper and more luminous as the lighting alternately favored one strip over another. He captured a richness of individual primary colors in a manner not unlike a comic book only with so much more depth of field and visual texture.

 

This was a startling innovation, and it side-stepped a fundamental problem of the Modern Horror film. The leap from B&W to color tended to purge Shadows and mute Suspense. And every improvement in color film that followed made more of the graininess go away, further scaring away the Shadows in which all Horror dwells. With these bright, wholly unnatural, but compositional appropriate, primary colors, Argento created something brand new: well-lit shadows, where the darkness hid in plain sight, in the disorientating shapes. It was an entirely new, eerie, world. Argento called it “a dark fairy tale.”

Argento was a lover of gore and unsubtle tales, but he also was a master of detail, so often quite subtle in his unsubtle contexts. Examples at play here were things like re-enforcing the Fairy Tale feel by setting the door-nobs at about shoulder height, so that the girl students seem even smaller and more childlike, as they walk through the dreamily lit halls.

Then there was the complex and fluid camera work that Argento was already famous for. Though for the most part “Suspria” didn’t rely on shots quite as complex as a number of his other films, he seems in greater command of his mannerisms now that he was less obligated by the demands of plot. He let the camera wander the halls as if it were one of the Characters, switching point of view from a (fictional) Objective, to the Subjective of the Victim, then to the Subjective of the Predator, and sometimes taking on more than one of these roles at a time. John Carpenter has acknowledged how important this inspiration was when he made “Halloween” (1978).

 

And then there’s the music by Argento’s frequent collaborator, The Goblins. Like Argento himself, they really cut loose in the score. Like the Sergio Leone Westerns that came before it, the score was composed before filming, and to a degree, the film was edited around the pre-existing music (not-for- nothing, this one film shaped the entire style and feel of most of the music videos if the 1980s). Alexander Walker described the score as sounding as if “five hundred cats are having their tails tramped on in unison.” Okay, get that idea in your head, now try to imagine that image as something beautiful. That’s what the Goblin’s achieved.

 

This film was the first of a loose Trilogy, “The Three Mothers” inspired by the "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," a section of Thomas de Quincey's “Suspiria de Profundis” (1845), a never completed collection of Essays/Prose Poems addressing the Author’s Drug-Induced Fantasies. The entries in the Trilogy were not consecutive, the three films, “Suspiria,” “Inferno” (1980), and “Mother of Tears” (2007), took 30 years to complete years, and during those years Argento Directed a total of twelve movies plus some TV.

 

Though there were (almost) no Characters appearing in more than one film, there was a narrative line.  The connection between the films is that just as there are three Fates and Graces, there are also three Sorrows. They are Witches, plotting to Rule the World: Mater Lachrymarum (Our Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Our Lady of Sighs), and Mater Tenebrarum (Our Lady of Darkness).  Each film has one of the Witches, and her Allies, living in a different house, in a different Country, all designed by the same Architect. Each concerns some innocents exposed to the Conspiracy and forced to fight for their own lives, which becomes the same as fighting to save the world.

 

In this film, the most disciplined of the three, also has the Mythology is least developed. “Inferno” is even more Surreal, therefore more loosely plotted, but includes some of the most memorable set pieces in Horror cinema and featured a direct collaboration between Argento and his mentor, Director Mario Bava. As for “Mother of Tears,” starring Argento’s daughter Asia … well … the less we say about that one the better.

 

Here Mater Lachrymarum appears only at the very end, and the Actress, Lela Svasta, is uncredited. According to Actress Jessica Harper, this film’s Lead, Svasta, "was a ninety-year-old ex-hooker Dario had found on the streets of Rome."

 

The Director that Argento is most comparable too is Brian DePalma, both loving set-pieces inspired by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but neither had any interest in Hitchcock’s narrative discipline. Also, both are fond of indulging in an Eroticization of Violence against women, but Argento generally doesn’t come across as Misogynistic as DePalma often does. This is in part because Argento seems to like his most-developed female characters more than De Palma (though it must be said, most of the supporting female roles in Argento’s films are not developed, they’re just there to serve the Body-Count).

 

Another reason why Argento seems less Misogynistic may sound counter-intuitive, but Argento is Crueler than DePalma -- one watches films about Maniacs with knives for the Sadism, but it’s a Sadism made clean and safe. Part of Argento’s gift was an unusual level of Cruelty in a Genre that often makes a high Body-Count passé, unlike most Gory-Horror-film Professionals, he makes sure the audience feeling at least a little unclean, and that evokes at least a little sympathy for the butchered.

 

“Suspira” was remade in 2018 by a completely different creative team. It was exquisitely designed and beautiful shot, but less coherent than this film that shows little interest in coherence. Worse, it then attempted a Political statement, making the lack of coherence that much more frustrating.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MecSlkWMHPY