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September 07, 2006

Happy Birthday, Dario Argento

September 7th marks the 66th birthday of one of my heroes, the Italian horror film director Dario Argento.

If you haven't seen any of his films, I highly recommend his early and mid-period stuff over the more recent. These days, with all the bad Hollywood remakes and emphasis-on-torture blockbusters, it's really rare to find such a master stylist making horror movies (I think Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of the only directors working like that anymore), and Argento's films of the seventies and early eighties show off this signature style the best. Suspiria, in particular, pretty much remains the most intense, earsplittingly loud, hallucinogenic, brutal, and strangely beautiful film I've ever seen. Anyway, blah blah blah. Interspersed throughout this posting are stills from some of Argento's movies.

My five favorite Argentos:
(1) Suspiria
(2) Opera
(3) Inferno
(4) Tenebrae
(5) (tie) Deep Red / Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Argento does amazing, tricky, and often incredibly excessive and self-indulgent things with camera angles and unusual frames and shots. If you've seen his movies, you know what I'm talking about. The bullet through the peephole in Opera; the shot through the face wound (censored from many prints) in Stendhal Syndrome (the onset of this scene is pictured below left); the so-excessive-it's-almost-funny crane shot that slowly moves around the house in Tenebrae (a shot that occurs just before the photo below right).

To further celebrate this day, I'm going to re-read a couple of books I highly recommend:
(1, below left) a great book that gives a lovely critical retrospective of Argento's films called Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, by Maitland McDonagh--whom I was lucky to meet once at a critics' screening of The Blair Witch Project that my film-critic friend Dennis Dermody took me to; and

(2, above right) an equally great (but unfortunately hard-to-find) book of poems inspired by D.A. himself, Argento Series, by the brilliant novelist & poet Kevin Killian (one of the two books in existence that also happens to be co-dedicated to yours truly). And now, with Kevin's permission, here's one of the poems from the book, a poem that makes me want to go watch this particular referenced film again and again.

OPERA

The tricky part is keeping your eyes.

Loving isn't enough, not with needles.

Overhead of the crowd beats the black crow,
His chance revenge.

Betty the teenage opera star in her
glittery black and silver Raiders gown
the crow, attentive, tilts his beak to caw
though no sound escapes

My mother slept with him long ago
Now he's back to give me an opera
dedicated to my name
in this theater holy with my death.
Unlucky love, that left to my devices
needed transfusion from lens to lens,
takes off his shirt in deco profusion
giving me head over hand over hand,
unlucky in love, lucky in cars
pull over and pick me up
I'll take you where

I’ve been watching you since
you were a child
In the corner of the schoolyard playing ball
and reading Wayne Koestenbaum

I’ve got a van with locks that shoot down into the doors, once you’re in
head over hand over hand

Folly to take so limpid a face for a match
the gun droops from your pale hand

give me the gun, dear
I’ll bind your green bruises with this ketone acetate,
that freezes into cloth once bound around
an itchy trigger finger

the swelling must go down

van back, cold corrugated metal, scrap of red carpet
put your eye to the keyhole
while the stitches force you to see
that which is unseeable
the collision of the ghosts in the hall
singing an aria, and banging into each other,
their flesh, not flesh, stinging then melting
they pass without speaking, only surprise
the tricky part is keeping your eyes
ghosts pause, behind each other now
do you see them in the dusty hall
see them shimmer, reading Wayne Koestenbaum
the crow, attentive, tilts his beak to caw
a sound escapes

Attention focused on the van
it starts to hump, to rock, its fat black tires
squeezing
and sighing, and swelling

Ink those tires, drive them over white strips of
paper like John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg

Like John “Van” Cage and Robert
“Van” Rauschenberg

--Kevin Killian

"Argento aims for, and achieves, total sensory overload. . . . By the end, you may feel that you’ve had needles thrust into your ears, and acid thrown in your eyes: but, this being cinema, you’re unscathed--in fact, you’re better off, as your sensory frame of reference has been forcibly widened." --Neil Young, Neil Young's Film Lounge.
Want to read more of this, as well as some good online reviews or essays on Argento? Get started with these: here; here; here; and here. You can also read this little interview he did with McDonagh.

Above and below: some classic images from Suspiria. I wish I knew how to put music on this blog, too; I'd cram on some samples of the otherworldly Goblin soundtrack from that film. But here it is. Happy birthday to Argento, and here's hoping his next film--the beautifully titled Mother of Tears, #3 in his proposed trilogy--will be terrific as the first two.