This week, things are getting freaky at New York’s beloved 35mm movie theater The Metrograph, with a retrospective of the Italian horror auteur Dario Argento in full swing. Expect plenty of blood, hallucinogenic visuals, and unsettling prog rock.
And, just in time for next month’s release of the remake of Argento’s landmark film “Suspiria,” the Metrograph is showing the recently unearthed, extended, uncut Italian version of the film—which has to be manually subtitled in English. “It’s a beautiful print,” says Aliza Ma, Metrograph’s Head of Programming.
I took the opportunity to pick Ma’s brain about “Suspiria,” watching Argento in a darkened room with an audience, and his oft-criticized female characterizations.
Aliza, could you explain what Dario Argento brought to the table that was so shockingly new?
There are so many intricate layers to his filmmaking that they train you to see and understand cinema differently. They are a sort of heightened update on Hitchcockian filmmaking, and you see their resonance in later American films by the likes of Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola.
For one, color is used as a visual language that overlays the narrative of the film, in the way that music is used sonically, and all the elements come together to convey a mood, atmosphere, and aesthetic all his own.
It’s said that women were a cinematic obsession of Argento’s. What would you say is most striking about the representation of women across his filmography?
Some people have a hard time with Giallo [Italian thriller-horror] films because of the way women can be used as such blatant props at the service of ultraviolent denouements. However, Argento’s film universe encompasses women in a total, complex array of characterizations, from perpetrators to victims; from lovers to, well, schoolgirls who can communicate telepathically with insets and chimpanzees (this is a young Jennifer Connelly in “Phenomena”). Often, there is a perverse role reversal in his films: the killer is often a femme fatale, clad in the accoutrements—tight black leather gloves, long coats, vaguely S&M attire—usually reserved for male characters who dominated Giallo films before them.
With a remake of “Suspiria” coming soon, what would you say to an Argento neophyte to steer them towards the original?
I’ve not seen the new film. I have heard it runs at about 2.5 hours, while the original clocks out at just 98 minutes, which is to say they are probably very different animals. I have also read an interview from the writer of the new film stating he isn’t a fan of the original, which is perplexing…
Anyway, the original “Suspiria” strikes that rare balance between artistic triumph and genre gratification. It’s a true work of art that belongs more in the camp of, say, “The Shining”, or “Eraserhead”, or “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”—films that find pure cinematic expression in the enactment, glorification, and sometimes deconstruction of horror-inducing onscreen rituals. It is also some of the most extremely entertaining and fun to watch films, ever, especially with an audience.
To that point, could you make a case for specifically experiencing one or more of Argento’s films in a theater with an audience?
In every way, these films were engineered to be seen on the big screen. As flamboyant and out-there as some of the set design can be, there is a panoply of visual nuances in the composition, and the whole canvass is meant to be seen writ large. I always think about the Stendhal Syndrome (a psychological affliction that renders one physiologically debilitated in the presence of great art) as a sort of footnote to Argento’s approach to art: he truly believes in the power of the image to move its audiences—certainly emotionally, and maybe even spiritually. A lot of them are widescreen, the image stretching from wall to wall, and all bearing these intense vivid palettes and dramatic scores. Judging from audience reactions every time we show his films—including my own—I’d say that on the big screen, they come pretty close to being a religious experience.
