A couple of years ago I tried watching Dario Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and wound up bailing pretty early. Tonight I gave Argento another go, watching the original Suspiria. I don't know that giallo is my scene, but I'll give the movie this: It's nuts, and there's a kind of commitment in it being just this nuts.
Jessica Harper plays a new student at a ballet school in, I think, Germany. It's a (really gory) horror flick, so there's a killer and there are witches and some other awful stuff. But just getting around the town and dealing with the people feels like enough of an ordeal. I suspect the movie was sponsored by the Americans Stay The Fuck Out of Europe Council.
The Goblins' musical score is really hyperactive, with rinky-dink keyboards paired with proto-black metal vocals.
2 comments:
Since I hate slasher movies it so happens I hadn't heard of giallo films, never mind having watched any. Jer knew of them but hasn't see any either as he doesn't like watching movies alone. Knowing you to be a cinephile I can understand why you found it necessary to have another look at Argento's work - Suspiria this time. I liked your remark about who sponsored it.
It still sounds horrific but it set me thinking about how artists before movies were invented dealt with the horror of death - by that I mean not the peacefully passing away kind but death by disease, accident, and war. Naturally, I thought of the famous painting by Goya - Saturn (or Cronus) eating his children. Nearly two hundred years earlier Rubens painted a version of the story on commission because it was how the Olympic gods began. Goya, on the other hand, was less interested in the Greek gods than the fact he didn't much like people and was worried about his own sanity. The Black Paintings were those he painted on the walls of a house he owned outside Madrid that he'd never intended for the public.
Neither of these have any substantial relevance to giallo but it is interesting how we tend to focus on the morbid aspects of death and so rarely on the transcendant.
I think I just learned the term a few years ago, even if some of the movies I'd already heard of otherwise. It's interesting that separate traditions of slasher movies developed in America and on the European continent. A case of parallel evolution, you could call it. The Italians have a certain verve, but you really have to be down with it to watch a lot of these movies. I'm not really, although I do like weird horror movies. I'm sure you're not.
Cronus/Saturn was one reaction of Greeks and Romans to their own mortality, of their life's work as well as the body. The dread that everything you attempt or accomplish will eventually be forgotten. It's sometimes noted that the gods of Classical religion aren't moral exemplars, but they're not supposed to be. Their job is to illustrate the forces of the universe. Goya was fully capable of being a portraitist, a court painter, a painter of gardens. The Black Paintings presented a side of him alien to all that. It's not to hard to see him working out his demons in a fairly literal sense.
The transcendent is hard to imagine, and to put in the context of what we've known before. No reason not to try, of course, but it does take an effort.
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