Descartes Player

So, I’ve picked up some second-hand DVDs of minor Dario Argento films over the years, and yesterday I decided to pop one on. Does minor = crap? Yes it does!

I couldn’t finish THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. The DVD was very poor quality with a weird line at the bottom of the image, like a thin reflection of the movie. Reminded me that when I rented a disc of Argento’s PHANTOM OF THE OPERA back in the day it turned out to be pan-and-scanned. A pan-and-scanned DVD of a new release? Who does that?

Though I respect and admire Argento’s devotion to pseudoscience — expiring people’s retinas capturing photographs of the last image they saw, the chromosomal theory of psychopathy — where’s his Lombroso phrenology thriller? — and conditions not in the DMSR — Stendhal’s syndrome is certainly a cool premise for a film — I went into this movie knowing in advance that the use of CGI was going to be terrible. It’s beyond terrible. It compares to the stuff in the hilarious DRACULA 3D “trailer.” Argento does have more techniques than just this one to bring daughter Asia’s would-be-rapturous/would-be-terrifying visions to life, but he seems to have relied on the crappy digital effects with undue confidence, and has not implied any critical filter — some of them could easily and should certainly have been chopped out.

So, Asia looks at a painting of the sea then falls into a CGI seascape (why not film a real one>) and then kisses a big daft fish.

It was not necessary, really, to show the lead character swallowing her meds FROM THE INSIDE.

I couldn’t finish it, so this isn’t a review. The quality of English dubbing seems to have declined since Argento’s 70s heyday, probably through reduced commercial demand, his dialogue and his work with actors is as bad as ever, though Thomas Kretschman does pull all the stops out, and Argento’s devotion to “non-Cartesian” storytelling — illogical and unrealistic — doesn’t map well onto the police procedural form, at least in this case.

It is also creepy that he cast his daughter as a rape victim. But not as creepy as casting her at 16 in TRAUMA and filming her topless. This all makes Dario’s emergence as a spokesman during the #MeToo movement seem even stranger than it did at the time.

The movie does have lots of crazy ideas and looks great — I caught bits of it decades ago on a Bravo cable screening, cropped to 1:1.33 and looking dreadful. It’s rather a handsome film when seen properly. The plot makes a vague sort of sense and the focus on, you know, trauma, makes it arguably prescient of a lot of modern horror. Like MIDSOMMAR and the like, it doesn’t seem to know or understand anything about trauma, though a supporting character is on hand to rattle off statistics about anorexia.

Like Hitchcock I guess, Argento makes psychological thrillers without being too concerned with character psychology, motivation, sense.

If he were really serious about non-Cartesian horror you might expect his films to be more Lynchian. Characters who get murdered might come back for no reason, people might transform into other people, mysteriously vanish without explanation, or travel to other dimensions. Instead, we just get what looks suspiciously like regular crime stories (the supernatural ones, SUSPRIA and INFERNO aside) that haven’t been worked out properly. When David Hemmings thinks he’s caught the killer in DEEP RED, then realises No hang on a minute he was standing right next to me witnessing the first murder, it’s not so much either an “Ah-ha! Brilliant twist!” or a “WTF this film is insane!” moment, as a chortled “This is really stupid.” You can enjoy it and be on the film’s side but you’re not being encouraged to respect it more deeply.

Too much not never being enough, Argento has to not only drop Tom Savini’s rubber Brad Dourif head down a lift shaft, but also badly superimposes Brad Dourif’s real-life head into a background plate, but somehow this head is at a ninety-degree angle to the rubber one. The illusion, such as it ever was, is ruined rather.

I DO rather like the optical illusion used in this one to fool us into thinking somebody’s dead. But then the reveal about the killer’s motivation is awful. And, in its obsession with decapitation — the killer, the chief suspect and the movie itself are all fixated on the idea — the movie is arguably very Cartesian indeed. Mind-body duality and all that?

THE STENDHAL SYNDROME stars Charlotte of Sauve; Captain Englehorn; Salvatore ‘Totò’ Di Vita – Teenager; Il Duca; and John Maynard Keynes.

TRAUMA stars Charlotte of Sauve; Sumner Todd; Catherine Martell / Mr. Tojamura; Hammett; Dicky Speck; Wormtongue; and Lady Caroline.

Lim Burger

Have I published this before? So hard to keep track. Never mind, this next one’s brand new.

The Sunday Intertitle: Product Shot

I guess this (below) qualifies as an intertitle, just about. The title of the film, by Walter Ruttman (BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY) is given as DAS WUNDER. It’s clearly an advertising film, and I wish ad-men gave work to our best experimental fimmakers today, instead of just ripping off their techniques.

I’m not sure this ad would be allowed today — it seems to suggest that Kantorowicz-Likor Weltbekkant (Wold Famous) is a pacifying social lubricant which dispels quarrels and brings mankind together in a glow of sympathy and universal brotherhood. Alcoholic drinks CAN have that effect, I guess, but they can also have the opposite effect, and a modern commercial probably wouldn’t be allowed to boost the former without mentioning the latter, and it wouldn’t want to mention the latter. Modern booze ads tend to settle for simply telling us the product exists and associating it with glossy and attractive images and sounds.

What I like best is the colour, but Ruttman turns out to be not only great at moving shapes and colours about in pleasing abstraction, but at caricature and character animation. When the two profiles are arguing, the movements of their jaws is an effective evocation of the anatomical articulation involved in speech — I sense mandibular motion, a whole system of parts. In the similarly graphic work of UIP, all you tend to get is lips forming different shapes.

When the wizard-distiller is making his hand movements around the 27 second mark, there’s a very nice trick involving the falsification of the audience’s memory. The hand glides from side to side, and midway through it’s arc the cut-out hand shape is substituted with a different angle. A sort of jump-cut within a continuous shot. We get the sensation of a smoothly turning, three-dimensional hand, when in fact all we get is two waving images of a hand, seen from slightly different angles. Our eye and mind somehow retroactively paint in all the intervening angles so the hand seems to us to be a rounded, three-dimensional object rotating before us.

The memory falsification part fascinates me. At first, we’re seeing a flat drawing from one angle. Then we’re seeing it as if turned to expose a slightly different angle. The act of believing we’ve actually seen the hand rotate must happen AFTER this abrupt switch — so we’re adding frames to the film in retrospect, frames which don’t exist and which we didn’t see, and we’re doing this so rapidly we think we saw them a moment ago. It’s an optical illusion which travels back in time, gaslighting us into imagining something we never saw.

The brain, it seems, invents its own in-betweens all the time, and usually gets away with it. The implications of this might be terrifying if I could figure out what they are.