I said I was going to write something about THE WIND, didn’t I? Saw it at the closing gala of the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival and, despite its grim subject matter, it was cinematic ecstasy.
But instead of a proper appreciation I find myself doing whatever this is (a comic strip?)
The film has a supporting character called Sourdough, you see, a sort of Gabby Hayes / Walter Brennan sidekick type. Here he is:
And this is what he’s singing:
Request granted!
Seems ole Sourdough went Northwest, to the Klondyke Gold Rush of ’98 (this may have involved some time travel) and met his fate in an icy wilderness. Somehow his friends were able to locate the exact spot at which he got lost… Did they find his body there? Most people, when they find themselves lost, wander about a bit in hopes of getting found. Ole Sourdough never was the sharpest.
One more connection — the heroine of THE WIND, Lillian Gish, gets off the train and is given a long cart ride by Sourdough and his friend Joe to her destination, a ranch called Sweetwater. The name provokes hilarity from another traveller on the train — it seems an ironic joke in this sand-blasted locale. Of course the connected film is ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, but I don’t know if the reference, presumably deliberate, originates with Leone, or Bertolucci (who recalls stuffing the script with nods to his favourite westerns), or co-writer Dario Argento (who might well enjoy THE WIND’s terrifying climax).
In OUATITW, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) is transported from train station to Sweetwater by a gummy Sourdough type, Sam (Paolo Stoppa), who is likewise amused by the place name.
THE WIND seems outside the range of films OUATITW is otherwise paying tribute to / cribbing from. It’s full of western stuff, but doesn’t feel like a western — but, like OUATITW its central generic atypicality is the presence of a female protagonist. The Leone film ultimately struggles to keep Jill central, and ultimately will have one of her rivals for lead character, Harmonica (Charles Bronson), say that she no longer matters at all to the central conflict, which is true in the moment but also kind of an admission of defeat by the very masculine authors. THE WIND has different (studio-imposed) third act issues, but to its credit writer Frances Marion and director Victor Sjostrom keep Gish’s Letty absolutely at the heart of the film, as active protag, focus of sympathies, and chief point of view for the audience…
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.
An interesting observation by Stephen R. Bissette when I interviewed him for my Bill Rebane piece — the understanding that seemed to pervade horror movie makers in the early eighties that logic and coherent plotting was obsolete, that it was potentially scarier, and easier, to just throw random shit at the audience, to baffle and disorient them with impossible plot twists and contradictions.
This was so widely understood — whether audiences LIKED it or not, and I think audiences often get cross about this stuff, even if it works on them emotionally — that Bill Rebane, who was hardly at the centre of the horror genre and professed not to be a fan of it, could apply it wholeheartedly to his DEMONS OF LUDLOW, and Stanley Kubrick could impose it on his adaptation (with novelist Diane Johnson) on THE SHINING. (Stephen King’s novels are fairly coherent but he usually depends on the forces of evil, when the story is supernatural, having vaguely-defined and conveniently-expanding powers.) The novel already mingled telepathy, violent psychotic breakdown, and ghosts, which is nearly triple voodoo, but Kubrick inserted the weird time-slip material, deciding that the Overlook shouldn’t blow up, and eventually rejecting the conventional closeup-of-a-bee ending he’d shot where the Overlook manager is somehow an avatar of the hotel — which didn’t make any sense but feels like other horror movies.
And when John Carpenter and Debra Hill realised they couldn’t sell THE FOG as a restrained, spooky ghost story, it was easy enough just to add a few zombie scares that didn’t exactly make sense, and they could be confident this wouldn’t stop the film being commercial.
Does this date back to SUSPIRIA? Who invented the incoherent narrative? It seems to make sense that it would be an Italian, though I wouldn’t put it past the Japanese — but it would be less likely to cross over.
(Afterthought: THE TENANT isn’t logical either — it predates SUSPIRIA — but doesn’t seem like it had the same broad influence.)
In DEEP RED, there’s a murder mystery with an answer that kind of makes sense, though for a moment there the hero has to be quite convinced that the killer was someone who was with him at the time of the first murder, an unbreakable alibi one would have thought. But in SUSPIRIA, randomness rules. The giallo knifings aren’t really motivated by anything in the story, which turns out to be about witchcraft, the first time that the earlier Italian Gothic horror genre infected the giallo — unless I’m missing something.
Argento’s dream illogic is his second-best trait, below his flamboyance — for me, now that he’s lost the wild visual imagination he’s lost everything. His dreams are amazingly banal. Men with knives chase women. And of course, he’s rewriting his dreams to make them about sexy girl victims instead of himself as victim, making them more commercial and more banal. By rendering the situations preposterous, overheated and surreal, he at least frames them in an unusual way.
The abandonment of logic is the second major step in the evolution of horror movie narratives. And the first was an Italian development also: in BLACK SABBATH, Mario Bava presented what seems to be the first horror movie with an unhappy ending –in fact, three of them. Previous horror movies might be a bit tragic — we feel sorry for Larry Talbot each time he perishes, at least until he’s done it once too often — but the ending was always about reestablishing the natural order, as in a Shakespeare tragedy. Mario Bava realised that was making things LESS SCARY, and why would you want that? And without the Breen Office or a similar censor imposing a morally uplifting The End, Finis or Fine, why should you let the viewer off the hook?
Similarly, even in a dark, violent story in which terrible things happen and evil wins, a logical, sequential story is somewhat reassuring. Pull that rug away!
Here’s an image that ties in directly with yesterday’s post…
Of pre-Argento horror movies, DEMENTIA and CARNIVAL OF SOULS feel somewhat “non-Cartesian,” as he would say, but their narrative frameworks put the weird events into some kind of structure that does make sense, even if the precise events we have to watch are somewhat inexplicable. The endings wrap things up neatly rather than exploding them in our faces.
Next question: can we imagine a next stage in the evolution of horror that would make the films generally more terrifying, less reassuring? I can only think of ways of intensifying the insanity, which isn’t a paradigm shift, just a small evolutionary step.
There’s also been the opposite movement towards realism, where you get HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and his more melodramatic cousins.
And the most interesting combined approach might be THE EXORCIST, which tries to make everything seem forcefully real (like HENRY), follows an accepted mythology (like DRACULA), AND has a crazy, why-is-this-happening randomness and a willingness to let plot points be obscure which anticipates Argento and his goofy followers.
If anyone has a great idea for how to transform the medium, let me know!
shadowplay 