This year the FFF showed a special film of the italian horror film classic Dario Argento –

Deep Red.

The Italian horror film classic – named also the Italian Hitchcock, the ‘Visconti of Violence’ – Dario Argento made his best films starting from late 1960s till early 1980s, although his last film to date Mother of Tears (La Terza Madre) was released in 2007; he will continue his work this year as well.

Early Argento’s films have a charming naivety of the age of innocence, being of the viewpoint that the frontiers for depicting the physiology of an individual’s dread is far from having been reached, which might be the reason for one of the critics to call his works ‘the horror films of the time when we were too young to watch them’. The director uses violence and evil as a metaphor of introspection (the main character is often a young girl), and the films’ structure is based on the initiation rite and its attributes (blood, fire), which is used to emphasize the transition of the hero/heroine into a different stage of existence, in order to emphasize the process of identity forming. Argento’s films lie in the so-called Italian giallo (it. “yellow”) genre, which has the elements of both, a detective and a mystery, but in a wider context (which undoubtedly applies also to Argento) he uses the French fantasy genre (having roots from the Middle Ages), which is characterized by a vehement presence of eroticism. It is said that an excessive shedding of blood, a stylistically elegant work of the cameraman and extraordinary music mark the giallo style in cinema. For quite a long time Argento has been cooperating with the Italian band Goblin, who has been composing music for his films ever since the 1970s. Argento’s films reveal a slightly noticeable influence of the gothic novel tradition – for example, a closed room as the character for the hero’s/heroine’s inner feelings, etc. Argento uses a very well approbated method to show tension and horror in his films – he creates a foreign and visually unexposed presence, as the Unknown is scarier than the enemy standing in front of you. Argento’s films reveal that sometimes a look is not that innocent at all and that an individual is unable to keep himself from looking, for example, in the film Bird with the Glass Feathers (L’Uccello dalle piume di cristallo) (1969) a man sees an attempted murder through a glass wall and thus becomes part of the events he saw. And in Argento’s best film Suspiria (1977) one of the heroines, though being taken over by paralysing fear, cannot keep herself from looking out in the black dark through the window, and thus is being killed by a mysterious murder: looking means gaining experience.

Viktors Freibergs

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