(A Superhero Named) Tony

There’s something about Italian genre films of the 1960s and ’70s that aren’t quite right. They appear to be cobbled together all too quickly for the basest international markets. They’re corny. They’re derivative. They often don’t make sense or, even worse, almost make sense. Their post-synch dialogue is unnerving and poorly mixed. Yet these films do have their occasionally spectacular visual displays, and so film nerds everywhere find joy in them.

Admittedly, I am one of those nerds.

Dario Argento’s Deep Red lumbers along as so many gialli do, awkwardly between dynamic, violent set pieces. In between such sequences is an abundance of acid-tinged art direction, otherworldly mise-en-scène, and clunky post-synch dialogue.

The big picture, however, is just Psycho without a twist: gender-bending murder stuff of which psychology papers are made. And we’re never misled to believe that anyone in particular did it. For the trained eyes out there, the killer’s face is even revealed in a mirror as our hero (David Hemmings, less the model he was in Blow Up) investigates the film’s first murder. (This spoiler appears to be cropped out — or blacked out? — of the video embedded above.) Everything is on the table from the beginning, at least all that Argento wants there to be, and the audience is left to sit back and enjoy the madness: wickedly fun/corny murder scenarios, a guilty pleasure score by Goblin, and screwball comedy hijinks between Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in her obscenely tiny Euro-auto.

Ah, Argento. We keep coming back for more.

Wikipedia’s entry for the film there has a link to a scholarly essay by a guy named Paul Flanagan. The essay puts the film in the contexts of Sigmund Freud and Robin Wood. It’s all very clear and well organized with reference notes, as scholarly texts tend to be. If you want a step-by-step analysis of the film and Freud’s ideas on the uncanny, it’s the thing for you.

However, the essay skips the notion of the uncanny (“that which is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror”) as experienced when watching an Argento film. I mean the more visceral reactions to aesthetics that we have — the baroque art direction, the unease of Goblin’s Eurotrash synth, the unmotivated camera moves, the un-reality of post-synch dialogue. To me these add as much to the uncanny nature of Argento (and other Italian genre films). It’s a weird dread that creeps up behind you just as you’re asking yourself what the fuck is really going on, or why no one at the Blue Bar seems to be moving.

Normally when I revisit a film, my response is affected by time and place, but it’s never so with Suspiria. The film exists on a different plane located at the other end of some wormhole, a place where temporal shifts are the norm, where every room looks like a mod experiment gone wrong, a set that Kubrick rejected as too baroque for A Clockwork Orange. The story isn’t short of any of the narrative leaps, bound, and WTFs found in its Italian horror contemporaries. The agenda is style over script, design above all, and not in a bad way. Indeed, spectacle is the best way to dress up what would otherwise be confusing schlock. But spectacle is one thing, and total sensory immersion is quite another. Suspiria happens to be one of my favorite examples of such, and maybe it’s the visceral responses it elicits in me, the inexplicable dread despite a story that is so damn retarded, that whenever I watch it all previous viewings escape me.

Read the rest of this entry »

—–Original Message—–
From: Tony Nigro
To: [redacted]
Sent: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 11:06 am
Subject: mumblecore

Dude–

So as I mentioned, I finally got around to the Bujalski films. It’s true there’s something fascinating about them — the speech patterns, the occasional generational identifiers, the lo-fi Cassavetes thing. But where Cassavetes characters can be unrealistically aggressive, Bujalski’s can be (almost) unrealistically passive-aggressive to the point of annoyance. It just makes me more conscious of how I speak.

Funny Ha Ha is by far worse about this than Mutual Appreciation. The second film at least has a character who calls people on their passive-aggressiveness. Mutual Appreciation sits better with me for other reasons, namely more narrative direction (not a lot, but more) and of course the Brooklyn nostalgia. The set piece in the club formerly known as Northsix and what appears to be the backyard of Iona certainly didn’t hurt.

Typical Bujalski dialogue might play like this:

“Do you want to, um, like, go out to dinner? Somewhere out?”
[Pause.] “Sure. I guess.”
“Because we don’t have to, you know… if you want to stay in.”
“No, I’ll go out.”
“We could order in if you want. Or make something here”
“No, I’ll go out. Unless you really want to stay in.”
“I just want to do what you want to do.”

So I watch my elocution now. (Still, the above conversation is one Carmen and I have almost nightly.) As for the dialogue’s effect on the movie, characters can become indistinguishable if you close your eyes, which can be a pretty depressing commentary if these films are really supposed to represent our generation.

But when it’s not over the top it’s also very realistic. The Cassavetes comparisons aren’t off base: Bujalski’s all about the Moment too, only exchanging Cassavetes’ drunken guffaws for drunken awkward pauses. I’d recommend you watch both films to get a sense of how much better Mutual Appreciation actually is (the audio alone is so much better recorded). Of course, maybe I only liked Mutual Appreciation because I watched it second. In any event, it’s inspiring enough to make you want to shoot something again.

Based on these two films alone, I don’t know if I can comment on the overall Mumblecore thing. It makes me want to see some of the others, but only because I’ve been pining for a new cinema movement ever since Dogme 95 devolved into a kind of joke.

Thoughts because you asked.

tony

p.s. I overwrote because I thought I’d kill two birds here and post this shit on the website. Do you mind? I mean, like, I could send you a shorter email. Um. If you want.