Sunglasses at Night

I told a friend that Dario Argento's new film, Dark Glasses (2022) strikes me as what you might get if you fed his old film, Cat O' Nine Tails, into an AI filmmaking engine. It would be equally soulless, but maybe that's being unkind. Dark Glasses isn't the same kind of car wreck Argento was making when last we met. Whatever the new film's deficiencies, it is an absolute baller in comparison to his Dracula. Faint praise, I know. For a brief period at the start, I thought the Argento of the early 1970s was behind the camera. The opening sequence is creepier and more suggestive of a world out of joint than the entirety of the director's output this century. But it was not to be...

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Sleeping Like the Dead

Welcome to another installment of the annual October Horror Movie Challenge. The goal, as always, is to watch 31 horror movies before the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. At least half of those movies have to be films I haven't seen before.

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Film history hasn't been kind to Riccardo Freda. Arguably the father of Italian horror, his star has been eclipsed by his great contemporary, Mario Bava. It was Freda, not Bava, who directed the first Italian horror movie of the sound era, and only the second horror movie ever made in Italy. Bava, a cinematographer at the time, was Freda's main collaborator, and their first film, I Vampiri, was a failure in 1957. The stage had not yet been set for the revival of the Gothic horror film. They were a year too early, a year before Hammer films in England paved the way with the massive success of their Frankenstein and Dracula revivals. When Bava went back to the well with Black Sunday, it was a huge hit. Its time had come. Freda, who had lobbied hard to get a horror movie off the ground, was left behind. His next horror movie wouldn't appear until 1962, and it wouldn't make it abroad until two years later. That film was The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, starring Barbara Steele. Steele is also associated with Bava, but she only made one film for him. She was Freda's favorite collaborator, however, and it was Freda more than Bava who shaped her into a horror icon. In spite of all this, Freda is largely forgotten while the cult of Bava (justifiably) grows apace.

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Sighs and Whispers

The most instantly noticeable difference between Dario Argento's original Suspiria and Luca Guadagnino's 2018 cover version is the way each film chooses to decorate itself. Argento's film often seems intent on burning the viewers' retinas right out of their eyeballs. Many of its best effects are accomplished through abstractions: color, stained glass decor, the pulsing electronic Goblin score. Guadagnino's film, by contrast, is a grey, bleak affair, taking its cues from the dismal world of Fassbinder's 1970s Germany. Both films start with a woman seeking help in a driving rainstorm, but where Argento's opening orchestrates a world of peril and chaos, Guadagnino's opening is a portrait of misery and defeat. It wouldn't be right to claim, as some have, that Guadagnino's film is "artier" than Argento's, because Argento's films from the 1970s are all art objects to one degree or another, both as objects unto themselves and in their contents. Argento made films in which art is dangerous, in which art can be used as a weapon. It shares this theme with the new film. They just have different ideas about art.

Note: this is heavy on the spoilers.

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Food for Worms

I was in high school the last time I saw Lucio Fulci's Zombie (1979) in one sitting. I've seen bits of it in the years since. Its most outré sequences show up in the culture outside the context of the film. I mean, an ad for a satellite service borrowed the film's notorious "zombie vs. shark" sequence a few years back and nobody blinked. It's a sad comedown for one of the original video nasties.

In truth, I've never revisited it because back when I was a young whippersnapper, I didn't really like it even if it did tickle something in the gorehound I used to be. I admit that the version I watched with my friends all those years ago was less than ideal: it was a dub off of some fly by night TV channel. I don't remember its exact provenance. It wasn't a commercial dub because it was grainy and cropped and not even panned and scanned. It must have come off of cable because it had its nudity intact, to say nothing of its zombie cannibal feasts. It certainly delivered on the gore. THAT, at least, I remember with vivid clarity. The story? Well, that's another matter. Like many Italian horror films of similar vintage, I thought the stuff between the set pieces was boring.

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All Roads Lead To Rome

"Late one night the club was heaving, I saw a vampire move across the floor.
Old and white with a silver cane lusting for youth through the mirror."
--The Mekons, "Club Mekon."

I stayed to the end of the credits of The Great Beauty (2013, directed by Paolo Sorrentino). The end credits wander lazily down the Tiber, coming to rest, eventually, on the Ponte Sant'Angelo. I don't want to read anything into this, because there's not really much symbolism here to decode. But it IS representative of the visual glory of Rome, something that is one of the film's primary concerns. It's also representative of the uneasy relationship between Italians and the Catholic Church, which is also one of the film's primary concerns. When, at last, it was done, a woman who had also stayed to the end asked me to describe what the film is about in three words. "Life," I said after a moment's reflection. "Death. Ennui." That's a gross oversimplification, because the film is also about art and movies and religion and how they all intersect in an Eternal City that has seen better days.

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Dying By Design

The only way I can make sense of Dario Argento's 1980s output is if I consider it all as a merciless put-on. How else to approach a movie like Tenebre (1982), which has a title that translates as "Darkness" but which is brightly lit? It's a film in which the director's pet obsessions turn inward on the movie itself in a fireworks display of self-reference. It's self-serving, too, in so far as it offers a defense for Argento's peccadilloes where no defense is really needed. It is funny, though.

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Mix and Match

My friend, Roberta, teaches Italian film, so when she says I need to have more Italian films on my long Halloween slog, I'm inclined to listen to her. Her recommendations were Dellamorte Dellamore (which I've seen several times, including the uncut version she recommended) and Shadow (2009, directed by Federico Zampaglione), of which, I knew nothing. Fortunately, it's on Netflix so into the queue it went. It's been a while since Italy produced any important horror films--the golden age of Italian genre film ended when the government decided to quit funding "entertainments" in favor of more highbrow fare--so I was curious to see what a contemporary horror movie from Italy looks like.

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Things Are Tough All Over

The last film on the schedule for last weekend's Italian Film Festival was Escort in Love (Nessuno mi può giudicare, 2011, directed by Massimiliano Bruno), a broad comedy of manners that's a bundle of social contradictions. On the one hand, its critique of affluence and consumerist culture places it in direct opposition to Berlusconi's version of Italy. On the other, its sexual mores are manifestly retrograde. When it comes to sex, this reminds me a bit of the tradition of England's Hammer studios: ladling on the moral disapprobation while using sex as the plot's hook and raison d'être. I'm uncomfortable with the slut-shaming nature of its plot, but I have to admit that I did laugh at this film often enough that I'm willing to think harder about what's on the screen than I might have.

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Exiles on the Flood

Shun Li and the Poet (Io sono Li, 2011, directed by Andrea Segre) is set in Chioggia, a town near Venice, on the Venetian lagoon, but it's a film that doesn't seem Italian. Oh, don't get me wrong: it lives and breathes its setting. It positively luxuriates in it. It's a film with a sense of place so strong and so dense that it borders on the mythic, but for all that its characters are exiles bearing with them their own culture and experiences. Those cultures and experiences inform the mood of the entire film, which is one of longing and loneliness, of being a stranger in a strange land.

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Constant as the Northern Star

I had a weird bit of synchronicity happen to me on the way home from the theater after the first day of the Italian Film Festival. The second movie of the day was Caesar Must Die (2012, directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani), a hybrid documentary about a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar performed by high security prisoners. At one point, one prisoner who is not performing in the play suggests that the story reminds him of his life back in Nigeria. Cut to the drive home. I was listening to Weekends on NPR and the story that was on the radio when I turned it on was a piece about a new Royal Shakespeare Company production of Julius Caesar set in Africa and performed by an all black cast. That sent a bit of frission coursing up the back of my skull. But that's Shakespeare for you, I guess. The Bard can be a reflecting mirror sometimes. You see in him what you bring to him.

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Day In, Day Out

The traveling Italian Film Festival rolled into my fair city this weekend. Our version of the event consists of four films over one weekend. The showings are free, which is a good price for a movie. Last year's event filled up and turned people away. This year, the organizers used the bigger auditorium at our local arthouse instead of the small one. This festival is dedicated to bringing recent Italian movies to an American audience who otherwise might not see these films, contemporary distribution models being what they are.

The opening film of this year's edition was One Day More (Il giorno in più 2011, directed by Massimo Venier), a romantic comedy like the ones that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan used to make in the 1990s. Parts of it are even set in Nora Ephron's version of New York. This isn't a criticism. Not really. Indeed, this is a kind of movie that I need right now, so going in blind and having it scratch an itch I didn't realize was bothering me is an unlooked-for serendipity.

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Break a Leg

Michele Soavi's Deliria (aka Stagefright, 1987) is of its time and place. It's a slasher, of course, but it's a slasher film that exists at the confluence of that subgenre and the Italian giallo. It's not exactly a giallo. It doesn't have the perverse investigative plot of most giallo films, but it borrows the giallo's style, in which massacre is lovingly mounted as slick entertainment. This is the descendent of Dario Argento, of course, for whom director Michele Soavi once worked as a second-unit director. Take out the director's credit, and you might mistake this for Argento's work. It's certainly cruel enough.

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Peace and Quiet

One of the interesting things about A Quiet Life (2010, directed by Claudio Cupellini) is how it demolishes the notion of national cinemas, in Europe at least. Mind you, Italy has been collaborating with its neighbors on the continent since the 1960s, but it's particularly noticeable in this film, given that it was shot in Germany, is SET in Germany, and features a bi-national cast speaking their own languages. There's nothing new in the number of spoken languages, either, but in the bad old days, everything was dubbed into a single language, be it English for the American audience or Italian for the locals. I any event, A Quiet Life has a bit of the feeling of Revanche in terms of its mood and it has a LOT in common with David Cronenberg's A History of Violence in terms of its plot.

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Sons and Fathers

Titles are a funny thing when you translate them from other languages, particularly if you're translating them from slang. Take, for example, Scialla! (2011, directed by Francesco Bruni), the second film I saw during this past weekend's Italian-palooza at my local art house. The film festival website (and my local art house followed its lead in its advertising of the event) translates "Scialla" as "Easy!" The IMDb doesn't list this as an alternate title of the film. It, instead, translates the title as "Chill." I suspect that the latter is probably closer to its usage, at least from what I can glean from its context in the film itself. Scialla!, in any case, is a comedy about fathers and sons. It's a coming of age film for both of its central characters, who are, respectively, a no-account 15-year old boy who dreams of becoming a gangster or a drug pusher and a burned out academic who has retired from teaching to ghost-write celebrity biographies. They're both defined by a certain lack of discipline, by a certain vague anomie, by a disregard for propriety. Like father, like son, as the saying goes.

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Hazardous To Your Health

I love my local art house, and weeks like this are one of the main reasons why. In addition to their ongoing programming, they've brought two traveling film festivals to my fair city this week, both of which look me and the eye and realize they've got a sucker on the hook. The first of them to screen is the Italian Film Festival USA, which is in its eighth year. This is the first year it has come to Columbia, which is the smallest city on the circuit. The premise of this festival is to provide playdates for important recent Italian cinema. This is kind of a big thing, because the window of opportunity for foreign films in the US grows smaller and smaller every year in spite of the changes in distribution and exhibition brought about by the digital age. It shouldn't be as hard as it is to see movies from Italy (or anywhere else, for that matter). But hard it is. This festival aims to address this imbalance and that's a noble purpose.

In any case, this last weekend brought four recent Italian films to a theater near me and further sweetened the pot by showing them at no charge to the audience. Mind you, I would have paid my money to see the show, but free is definitely better. Unfortunately, a lot of people think like this and I didn't get in to the first film of the series. I did see the second film, though, and the other two on the next day.

The first film I saw was 20 Cigarettes (2010, directed by Aureliano Amadei), an autobiographical film in which a young filmmaker and activist accepts a job filming a project in Iraq in 2003, right after George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished." Needless to say, things are not all skittles and beer for our hapless filmmaker. Shortly after arriving in Iraq, he the director for whom he is working travel to the Italian Military Headquarters in Nassiriya where security has become lax in the wake of the "end" of open hostilities. A truck bomb comes crashing through the gates shortly after Amadei and his escort arrive, killling most of his companions and inflicting a horrific leg wound on Amadei himself. He returns to Italy a changed man, no longer the activist who sees things in black and white, and no longer able to stomach the official lies about the Italian presence in Iraq. His relationship with his best friend, Claudia, changes, too, and together, they start a family. Unfortunately, Amadei carries his trauma with him. The film suggests that it will follow him all of his days.

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