Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

[Mr Sausage]

Perhaps the most significant way that Pulse relates to a film like Ring or even back to Suspiria/Inferno and Lovecraft is the way that the initial outbreak is transmitted through information, learning planting ideas that would otherwise have never been considered and knowledge literally leading to depression and despair and a wish maybe to unsee (or unknow) and return to an unattainable state of ignorance - though Pulse uses the internet as a medium instead of a musty and mysterious book and the deaths come from within rather than from an outside attacker (I would maybe argue that the encounters the characters have with the ghosts is less a conscious malevolent cursing than a transmission of a 'disease of futility').

Well one of the most interesting things about the transmission of the "virus" in Pulse is how it manipulates basic human curiosity. It relentlessly asks: "do you want to see a ghost?" The overwhelming answer to this question is, of course, yes, as even a cursory examination of the ghost hunter phenomenon throughout history will uphold (how many reality television shows are based on exactly this premise, and how many "true-life" ghost stories are later turned into best-selling novels?). One can, of course, make too much of this, such as pursuing the link between the curiosity theme and that of computer transmission and the information overload of the internet--a far less meaningful connection than it initially seems. But I would like to posit that the death and dissolution that comes from the pursuit of knowldge in Pulse hinges less on having unlocked forbidden and unthought-of truths (as in Inferno) than on having confirmed one's deepest and unsaid fears. The revelations presented by the ghosts do not surprise the characters, they reaffirm things that the characters had hoped their search would disprove. There is, in most people anways, the deep suspicion and fear that the universe is meaningless and empty. This is implict in the search for meaning itself: why expend so much effort in the pursuit of meaning unless out of a fear there may be none? Why is so much of our literature built around the archetypal structure of the quest myth, where a character sets out on a journey whose destination holds the one key or object that will reveal the true order of the world and set right again all that is broken in experience (think: the grail myth)? In K. Kurosawa's version of this myth, the end of the quest only affirms that one need not have made the journey at all: there is as little hope to be found in the afterlife as there is in physical life.

To bring this back to Inferno, the final confrontation between Mark and Mater Tenebrarum ends in a beautiful image that encapsulates the entire thrust of the (admittedly disjointed) movie. Mark stares into a mirror that reflects the world as it seems to be: it shows the room in which he stands, and it shows the human image of the girl he chased who still looks to be a nurse. One is, in fact, apt to think there is no mirror at all and that Mark is simply looking at reality. But for her penultimate act, Mater Tenebrarum shatters the mirror of the world and shows Mark what is hidden behind reality: death and blackness. The point of her accompanying speech is that the world is run by organizing elements: the three fates, the nine muses, what have you; but there are three more elements people tend to leave out--the three mothers--and that is because their separate identities fuse in man's mind into a single idea, death, which is more powerful than the muses or the fates because it is the inescapable terminus of everything. The implication is that Mater Tenebrarum need not pursue Mark in a final stalk-and-kill sequence because no matter what he does, no matter who he loves, no matter how he lives his life, death will claim him in the end. Hence her final act is to raise her arms in triumph as the building collapses around her.

Inferno, in my opinion anyway, has a greater capacity for significance than Suspira, its visually richer but less weighty cousin; but this capacity doesn't get beyond the level of potential due to Argento's inability to really put the pieces together (and R0lf's post gives a beautiful account of how good the pieces are). You can kind of work them out, but the movie never quite manages to fit together, and that's why I like it less than Suspiria even if it seems to hint at more.

[colinr0380]

"There are mysterious parts in that book, but the only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people."

Thanks for pointing that out R0lf, the connection between the objects at the opening and the three keys themselves had never occurred to me! I'm not sure about the library in Rome being the home of the Mother of Tears though - I've always assumed that Ania Pieroni stroking the cat inside the lecture hall was meant to be this Mother, aware of Rose's letter and trying to either warn off or intercept it (she also appears for the last time in the taxi going past Sara's apartment after she has been murdered). But then the sweet smell Sara senses around the library does suggest that it could be the right place...

I sort of see Inferno and Suspiria as having similar 'problems' to those I encountered with Jarman's Jubilee, in that the set pieces and moment to moment experiencing of the environment are so spectacular in themselves that they sort of end up overwhelming the construction and the incidental details of the story, even though on watching them through again, and reading the comments here, I feel much less comfortable about simply dismissing their plots as just a semi-coherent parade of 'good looking stuff' than I once did.

The implication is that Mater Tenebrarum need not pursue Mark in a final stalk-and-kill sequence because no matter what he does, no matter who he loves, no matter how he lives his life, death will claim him in the end. Hence her final act is to raise her arms in triumph as the building collapses around her.

Inferno, in my opinion anyway, has a greater capacity for significance than Suspira, its visually richer but less weighty cousin; but this capacity doesn't get beyond the level of potential due to Argento's inability to really put the pieces together (and R0lf's post gives a beautiful account of how good the pieces are). You can kind of work them out, but the movie never quite manages to fit together, and that's why I like it less than Suspiria even if it seems to hint at more.

I wonder if another reason for why Inferno feels a little more disappointing of genre expectations than Suspiria is for the fascinating idea discussed above - that the film is a dark version of Suspiria in which the Mother dominates the plot far more. Suspiria seems structured like an informational relay race, with one character handing over (or infecting) the incremental push for knowledge to another thereby sealing their own fate to be killed but ensuring that the quest goes on until eventually Suzy is in the position of solving the mystery more by the sheer weight of those who went before her (and the members of the audience who have followed these other characters and are therefore in the most privileged and knowledgable position of all) than by any conscious action on her part.

In the Suspiria commentary some joke is made about the time it has taken for Suzy to cotton on to the initial clue of "the iris...turn the blue one" that she barely overheard through the rainstorm at the very beginning of the film from the first girl to be murdered, but in a way her flashback finally figuring this clue out seems quite touching as if the very first murdered girl is still guiding her to solving the mystery in some way. This makes the destruction of the coven less a personal victory for Suzy than a triumph for all those who were murdered during the course of the film (maybe the ineffectualness of the zombified Sara against Suzy plays into this too), and I think that Jessica Harper's relieved expression walking away from the burning building at the end of the film is absolutely perfect, not just that showing that she is now 'safe' but more as if this great weight of accumulated expectation and obligation has been lifted from her shoulders.

Inferno is similar but much differently weighted. We see the havoc caused by Varelli's book as characters are silenced and the books retrieved (With the interesting question arising about just why such characters are allowed to come into possession of the books in the first place if they just have to be killed? For example Sara being pointed towards the location of the book in the library or Kazanian reading and apparently having sold a copy of the book to Rose at the beginning of the film. Either there is a rather shameful laxness about keeping copies of the book totally in the possession of the Mothers, or the people are being purposefully allowed to briefly access the book to make them into sacrificial characters) but a lot of this doesn't take the form of the 'relay race' hand off of information in the vein of Suspiria. Instead the characters seem more like branches off of the main thread of the film, reaching dead ends, but ones which don't really have the same accumulated 'one explorer naturally follows the other' weight on pushing Mark's own discoveries.

There is also the move in Inferno away from spectacularly staged murders (Rose and Sara) towards more underwhelming deaths in Elise and Kazanian, who incidentally repurpose set pieces from Suspiria. Elise relates to Sara in Suspiria with the struggle with cats replacing the struggle with the wire in the earlier film - even their final moments are staged and shot in a very smiliar way. Plus both of their final sequences are preceded by the main character, either Mark or Suzy, being taken out of the picture by being drugged into unconsciousness. The crippled Kazanian relates to the blind piano player being attacked by his dog, with the twist that the people running to help in Suspiria becomes the person coming to finish the job here. (Incidentally you can really see elements which would later influence Lucio Fulci here, with Kazanian rolling around for ages, helplessly being eaten by rats something which would later be drawn out to ludicrous extremes in The Beyond's spider scene. And the constant returning to the framed picture of the building on the wall could have influence on the House By The Cemetery, another film which features a historical figure/figure of death hidden in the cellar. Also some interesting notes on casting: Veronica Lazar later had a role in The Beyond, as does Ania Pieroni in House By The Cemetery both as ineffectual guardian figures. And apparently, if imdb is to be trusted, the actor playing Varelli was also one of the sinister cult members feigning drunkeness on the train in The Seventh Victim, a very nice linkage to an earlier film on investigation and death wishes with which Inferno has a lot in common!)

Eventually you then get to the briefly raised embezzlement plot with Alida Valli and the butler to Elise, both planning to steal her jewels (which raises the idea that the killing of Elise was a kind of copycat murder, done for reasons other than just silencing her talk of Varelli's book), which no sooner is it raised is immediately quashed with the murder of these characters, with Valli having a particularly Mrs Danvers-esque firery demise.

Incidentally I like the way that Rose (the door handle), Sara (the pin in the taxi door), even Kazanian (the cat scratching him) all cut themselves in a sort of preparatory bloodletting just before their final 'murder sequences'. That likely plays into the alchemy aspect that R0lf talks about above, this cut being a sign of the character now being irrevocably cursed maybe.

The thing which sets Elise apart and suggests that her murder takes place for alterior reasons is that she doesn't get cut, but does step on some of the blood left behind by Rose leading her (later to be proved scheming) butler to quickly ask her if she has cut herself, as if he realises that if she has her death could be tied in with the others. Also her apparently fragile mental and physical state and need for regular injections has a suggestion of the wife from Les Diaboliques about it. So I think the rather underwhelming and derivative nature of her cat related death is meant to suggest that she wasn't actually supernaturally marked for death, just bumped off for other reasons by the servants who likely do the other, more properly motivated, murders.

I think, as you say Mr Sausage, that this undermines the 'stalk and slash' nature of the film, until we get to the ending and find the revelation that death doesn't really need these murders to claim people's lives - we all die anyway. "To them we are all just dust", as Varelli says.

So while Suzy can feel the lifting of the burden at the end of Suspiria, Inferno seems all about Mark finally realising the nature of his own burden and that it can never be fought against, solved or lifted from him, making Inferno feel much more complex and eventually far darker than Suspiria.

[Mr Sausage]

The thing which sets Elise apart and suggests that her murder takes place for alterior reasons is that she doesn't get cut, but does step on some of the blood left behind by Rose leading her (later to be proved scheming) butler to quickly ask her if she has cut herself, as if he realises that if she has her death could be tied in with the others. Also her apparently fragile mental and physical state and need for regular injections has a suggestion of the wife from Les Diaboliques about it. So I think the rather underwhelming and derivative nature of her cat related death is meant to suggest that she wasn't actually supernaturally marked for death, just bumped off for other reasons by the servants who likely do the other, more properly motivated, murders.

I always figured Elise's murder by the butler and helper was Argento just wanting to cram too much plot into the movie, and that it was altogether unrelated to the central narrative. I never thought that those two characters were actually conspiring with Mater Tenebrarum--I figured Elise's murder was a one-off--but it makes sense. When Rose returns from her swimming expedition, she overhears some figures whispering about her, a moment I had always quickly forgotten, but whom I now understand to be the butler and Alida Valli conspiring with Mater Tenebrarum (although I don't think we see the butler and Alida actually perform the other murders. The hands, always important in an Argento film, are clearly those of Mater Tenebrarum, and I think we're meant to understand that the other two, for instance, simply help scare Rose and drive her into the basement where her real murderer waits, helping explain Mater Tenebrarum's seeming physical omnipresence). This is one example that the movie is an ill-assembled collection of great pieces: if it had been put together better, we would understand that the butler and Alida Valli are conspirers with evil, but that they also commit a purely selfish murder and try to disguise it as one more supernatural act of the house. Your brilliantly observed point about the blood hints at this, but such a detail is too subtle to adequately carry so much plot.

I think, as you say Mr Sausage, that this undermines the 'stalk and slash' nature of the film, until we get to the ending and find the revelation that death doesn't really need these murders to claim people's lives - we all die anyway. "To them we are all just dust", as Varelli says.

So while Suzy can feel the lifting of the burden at the end of Suspiria, Inferno seems all about Mark finally realising the nature of his own burden and that it can never be fought against, solved or lifted from him, making Inferno feel much more complex and eventually far darker than Suspiria.

I like to think that Mater Tenebrarum murders people just because she enjoys it: a fun excuse to get away from the drudgery of her alchemical experiments. But that aside, I think Argento has edged the giallo into pure nihilism (the proper meaning of the word, not Armond White's bastardization of it): the murders in a giallo all serve some sort of twisted purpose and eventually help reveal the essential pattern that underlies the killer's psychology. In Inferno, as you note, all the murders are revealed to be perfectly arbitrary and unnecessary; they reveal nothing except their egregiousness for the sake of egregiousness; they fulfill no design, or at least they only fulfill the grand design of the world which is the passage of life into death, a design that makes any individual death feel meaningless. What a thing to discover at the end of a horror film: that it makes no difference that some people died and that you didn't: you share their fate all the same, and none of your actions has either brought the deceased justice or saved the living from injustice. Inferno is perhaps the most hopeless of all horror movies.

Your contrast between the end of Suspiria and Inferno is instructive: they both end in triumph, but where Suspiria ends with the triumphant relief of the protagonist, Inferno ends with the triumphant gesture of the antagonist, the true winner of that movie. The end of Inferno is a curious one if only because it seems more appropriate for the final volume of a projected trilogy than the middle volume, since it makes all other sequels unnecessary. No wonder, then, that Argento chose to ignore it and end Mother of Tears (a poor and dissapointing movie) with relieving laughter.

This conversation has drastically increased my estimation of Inferno, tho' I always thought it was among Argento's best.

I wrote this post while listening to the Inferno theme on a loop. "Mater...Susperiorum...Lachrymarum...Tenebrarum!"

[colinr0380]

I always figured Elise's murder by the butler and helper was Argento just wanting to cram too much plot into the movie, and that it was altogether unrelated to the central narrative. I never thought that those two characters were actually conspiring with Mater Tenebrarum--I figured Elise's murder was a one-off--but it makes sense.

This aspect seems a development of the way the staff were portrayed in Suspiria, the butler as well as the plump housekeeper and the young boy that she seems in charge of. Again going back to the excellent Suspiria commentary the moment when Suzy catches sight of the staff having a laugh and a joke together in the kitchen is pointed out and I think Kim Newman mentions that it was a fun moment suggesting that the brusque demeanor that they present to the students is put on for them. I've always thought that the true supernatural Mothers have some of these minions to do their bidding - the first murders in Suspiria I assume could have been performed by the butler at the school for example. But there is always a tension between the 'hands on' deaths and the supernatural elements driving them. Suzy being struck by the shaft of light for example, which suggests some of the staff can perform black magic too.

I think this maybe relates back to The Seventh Victim, in which film you have the society casting spells and trying to drive characters to suicide, keeping up a classy pretence yet not above actually having people murdered when they get too close as well! Carlo's death in Sara's apartment in Inferno, with the knife through his neck, seems a gory though otherwise similar version of the death of Irving August in the Lewton film - Sara allows Carlo to go to the back room to 'check the fuse box', in much the same way that Mary forces Irving to go and check the office while she stays in the corridor. Similarly they both reappear in their dying moments to in a way condemn her for using them as a masculine human shield when they were ill equipped to be a protector. Of course the big difference being where Mary survives, Sara also dies herself.

I think Argento has edged the giallo into pure nihilism (the proper meaning of the word, not Armond White's bastardization of it): the murders in a giallo all serve some sort of twisted purpose and eventually help reveal the essential pattern that underlies the killer's psychology

While for some it may seem a step backwards after these much more fantastical films, this is perhaps the reason why Argento went back to giallo to do Tenebrae, in order to apply some of this nihilism back to that genre, where half of the film is driven by a psychologically disturbed compulsive killer and the other half is driven by a copycat thinking that they can use the original murderer as cover for settling a few scores of their own, eventually losing the plot to such an extent (since they are driven by their own compulsions, as shown in the dream sequences that the audience might attribute to the wrong protagonist at first) that they are not above killing even good friends to ensure their success. As much as Suspiria or Inferno it is about a carefully managed facade (a persona rather than a building) or lifestyle crumbling into eventually one of the other most devastating conclusions to an Argento film I can think of.

Spoiler

Considering it is about a writer totally destroying the life and sanity of his potential girlfriend due to his manias, eventually leading to her inadvertently killing him just when he is about to do the same to her, with Daria Nicolodi playing the girl and Argento having written the script, it could be considered one of the great self aware apologies to a partner for cruel and selfish behaviour in the name of furthering a career similar to Godard's Contempt

[Mr Sausage]

For me the most amusing part of Tenebre is the irony that explodes the self-defense implict in any book or movie whose plot concerns an artist whose work is appropriated by a madman and who must vindicate his position by solving the case. Peter Neal articulates the usual version of this self-defense with his parable of of the gunman and the owner of Smith and Wesson, and one is initially inclined to agree with him that the killer is perverting the message behind the book in order to reaffirm his own twisted sense of moral design, and that the killer rather than the book is responsible. Except

Spoiler

it turns out that the killer had interpreted Peter's book correctly, and that Peter not only agrees with the basic tenant of the killer's practise, but takes it up himself in order to impose on his social circle the perverted sense of order and justice that he had codified in the hypothetical world of the book. The movie is about a man who finds the perfect opportunity to act out in real life the kind of world that for so long he could only represent hypothetically in books. We must be aware that his first foray into murder preceded his work as a novelist, and that the latter must be his attempt to exorcise his basest impulses (a common criticism of art), which given the severity of his psychosis was bound to fail. In Tenebre, both the impulse to murder and the impulse to order words (as in a novel) are not only analogous acts, but acts which spring from the exact same source: the desire to impose on the world a particular structure of meaning that it does not and perhaps should not contain.

Tenebre is then the darkest vision of art that Argento's put forward, and I really like what the autobiographical undercurrent you've brought out adds to this interpretation. When you say the film is a self-indictment (or "self-aware apology" as you put it, although I'm careful about using the world apology, since implicit in the word is its etymological sense of a "defense"), I'm inclined to agree with you, and I think it's a great reading. Where before I was inclined to see Argento's movement back to pure giallo after Inferno as an attempt to locate meaning again in his work, given that Inferno went about as far as you can go towards emptiness, I now agree with you that he actually imported the nihilistic tendency into his giallo's, breaking down basic meaningful divisions between the purity and autonomy of hypothetical art and the concrete physical life of its creator (both in and out of the diegesis), between hero and villain, between love and psychosis, between man and mask. It's appropriate that the movie is titled Darkness (Tenebre, which in Latin anyway has the connotations of blindness, death, and the underworld, and which would also be a good title for Inferno, perhaps more so given the antagonist's name), not just because of the bleak subject matter, but because the movie blurs and muddies divisions.

the first murders in Suspiria I assume could have been performed by the butler at the school for example. But there is always a tension between the 'hands on' deaths and the supernatural elements driving them. Suzy being struck by the shaft of light for example, which suggests some of the staff can perform black magic too.

Yes, I always assumed the ugly Hungarian butler with the false teeth was the giallo-like murderer for the first few kills, especially because at the end we see him carrying Sara's lighter as he walks off to, presumeably, kill Suzy. This seems oddly practical for a coven of witches, as does Mater Tenebrarum's own stints as hands-on serial murderer. But I think Argento just loved shooting giallo type kills.

Spoiler

An interesting connection between Tenebre and The Seventh Victim is that, in both, a supposed victim also ends up being a murderer.

[colinr0380]

Tenebre is then the darkest vision of art that Argento's put forward, and I really like what the autobiographical undercurrent you've brought out adds to this interpretation. When you say the film is a self-indictment (or "self-aware apology" as you put it, although I'm careful about using the world apology, since implicit in the word is its etymological sense of a "defense"), I'm inclined to agree with you.

Looking back I think I phrased it wrongly and instead of a specific 'apology' I really should have said 'apologia' - something which doesn't have the specific connotations of Argento trying to atone for his treatment of Nicolodi, but perhaps instead signifying an awareness of both of their professional roles without a particular acknowledgement of this behaviour being in some way wrong and needing defending - especially if we factor in the rather cruel and disposable treatment of Nicolodi that occurs in her roles in Phenomena and Opera which follow that might be too disturbing if we see it in too personalised terms.

Of course it is always a dangerous game to try and discern concrete links between a real life relationship from fictional films a couple make together just from viewing the films. But it is another fascinating element that is perhaps interesting to factor in when watching the films, similar to the way that the father and daughter relationship between Dario and Asia Argento has to also be acknowledged and considered even though it is something that in the end exists outside and separate from the fictional world of the films they make together.

[Mr Sausage]

Of course it is always a dangerous game to try and discern concrete links between a real life relationship from fictional films a couple make together just from viewing the films.

Agreed. I always find it particularly unhelpful and stupid when I see someone say the equivalent of "the character experiences jealousy because the author clearly felt jealousy at some point," or when a whole movie or book gets boiled down to some single biographical happenstance in the author's life. Interpreting art like that is like leeching the water out of a watermelon and then proclaiming the remainder a substantive meal.

But a movie like Tenebre is such a deliberately reflexive thing that I think we can proceed along certain biographical lines, so long as we stick to what Argento seems to be saying about himself or his relationships or his manner of work, rather than trying to work out as you say "concrete" biographical links in spite of what the movie seems to be trying to get across. It's the difference between getting at what the filmmaker thinks of his life, including his constructions and assumptions, and trying to work out factual biographical details.

[Morbii]

I like to think that Mater Tenebrarum murders people just because she enjoys it: a fun excuse to get away from the drudgery of her alchemical experiments. But that aside, I think Argento has edged the giallo into pure nihilism (the proper meaning of the word, not Armond White's bastardization of it): the murders in a giallo all serve some sort of twisted purpose and eventually help reveal the essential pattern that underlies the killer's psychology. In Inferno, as you note, all the murders are revealed to be perfectly arbitrary and unnecessary; they reveal nothing except their egregiousness for the sake of egregiousness; they fulfill no design, or at least they only fulfill the grand design of the world which is the passage of life into death, a design that makes any individual death feel meaningless. What a thing to discover at the end of a horror film: that it makes no difference that some people died and that you didn't: you share their fate all the same, and none of your actions has either brought the deceased justice or saved the living from injustice. Inferno is perhaps the most hopeless of all horror movies.

These words reminded me of Kazanian's death to the rats/butcher. I was always (perhaps morbidly) interested in why Argento did this, and in the context of this conversation, I think it fits quite neatly. At first you have the supernatural nature of what's happening to the character (presumably, anyway, as one might not normally expect the rats to just attack someone) who is then just randomly slaughtered by an unknown character. The duality of it ultimately speaks to Mother Tenebrarum's final speech.

I too agree that Inferno feels like what should have been the third of the trilogy given the ultimate message. However, we wouldn't have gotten the cameo of Mother Lachrymarum that way! Perhaps watching The Third Mother in the context of what's been discussed here there are answers to be gained (I haven't seen the film in a while, and this whole conversation is definitely worthwhile!)

[R0lf]

Incidentally I like the way that Rose (the door handle), Sara (the pin in the taxi door), even Kazanian (the cat scratching him) all cut themselves in a sort of preparatory bloodletting just before their final 'murder sequences'. That likely plays into the alchemy aspect that R0lf talks about above, this cut being a sign of the character now being irrevocably cursed maybe.

The thing which sets Elise apart and suggests that her murder takes place for alterior reasons is that she doesn't get cut

From my memory the butler gives her an injection before she is murdered. Which fits your explanation as well.

Also I really like The Third Mother. I have found it unexpectedly having many repeat viewings after buying the DVD. Also having seen it so many times from bad downloads I must say the cinematography and colour pallet is a lot better than I originally gave it credit for. I think my liking though is something akin to the reasoning behind why I enjoy Tony Scott's The Hunger better than Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. It has a certain pitch that I can't quite place that I like over much more deadly earnest fare.

And slightly off topic. Whenever I watch Let The Right One In I always think about how they could have benefitted from the practical cats effects from Inferno!