“DARIO ARGENTO, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM” : a book on the trilogy, the magician’s fantastic

This article has been written in the context of the topic FOLDERS Of ARKHAM

In its rich years, the fantastic cinema Italian saw a good number of artisans, and some silversmiths only. And at the end of the sixties, it led to the birth of a magician. If his fellow filmmakers had been a proof of know-how in the art of narration, Dario Argento began to operate in the art of the spell, striding a territory film as a dark cave, to the limits unfathomable and reverberation vertiginous, where the bursts of light of that good old magic lantern projetteraient images obsessive of our dreams. The film, the “camera obscura” became a prism of black, as dark as deep, but spreading by diffraction a range of impressive colors.

In his work devoted to the master of the giallo, Thibault Loucheux reminds us on several occasions; to speak justly of the three films of the “Trilogy Pet”, he is foremost a question of colour. The yellow of which the genre giallo, between thriller and horror, takes its name; the green color of the random and perpetual change, if present in Four Flies of grey velvet; and the red, borrowed from the Caravaggio , and gives his character death at the filmography of director roman. Thibault Loucheux seeks the foundation archaic to the cinema of Argento, hollow to its nature primitive, so that the general appearance of his first works, such as his biography, suggests a need for sophistication. The colors first, impressions of radical that they leave in our memories, and then to measure that draws its appropriation of the visual codes of the cinema police, the hypothesis that the filmmaker lets talk about the part animal of his brain. Bright colors, dissonance, and the remnants of the instinct, fear and ancient spell, a predator lurking in the shadows.

The enchantment of Argento, therefore, is to remember the fateful moment of the narrative like a recurring dream. And trauma to be shared with the collective unconscious of his audience, he chooses the image of a murder weapon, the victim is most often a woman. The time of the murder affects all of the story and the general feel of the visual appearance; cut out and worked to dictate the pace of the installation and its temporality in the narration. The viewer, like the protagonists, live, sometimes come back to life, the present of the act; the rest is of the flash-forwards and flash-backs representing only the before and the after. In the process of the development of the work, this drive, deadly to strong sexual connotation, could paradoxically be seen as a return to a one-dimensional primitive of the spirit of a young man. Remember that Argento has not even thirty years old when his first film, which he opposes to a rear-guard aging of the Italian cinema, and he wishes to speak to a conservative society where the sexual revolution is difficult to assert. Beyond this consideration societal; the filmmaker seeks to illuminate the design of the murder of a sophistication that is amazing.

“The murder is not only a narrative, it becomes a figure of style. Oxymoron, to be both macabre and sweet.”

Has the image of the scene in the most iconic of The Bird in the Plumage of crystal , taking place in an art gallery, the representation of the murder over in the filmography of the maestro is a work of art Thibault Loucheux seeks a justification of this sophistication by the art in the biography of the director, who before moving behind the camera, officiated as a film critic and had to build up arguments and to describe the place of film chroniqués in a society and an era. But even before this period of sophistication of his thought, Argento was already a special relationship to the arts since his youngest age : father producer, mother, photographer, grandmother, passionate about opera; the trauma of the young Dario seem to be crystallized is less on events than on the images, the moments of strange also contained in arts.

Over the course of his trilogy of animals, the filmmaker developed his personal treatment of the murder, where it is no longer only a narrative, and becomes a figure of style. Oxymoron, to be both macabre and sweet. Revolve around this figure, patterns such as those that make up the field of poetry author : leather gloves, blades glittering, and especially the important role of the eye: écarquillant on a big plan, taking the place of the camera which views the subjective and the remaining holder of an image revealing as the one of the Four Flies of grey velvet. The animal Kingdom can learn more on the debut of Dario Argento before he succumbed completely to the charms of the fantastic genre with Suspiria; and if the role of the eye is noticed both in this first part of filmography, it is that the eyes of the spectators are then, already haunted by the incantations of the mesmer Italian.