Rome — Italian director Dario Argento isn’t scary at all for a man who has scared the movie audience for nearly 50 years.
Orally and a little understated, Argento wanted to conclude his recent interview with actress Asia Argento, a descendant of her daughter, to meet her grandchildren before traveling to New York the next day.Note Dario Argento: A Retrospective of 20 MoviesIs running at the Lincoln Center until June 29th.
“I won’t see them for a while,” he said of the children before driving his interviewer out the door. There are few “horror masters” tricks.
But that doesn’t mean that 81-year-old Argent hasn’t had a bit of riot or bloodshed yet.
His latest film, “Darkglass,” premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and made its North American debut at the Lincoln Center’s retrospective exhibition. This brings a classic Argent moment. A terrifying, bloody murder. Claw biting chase (including the blind hero this time); lots of twists and turns. But this movie is also surprisingly soft. At the heart of it is the relationship between women and boys, whose lives are intertwined by tragedy.
“This movie is different from the other movies I made,” Argent said in the antique-filled living room of his home in the upscale district of Rome, “there’s even room for” a little tears “in the finale.” I did. The bookshelves that swelled along one wall were littered with some of the many awards he had won during his long career.
Two recently added are he in August Locarno Film Festival Of Switzerland. One was the Lifetime Achievement Award given to him. Director John LandisAt the ceremony, he said he insisted on giving Argent a direct prize. The other is recognized as a debut actor in the moving movie “Vortex” about the decline of Gaspar Noé’s old couple. (Argent played a little role as an altar boy in the 1966 movie, but it wasn’t trusted.)
It’s a pretty career arc for a man who first worked as a journalist and then as a film critic for the left-wing Roman newspaper. Co-authored the story of Sergio Leone’s classic “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) with Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. Collaborated with George A. Romero in the Zombie Apocalypse classic “Dawn of Zombie” (1978). And recently, he wrote two books, his autobiography called “Fear” and an anthology of scary stories titled “Horror” (2018).
Argent said he felt the first horror as a little kid when his parents (father was a film producer and mother was a famous photographer) took him to see the work of “Hamlet” in Rome. When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared, the young Argent remembered that he had “convulsions,” but he was still intrigued. “The seeds were planted and it grew,” he said.
And it keeps growing. The day after the work on “Vortex” was done, Argento was working on “Dark Glasses”, which was delayed due to a pandemic.The movie is ItalianGialloMovies — A wide range of genres that can include elements drawn from murder mystery, detective crime, and horror. The slasher sub-genre is also included. Argent is a living master of Giallo films.
Indeed, death in “Darkglass” began with a female prostitute being hanged early in the movie, causing violence on your face. The brutally murdered woman is the nasty leitmotif of the Giallo movie, but Argent argued that she “killed many men” in a similarly horrifying way.
And he also wrote the role of a brave woman. Especially the role depicted by his daughter Asia, who has been his protagonist for many years. “She has played many strong characters,” he said.
Argent entered the Italian movie scene in 1970 with The Bird with the Crystal Pleasure. This is a stylish and visually rich Giallo movie that has established itself as a rising star in the film world and has earned the nickname “Italian Hitchcock”.
“Argent films are often full of these surprises, these twists,” said Russ Hunter, an Italian film expert who teaches at Northumbria University in northern England. But Argent also brought to the screen a “kind of brave visual style” that influenced other filmmakers and continued to establish him as a cult director with enthusiastic fans, said Hunter. I added.
In one of his most famous films, “Deep Red” (1975), Argent created a drama with dynamic camerawork and rich visuals (of Carlo Rambaldi, who won three Oscars). Not to mention special effects). In “Suspiria” (1977), light and color do the trick. “There is a great use of saturation, which creates a different world atmosphere,” said Hunter. Color contrast creates an “uneasy and eerie” mood, he added.
Argent said that even though the world he created looks glamorous and stylized, it’s just a sham. “Inside, there is something in the truth, something in reality, something from inside me, from my dreams, from my nightmares,” he explained.
Argent said he had never been psychoanalyzed, but he appreciates Sigmund Freud, and whenever he is in Vienna, he “looks at the sofa where many people are sleeping” at his home in Vienna. He said he was visiting.
Director Luigi Cozzi, who has worked with Argent in several films, has three to find a camera that can produce the effect Argent wanted in a slow-motion car accident at the finale of “Four Flies on Gray Velodrome”. I remembered that it took a month. .. Finally, Cozzi found and rented a camera (used to monitor train wheel wear) that shoots 3,000 frames per second at the University of Naples. The scene was about one and a half minutes long.
“Another director would have done it with something else, not Dario,” Kozzi opened with Argent in 1989 at a Roman store called Profondorosso (Deep Red in Italian). He said in an interview. There are also books and movies, masks and fake limbs, and a museum dedicated to Argent, featuring the director’s film objects (of course, in the basement). According to Kozzi, Argent stops by frequently and appears regularly every Halloween.
“Dario has revolutionized the language in which horror films are made,” Kozzi added.
Jason Rockman, one of the hosts of a Montreal radio station who recently visited the store during his vacation, agreed.
“His film has everything, not only the mystery, but also this stylized vision, the sensation of stopping at the exact moment you’ll never see again,” Rockman said. He added that he was disappointed that he could not reach Turin. National Film Museum The Argent exhibition is being held until January 16th.
“I wanted to celebrate Dario Argento,” who is experiencing “rediscovery with a new generation of critics,” said Chiara Sbarigia, president of Cinecittà, who co-produced the New York retrospective. “We wanted him to have a formal awareness as well as an awareness of our work and the work of our recoverers,” she added.
Argent said he probably wouldn’t stick to the screening.
“I don’t want to see you again. What I made, they’re done,” he said. “Now I’m thinking about something new.”
