(musing over Dario Argento’s Suspiria remastered)
Suspiria is a masterpiece conceptually, a beautiful, disorienting, sublime, surreal and sometimes terrifying fairytale of horror. It is a true “video play” of a film. Argento uses disorienting visuals/sound to allow for revelation, this sublime experience beyond language. This is the value of ‘altered states’. Pondering the limits, I think there are benefits of both sober and “intoxicated” creation (creation under the influence).
It opens with an angry storm, in a country of regular political turmoil. The post “liberation” German airport cabbie won’t move a muscle to pick up young Susie’s luggage, even though it’s a blizzard. She’s all alone in a foreign and mysterious land. And so unfolds the nightmarish fairytale.
Between the banality of a private dance institution, and violent emotional exaggerations bursting through the seems we’re confronted with illusions. The tyrannical “Teutonic” (though with an obvious Italian accent) instructress is a caricature of fascist imagery. What appears a normal older woman on the surface is truly a wicked old witch, a giant amongst the blind piano player. As her voice echoes off the walls of the practice room, the blind piano player it seems is the only one who can see her true form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUDtfaqgbzI
Ultimately he dies in darkness. His angry dog barks at the surrounding gloom, standing in the square before gray pillared stone, ruins of the past. The deeper he walks into the dark, the louder barks the disrupted dog. Finally the spirit of a gargoyle leaps from the roof as the rattling drums pound.
Susie becomes progressively disoriented throughout the film, while through the clear secondary gaze of her companion Sara, the creepy hallways like the veins of hell are explored. You can tell she is approaching the “sublime object” of desire. Likewise the film attempts to disorient the audience and bring us closer.
The blood is paint. The universe of Argento is surrealist poetry in motion over the canvas of the screen. A series of symbolisms; Susie and Sara are paddling through the pool towards somewhere beyond the image at the pool’s floor of what could be a razor outlined in white. They’re being watched.
The color of an empty bulb becomes the color that lights the room, a virginal green. Sara runs into the red lit hallway chased by a sound deep into the shadows and up to a mellow blueish-purple storage room. As the drums return the red begins to rhythmically pulse. An oversized storage room shrinks our secondary-protagonist before she falls to a pool of barbed wire.
An older male doctor enters the film towards the ending, a “master researcher”. He tells Susie of magic and the occult, and gives reason to the superstition. He provides the last ingredient for a truly disturbing supernatural horror, a rationality that attempts to justify the chaotic irrationality of the supernatural, which somehow survived into our modern age of reason.
The sublime is embodied in the demonstrable truth of that superstition. Wash the red down the drain as colors can be disorientating. The now disembodied voice of Suspiria surrounds Susie on all size but she still manages to find the invisible body and penetrate the elder witch. The walls begin to cave in and out come the corpses, which follow her down the windy hallway with their whispers, swelling to the sound of outside winds as the building crumbles.
