Films: 1970s
(1977) Suspiria
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Suspiria
Director: Dario Argento
Release: 1977
Eye-popping set design, brutal murders, and witches are the key ingredients in director Dario Argento's "Suspiria."
New York dancer Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in Freiburg, Switzerland to attend an exclusive academy. Her laborious journey starts with a surly cab driver and a torrential rain, only to be capped by a wild-eyed girl fleeing the school into the storm.
What follows is a mystery, punctuated by horrific surprises. The fleeing girl is found dead; Suzy develops a hemorrhage that requires special diet. Worms infest the school. And Suzy's new dorm-mate Sara (Stefania Casini) is obsessed with discovering just where the dance instructors go every night " their heels clicking through the hallways.
"Suspiria" features titanic sets. Argento and Production Designer Giuseppe Bassan leave practically no surface untouched. The actresses of "Suspiria" move through three dimensional paintings "complicated visual fields of lighted glass, dizzying wallpaper, curvaceous doors and hallways that transform mere passages into a kind of organic maze.
Cinematographer Luciano Tovoli builds tension with layer after layer of lush and disorienting mise-en-scene. We slide along hallways, peek into darkened corners, but always fail to sort out exactly how all these chambers and corridors connect. 
His frame is almost always filled with the female shape " his lens drinks in the impossible school interiors and creeps into the girls' personal space. Patterns and furniture over and over again reiterate the female curve, the soft knot of reproductive tangle. Fan windows atop the doors, fallopian in design, glow menacingly. There is something unknown at work in the night.
Like its protagonists, on the verge of full womanhood, the tension of the story comes from submission to the child-state versus the quest for knowledge, control and freedom from the womb. The schools' interiors infantilize. Doorknobs are at head-level. The actresses must reach up for them forcing the perspective to that of a child. Will Suzy stay with sophisticated Olga (Barbara Magnolfi) in the city or with the matriarchs at the school? When Suzy and Sara push towards the center of the mystery, the school pushes back. Suzy and Sara are asking not for the simple answer to the question: "where do the older women go?" They are asking, "What do older women do at night?"
The answer, of course, is that they work magic. Access to that magic, Suzy discovers, is guarded by a secret. One shape is the key to that secret. The shape: a flower " a delicate reproductive organ. When Suzy understands what she must do with the shape, she can fully explore the passage beyond. "Suspiria" is built on this essential search for the feminine center.
And then there's the violence.
Nobody simply dies in "Suspiria." They are executed ballet-style in a methodically blocked and lighted set piece. Each murder makes a visual point " whether it's the downward explosion of a stained glass window paired with a stabbed-open chest " and the revealed beating heart, or the exquisitely lit plaza and the just-off-screen meal of a killer dog. Argento paints with these scenes. The most effective is Sara's fall into a room of barbed wire. As she attempts to escape the wire winds tighter and tighter, and her frustration and hopelessness magnifies across the screen, second by second, until the razor-wielding murderer arrives. 
The problem with "Suspiria" is that the individual deaths do little to move the story towards a climax. Unlike a conventional slasher film, "Suspiria" is not a reductive storyline. The cast is not whittled to a single symbolic survivor. Instead, the murders are simply injected into the film's narrative. Purely artistic, they are impressive but they fracture the film. Only vaguely, at the end, is the identity of the knife-wielding killer explained. The black magic that causes a blind man's dog to turn vicious is clear enough, but the reason for killing him is murky " a mostly unseen subplot about the kitchen keeper's boy and an accidental bite.
Argento has made a visual masterpiece in "Suspiria." If it were coupled with a better script, something of the caliber of "Repulsion" or "Rosemary's Baby," it would take its place among those pinnacle moments in horror cinema. Instead, it is relegated to that category of influential but imperfect. It is a staggering piece of design and photography, but the whirling patterns and color soaked frenzy ultimately signifiy, if not quite nothing, then at most not a whole lot.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Suspiria, 1977
"Suspiria" features titanic sets. Argento and Production Designer Giuseppe Bassan leave practically no surface untouched. The actresses of "Suspiria" move through three dimensional paintings "complicated visual fields of lighted glass, dizzying wallpaper, curvaceous doors and hallways that transform mere passages into a kind of organic maze.
