Our visit to Argentoland today will take us through Tenebrae, Argento’s bloodiest film. It includes: a brooding synthesized track, (composed by Goblin), whose musical manifestations usually coincide with the violent murder of a young pretty actress; rich lashings of gore and two of the bloodiest axe murders ever committed to celluloid (the first shows a man’s head cleaved vertically by a blade, the second opens with a bit of the old chop chop on a woman’s arm before the axe blade finds its way into the soft flesh of her back). We also have some genuinely terrible dialogue and some equally terrible acting, both (thankfully) overshadowed by Argento’s mesmerizing mise-en-scène of murder which boasts some of the most technically-inventive and Daliesque camerawork and editing on either side of the Atlantic.

Argento’s films might be thought of as a kind of incubatory vessel for murder. That is, for Argento everything of importance and interest exists to nurture the act of killing, or more specifically, exists to nurture his cinematic representations of this act. His interest in narrative, character, theme, dialogue, shooting and editing style, seem to be insignificantly different from zero until the proximity of a murder excites his attention. And the act of killing does seem to excite Argento on a number of levels. It not only excites him in the sense of being an event which clearly inspires his visual sensitivity, but also seems to function as a complex emotional stimulus: Argento’s killers are vitalized by a tormenting need to kill, and at the same time, they seem to find a highly sexualized release of tension in the carrying out of this act. Thus the killer in Tenebrae is haunted by memories of sexual rejection and abuse suffered as a youth -- the face of the girl at the centre of his rejection-abuse is deeply implanted in his mind -- and recalling it invokes a complex of frustrations that only the act of killing (a woman, of course) can temporarily quell.

This obsessive psychopathically-inflected style of serial murder may sound familiar from other films, but the act of killing as imagined by Argento has a unique signature. Not uncommonly, he images it as a contagious virus that passes from one host to the next. As a result, there may be two separate murderers in an Argento film: one whose activities occupy the first part of the film, and another who, having coming into contact with the original psychopath, has become ‘infected’ as it were, and continues the original killers activities after he or she has died. This contagion is one of the more unsettling motifs in Argento’s films, especially as it is always a character we have come to know and empathize with who is transformed into the new psychopathic killer.

Over the years, Argento has increased the frequency with which the act of killing occurs in his films, and has attempted to make his representations of murder more gruesome. His style touches perfection in two films: Deep Red (1975) and Tenebrae (1982). Tenebrae is wrapped like a membrane around Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), an author of cheap lurid slasher tales who travels to Rome to publicize his latest novel and finds himself caught up in a police investigation, and in the sick labyrinthine mind-games of a serial killer whose real life murders mimic the fictional murders of Neal’s novel "Tenebrae". ‘Tenebrae’ is a Latin word meaning darkness, or more literally ‘darknesses’. The plural substantive reminds me of a line from the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s "Altazor": "De la noche cae otra noche" ("From the night another night falls") (1). The image of multiple darknesses, of darknesses opening up to reveal other darknesses, of darkness within darkness, offers a concise encapsulation of the psychic structure of Argento’s killers. ‘Tenebrae’ is also the name of a church service commemorating the death of Jesus, in which burning candles are extinguished, one by one, until the church is flooded with darkness. Argento enacts something similar to this ritual in the way he has put Tenebrae together: scene by scene he advances by extinguishing the illuminative power of logic, order, rationality, and slowly but surely plunges us into a darkness which contains a deeper darkness of violence, mental sickness, unease, and demonic homicidal desires.

In a recent article commemorating the death of François Truffaut, Gilbert Adair remarked that the "necrophiliac obituarist on a provincial French newspaper" in La Chambre Verte (1978) was "a role in which, rather troublingly, Truffaut cast himself" (2). Adair’s remark could be turned on Argento who has consistently, and one could also say "rather troublingly", positioned himself as the killer in his own films. In a strange, almost bizarre sense, Argento is the real killer in his films. And I’m not referring to the rather banal fact that it is Argento who dreams up the psychopathically inventive methods of dispatching the pretty Italian girls that pepper his films, (and the phrase ‘dreams up’ here should be taken quite literally: Argento’s dreams being the main source for his scripts), but because it is Argento’s own hands in those depersonalized black leather gloves which we see strangling and slashing at the film’s victims. There he is grabbing the girl from behind. There he is holding a cutthroat razor to her neck and stuffing the pages of Peter Neal’s latest book into her mouth. There he is lifting the blade. And that’s him again delivering the fatal slash.

(In fact, apart from his most recent output, Argento’s hands have been the hands of the murderer in every one of his films, much as Mel Gibson for his own private, quite clearly religious reasons, wished to use his own hands to hammer the iron nail into the Christian Saviour’s feet in The Passion of the Christ [2004]. [It was also Gibson’s voice imitating the cries and screams of Judas when he commits suicide.] When one looks at the ways in which directors such as Gibson and Argento realize a desire to enter their films, it is difficult to avoid noting that whilst these films are seeking to express thoughts and feelings shared by some larger public, they also contain moments that represent the purest distillation of the personal interests-obsessions of a highly idiosyncratic individual. This personal entry and involvement injects these films with highly personalized sets of meanings whose locus is the director -- a semiological phenomenon that is rarely considered worth mentioning since Roland Barthes made authorial intentions unfashionable when he decreed [with a philosophic wave of his hand] the death of the author.)

But let us continue our ‘tour’ and turn our attention to the formalistic ways in which Argento’s murders are realized. Watch how both Argento’s camera and editing style change during the course of this film. See how blandly photographed Tenebrae is throughout its long unremarkable dialogue sequences: mostly neutral eye-level shots that simply follow the characters’ about like a faithful dog. But now, watch how the camera begins to swirl about the house of the women whom Argento’s psychopath and Argento’s hands, are shortly to murder. Watch the tour-de-force POV of the killer, (Tenebrae’s most inspiring shot), moving up the wall of a house, peering into a window, climbing up and over the roof, then down the other side, all in a single fluid dizzying shot. This shot was achieved using a special telescopic lens originally designed for some (unknown to me) scientific purpose. Here it is used by Argento to achieve his own precisely calculated ends: to allow a visual analysis, a visual dissection if you want, of the act of killing, much as a scientist/technician might dissect a frog, cutting it open to pull out and observe the parts in all their fascinating detail. And Argento’s visual dissection of the act of killing consists of presenting, performing, and recording its details again and again and again, details which extend from viewing the killers preparations to watching him clean a victim’s blood from the blade.

Whilst the audience is linked to Argento’s ‘darknesses’ through fear, Argento himself seems to thrive on them. Like him, Argento’s protagonists are often artists. And it’s no coincidence that the fictional Neal’s novel has the same name as the non-fictional Argento’s movie. Moreover, Argento’s protagonists use their art as a way of exorcising the vaguely-outlined intimate demons that lurk in their own minds and souls. When their art isn’t enough they turn to murder as a way of releasing their inner tormentors. Some of this is surprising close to what Argento himself does as a filmmaker: Argento speaks of his films as a way of expressing and exorcising passions that he believes are best left unthought on a conscious level. Argento has noted but never sought to explain the fact that he has staged and filmed the violent murder of his actress-partner Daria Nicolodi over and over. He has also noted, but never sought to explain, the fact that he has staged and filmed the rape of his actress-daughter Asia Argento. Daria Nicolodi appears in Tenebrae as Anne, Peter Neal’s girlfriend, and though she manages to survive this film without meeting a violent onscreen death, her character is present to witness the film’s final horrifying bloodbath, (and what a bloodbath!). And the last shot of the film is of her, in torrential rain, screaming hysterically. Ah, to know what Argento was thinking of here, to descend into his darknesses within darknesses. A vain wish to enter into the inner circle of personal meanings that inhabit his films? I wonder. Its vanity, however, may not rest on the impossibility of its realization. It is more likely to rest on the fact that I’m wishing for what Argento has already given: in film after film, Argento gifts us his own interior darknesses.

Endnotes:
(1) p.100, Vicente Huidobro,. Altazor, trans. Eliot Weinberger, (Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1988)
(2) Gilbert Adair, "The wild child" <http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1455258,00.html>

To buy this film from Umbrella Entertainment click here