In a previous post, I talked about Italian horror and giallo films, and I touched on Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. I mentioned, in particular, Fulci's film 'The Beyond' from 1983. Fulci once argued against the criticism of The Beyond as being incoherent by saying that it was 'a film of images, which must be received without any reflection.' and that while any 'idiot' can understand the like of La Cage aux Folles or Escape from New York, because they have 'threads' (by which I assume he means a unified plot which matches story dialogue and explanations to the visuals on the screen, there were only two films which he considered 'absolute films'.... The Beyond, and Dario Argento's Inferno (1980).
Inferno is, if you will forgive the pun, the spiritual successor to Argento's Suspiria (1977). It is a grimier, more down to earth film than Suspiria however, and the dreamlike imagery that worked so well in the previous film here has taken on less of a dream-like quality, and more of a nightmarish texture. There are still peculiar and unexplained set pieces, their is still an old and crumbling edifice that holds bizarre secrets (In particular, both places have inexplicable rooms in them... the neon-lit room filled with razor wire in Suspiria, and in Inferno, a sealed Ballroom filled with water.), and of course, each holds one of the three great witch mothers, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum respectively. But where the building in Suspiria is beautiful and dreamy in its presentation, the building in Inferno is run down and crumbling, and infested with various pests. Suspiria is alluded to in passing, with the dialogue mentioning that Mater Suspiriorum is living in a building in Freiburg, Germany.... which was the setting of the first film. Apparently word hadn't made it to New York about her death in the previous film, though.
Fulci has a point though, in that not everything is neatly explained in Inferno. You take your best guess at some of the events going on. The film opens with young poetess Rose, who lives in New York, reading about the Three Mothers, and apparently growing suspicious that Mater Tenebrarum is living in the neighborhood. This leads her to the basement of her building, where she accidentally drops her keys into a hole in the floor filled with water. She turns on the lights.... which also apparently turns on the lights in the room under the water, and then jumps in to go retrieve the keys. Here we find a couple of things... first is that Rose can apparently hold her breath for about 20 minutes at a time. And second, there are dead bodies in the water too... WHY this room is filled with water is anyone's guess. There appear to be no entrances other than this hole in the ceiling of the room. Its very peculiar, and its presence, much like the room full of razor wire in Suspiria is NEVER explained.
Rose leaves, and rather than going immediately to the police and saying "Hey there are dead bodies here..." she decides to write a letter to her brother who is attending college in Rome. She outlines what she knows about the Three Mothers in the letter and asks him to visit. Her brother Mark, oddly, has the letter delivered to him by a classmate, during a Musicology lesson. This letter appears, partly, to have teleported to Rome in moments, by the way. Mark is distracted from both the letter AND the lesson by a beautiful woman sitting at one of the other desks, with a cat, who turns to stare at him, and mouths something to him that he can't hear. The windows all blow open and strong winds fill the room, and not one person notices. Who is this woman? Who knows? We never find out. She appears once more in the film, driving slowly by Mark in a taxi, and staring at him after he has found the bodies of a couple fellow students. He managed to lose the letter, (which is apparently why the other students are killed... they FOUND the letter.) and instead calls his sister, and tells her he'll come visit... and she tells him NOTHING MORE. Someone appears at her door, and she flees, leaving the phone off the hook, and is murdered in another room.
This is where space and time seem to make no sense.
The previous scene, Rose is in the basement, she is followed by someone out of the basement, who stalks her for a bit. She takes the time to write this letter, mail it, it gets all the way to Rome, where it has various misadventures before Mark calls Rose, who is only NOW aware of someone following her, and runs off to get murdered. If we assume days have passed, what was Rose doing in the meantime? Why would she stay in the evil murder building where she suspects a centuries old witch to be living?
It doesn't matter. Mark comes to New York, and goes to Rose's apartment, where he finds the phone off the hook. He thoughtfully replaces it, but again, doesn't bother to call the police and tell them that his sister vanished while on the phone with him. It gets worse. While he is doing this, he runs into a pretty young lady, who is, apparently, an ailing Countess who just HAPPENS to be staying in the run down building in New York City, and who wanders around barefoot... despite being, apparently, deathly ill. This lady happens to step on bloodstains from the attack on Rose... which are still wet.
Really? When did this attack actually happen, anyway? Or does blood ever really dry in the universe of the Three Mothers?
People in this film are continuously murdered, or disappear... but no one ever stops to call the police about any of it. Some of the deaths are downright bizarre too. The countess? She is attacked by dozens of housecats (which look like stage hands are standing just off camera and gently tossing at her. I laughed.) and is then stabbed to death. A disabled antique dealer is swarmed by rats.... and then a random hot dog vender RUNS at top speed across the park after hearing his cries for help, and DOES help him! By hacking off his head with a knife. Uh, huh? Who is this randomly murderous hot dog vendor? Well, it IS New York in 1980, I guess. Another woman panics and manages to set herself on fire.... this, weirdly, becomes a plot point, as she manages to set the whole building on fire in the process.
Our hero (such as he is), manages to find his way to a whole series of secret rooms, where the Mother of Darkness reveals herself to him. What her plan is? Is never really made clear. There is one really cool sequence that is ruined at the last moment. Mater Tenebrarum vanishes from in front of Mark's eyes, and reappears inside the mirror in the room, where she continues her evil villain speech. She gets to a part where she says that collectively, she and her sisters are known as... DEATH! And with this pronouncement, she strikes to reverse of the mirror and emerges as it shatters as a grim visaged Grim Reaper! .... Or that was the theory at any rate. The problem with this sequence is not the shattering of the mirror, or the emerging from it, that looks great. The problem is, instead of an intimidating Grim Reaper costume, we get a cheap plastic skeleton the likes of which you'd find in one of those seasonal Halloween Stores that pop up in abandoned Circuit City locations.
I think wisely, Argento limits shots of this to quick cuts. However, Mark manages to escape the skeleton, and the blazing building, and watch from the outside with a crowd as the building falls in on the Mother of Darkness. Which.... is sort of a relief, because the blaze actually started some 20 minutes previously, and seemed to have absolutely no effect on any of the areas Mark was in. He not only has time to solve the final riddle of where to look for the witch, he also has time to explore the halls beneath the floors, find the secret room where the alchemist Varelli is hiding, have a conversation with him, fight with him, locate the place the witch is hiding, and have a long conversation with her.... and THEN the fire becomes an issue. Weirdly, Mater Tenebrarum seems to indicate, in her final rant, that she KNOWS the building is on fire, and she seems to have a plan for survival. But then she dies anyway, once Mark is safely outside.
There is so much that is unexplained over the course of this film. Why is there a sunken ballroom? Who are the dead bodies in it? Who is the woman with the cat in Rome? Who killed the other students in Rome? What is the time line here? Why is there a room full of feral cats? Why do the rats decide to attack the antique dealer? Why does the hot dog vender kill the antique dealer? Why are they bothering to kill everyone in the building OTHER than Mark? Why save Mark when he is helpless, but kill the Countess?
Some of these things you can make a guess at. My guess, for example, is that the woman in Rome was either an agent of Mater Lachrymarum or the witch herself, and she's killing anyone researching the Three Mothers. She doesn't kill Mark because at that point, he hasn't even heard or read the name of the Three Mothers, let alone started looking into it. The animals and the hot dog vender? Ok, The Mother of Darkness controlled them to make life miserable for her victims I guess. Why save Mark when he's helpless? Well... if I understood her rant at the end, Mater Tenebrarum seemed to have some plans for him.
AS for the time line of events, you're on your own. I think you need to be Gallifreyan to understand how it worked.
But with all that said, despite all its problems, this is an eminently WATCHABLE movie. Its gothic sort of sensibilities seem almost an update of Hammer's style. Its intensely visual in its approach. A great deal of attention is paid to most of the production values. The costumes are stunning. The set dressing is top notch. Its that value that makes the appearance of the cheap skeleton at the end so glaring.
But is it, as Fulci claimed, an 'Absolute Film'?
No, not really. See, an 'Absolute' film is something entirely abstract. It was a film movement in 1920s Germany. The idea was that film didn't have to be combined to a narrative to be affecting. In its purest form, they were animated, abstract films.The problem is, Inferno has a very necessary narrative, and one that even ties in with a previous film's narrative, nor is it particularly abstract.
What it DOES do is pay homage to early surrealist cinema. There are shots that seem to be lifted wholesale from Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929). The scene with the ants on the hand comes almost directly from Bunuel. The gore in Un Chien Andalou is actually almost MORE graphic than that in Inferno in one case, but in both there is gore and violence directed at eyeballs.
Further, time seems only relative to the film itself.... so the blood spilled in the scene previous, which narratively must have been spilled days ago, is still wet, because within the confines of the film, it only was spilled a few minutes before. This is the same sort of narrative structure that Un Chien Andalou has, which makes jumps in time, forward and backward, without any impact on the characters. Inferno might be considered Un Chien Andalou with a bright color pallet.
But where there is no real 'story' in Un Chien Andalou, there IS in Inferno, so it is not really an "absolute" film, as Fulci claimed. But it acknowledges the existence of absolute film and its French counterpart, Cinema Pur, and the Surrealist movement that spawned them.
The dreamlike imagery is in full evidence. The entire scene in the musicology class plays out like a surrealist silent film. The musical score that the students listen to is the only sound really evident, just as you would have in a silent film. No one sees the woman with the cat other than our main character, and she is dressed completely out of place from the other students, nor is she wearing headphones like the rest of them. No one reacts to her, or the cat, and no one reacts to the windows of the room suddenly blowing open with game force winds... that don't seem to rustle the papers on the desks. When the woman turns, she looks directly at the camera and speaks, but we do not know what she said, which is staged much like early silent films. Once again, like a dream, the woman and the cat both vanish.
Like all of Argento's films, the use of color is astonishing. In this case the colors almost feel hallucinogenic. When Mark finds his way to the secret rooms of the building, he moves from a room lit in bright neon reds and gold, down into a hidden world lit by soft green lights. It almost reminded me of Rose's descent into the sunken ballroom, which is done in brilliant aqua, like a swimming pool.
There is also an alchemical subtext to the film as well. One of the central ideas is that the alchemist Varelli, who wrote the book on the three mothers, may have also designed their homes. We see elemental imagery through the film as well.... Opening with the sunken ballroom (Water), the wind blowing open the windows (Air), the descent in the the depths of the building, symbolically going underground (Earth), and finally ending in the Inferno of the title, (Fire).
Argento has a great love of visual art, and this is not the first time we've seen that in an Argento film. Look at my previous mention in a previous post of the diner he put into Profundo Rosso. The diner intentionally invokes the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks, but also recalls the isolation that you see in a Hopper painting. In the 25th Anniversary documentary about Suspiria, he says ""For Suspiria I was inspired by everything that German Expressionism means; dreams, provocations, unreality, and psychoanalysis." but additionally, he has said that the color pallet of Suspiria was inspired by Disney's Snow White.
He is far from the only director who has ever been inspired like this, but he is one of the most stylish about it. I could talk at some point about the artistic influences behind Hitchcock's Psycho (the house is a visual call out, again, to Edward Hopper, and his painting The House by the Railroad.) Hitchcock was more restrained and naturalist in his homages than Argento. But that is one of the nice things about this is that it IS such a distinctive visual style, and makes Argento a unique and beautiful director.
But Bunuel's intention in Un Chien Andalou was to shock 'polite' society... and in the words of film critic Ado Kyrou, he actively sought to 'alienate all potential spectators.' This seems an apt summation of Inferno as well. Argento made a career of shocking images. And moreso in Inferno, I think, where, there is much to alienate the viewer. Certainly his next films, Tenebrae, Phenomena, and Opera, have much more straightforward storylines, even if they still deal with violence, mystery, and gore.
For fans of the surreal, or giallo, or Italian Horror in general, or Dario Argento, Inferno is worth a look. It is not, in my opinion, his BEST work, but it is arguably his most complex work from the point of view of cinema.
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