Suspiria

An American ballerina, Suzy Banyon, travels to Bavaria to complete her dance studies at the famous Tanzacademie. Arriving at the Academie in the midst of a ferocious storm, Suzy witnesses another girl fleeing in terror. The next day Suzy learns that the girl she saw and another were murdered that night. Finding the staff of the Academie strangely unconcerned and convinced that there is some vital piece of information she can't recall, Suzy embarks on her own investigation. Amidst a series of increasingly bizarre incidents – including a rain of maggots and a fellow pupil's falling into a room filled with razor wire – Suzy discovers that the Academie is home to a coven of witches presided over by the mysterious Mother of Sighs.

1977's Suspiria is generaly regarded as inaugurating a new chapter in director Dario Argento's career; a departure from the giallo with which he made his name.

On closer examination, however, one wonders if the film couldn't be fitted within the giallo framework. Suspiria's protagonist, Suzy Banyon, is both artistically inclined and an outsider, much like Sam Dalmas in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Marc Daly in Deep Red. Like them, Suzy can't quite put her finger on something about the scene she witnesses, compelling her to investigate. And, while the overtly supernatural elements are certainly more pronounced in Suspiria than Argento's or other directors' gialli, one could hardly say that they are a new element. Four Flies on Grey Velvet derives its title from the belief that a dead person's eyes hold a record of the last thing they saw when alive, while Deep Red has a psychic detecting a murderer within her audience. Outwith Argento's work the likes of They're Coming to Get You and Short Night of the Glass Dolls incorporate supernatural elements. (The last film, with its coven of witches murdering all who learn theire secrets, seems particularly relevant to Suspiria and its mythology of the Three Mothers.)

What we are left with, then, is the heightened degree of artifice and excess that characterises Suspiria compared to Argento's earlier gialli. Excess is, of course, a relative term here: Argento's films have always been about style, first and foremost (though also possesed of greater substance than many a critic, unable to see beyond the surface, has recognised).Nevertheless, none of the preceding films is quite so over the top whether in terms of colour, design, sound or mise-en-scene. The earlier films had their extravagant, operatic, overblown set-pieces. Suspiria is nothing less than a film constructed out of a procession of them. It's Argento's first synaesthetic, total, composed film where the elements are deployed like musical notes to produce harmony and counterpoint.

Here one must note two of Argento's aesthetic strategies: having the sound/music precede the image – the definition of the composed film – and shooting on obsolescenced three strip Technicolor.

The film's extravagance – everything turned up to eleven – extends to its bold myth making. Where Deep Red had concocted the tale of the "House of the Screaming Child", Suspiria boldly fashions a whole new mythology out of its diverse influences – fairytales like Red Riding Hood, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Daria Nicolodi's memories of her grandmother telling of the Steiner school she attended being home to a coven of witches. Three Witches, the mothers of sighs, tears and darkness, control the world from their three houses. Subsequently, of course, Argento would push the fantastical element further with Inferno before retreating back towards the straight giallo with the misleadingly titled Tenebre, which sounds like part of the Three Mothers trilogy but isn't.

The world Argento creates in Suspiria, a twilight zone parallel to our own, works. That it does is, I think, because Argento sets out his position so early on. The film opens with a voice-over as Suzy Banyon arrives in Munich, one that establishes Suspiria to take place in a once upon a time never-neverland where "magic is everywhere" and mundane logic does not apply. Yet, equally importantly, the world of Suspiria has its own internal coherence. It is not that anything goes.

That the film has attracted so little attention from mainstream critics can be put down, I think, to their inability to handle its excess. We might speculate that there are at least two varieties of excessive cinema, exemplified by directors like Peter Greenaway on the one hand and Sergio Leone, Michael Powell and Dario Argento on the other. Critics tend to respond more positively to the Greenaway type. They're frightened of looking uncultured and assume that the hermetic mass of high culture signifiers must mean something deep and meaningful, if one can only unravel the tapestry of [ai]llusions. But they'll rarely call such a film-makers bluff and suggest it's all a case of the emperor's new clothes. The second sort of film-maker, far less concerned about using the right, culturally approved strategies, tends to come in for a harder time. The critics can feel superior, safe in their midcult values, and say it's vulgar and lacking in good taste. But good taste, as Picasso famously reminds us, is the enemy of creativity.

In the end, though, whatever one can write and theorise about Suspiria is largely an irrelevance. It is primarily a film to be seen, heard and experienced. If these ramblings can persuade you to seek the film out and make up your own mind they will have served their purpose…