Mother of Sighs
On thumps, scrapes, and oozing in Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) and Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)
I had great plans to write about both of the Candymans for the end of March, to be followed by a deeply personal consideration of the sexiest on-screen Jesus (a showdown between Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal and Ken Russell’s The Devils) but as sometimes happens, a different viewing opportunity presented itself.
This week I had the immense pleasure of watching both Suspirias back to back. My hosts for this occasion were my darling pal who has seen both films many times, and his beloved, who was watching these films for the first time. In an effort to be an informed conversationalist, and worried that I might have to try and convert someone to these witchy, breathy, spooky films, I finally read all of Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ short book on Argento’s Suspiria. I also read Anna Powell’s chapter on Suspiria in European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe since 1945. This did mean I came to this viewing armed with an array of fun facts: they lit some of the scenes through velvet (too divine), that Argento’s Suspiria is the last film to ever be printed using the dye transfer method for Technicolor, and that cinematographer Luciano Tovoli did some early technical tests which so delighted Argento that he stroked the screen (see Heller-Nicholas 2018:14).
I am particularly interested in the way bodies move (“the body is Sarah’s thing” is what my Suspiria-loving pal says about my professional interests) but this is a film set in a dance school where there’s very little actual dancing. Argento’s film isn’t so much about dancers and their bodies, but it is interested in the way that Sara (Stefania Cassini) and Suzy (Jessica Harper) (“names that begin with ‘s’ are the names of snakes!”) creep around the school, the way Suzy is often half asleep, dreaming, surrounded by changing colours, as if the red wine she is prescribed for her recovery from illness has permanently altered her perception. Heller-Nicholas rightly states that “Argento’s secret weapon is his invitation to not so much understand Suspiria intellectually as it is rather to experience it sensorially.” (2015: 8) The Argento Suspiria makes you feel as if you are inside a Beardsley drawing, swooning into velvet, surrounded by poisonous flowers. (The fact that Killstar have made a long, burnt velvet, hooded cardigan in their Argento collection proved too tempting for me and it is currently winging its way into my already overstuffed wardrobe because apparently two capes aren’t enough for me.)
And then there is the sound of Suspiria, the relentless score by Goblin, the shrieking whispers of “WITCH!”, the screams, the panting, the sighs. Though we get little of the Suspiria mythology here about the three mothers (Tenebraurum/Darkness, Lachrymaurum/Tears, Suspiriorum/Sighs) all these qualities are present in Argento’s masterpiece. Tears, nausea, screams, and sighs are the things that make the body swoon, involuntary bodily responses that are hard to ignore or conceal. When Suzy first becomes unwell, she tries to dance through this feeling, panting with nausea, until she collapses with blood seeping from her nose and mouth. When Sara tries to find the teachers’ lair, she meets her end in a blue-lit room filled with razor wire, which Powell describes as “death by touch.” (2012: 172) This aligns with the demonic hands that dispatch the first victim, plunging a knife into her still-beating heart. Even in death, bodies writhe and pulse, and their sighs of suffering become a kind of offering.
If Argento’s Suspiria is a pulsating, velvet Beardsley painting, Guadagnino’s is a sweaty, slippery nest of silk, rope, and hair.
When Guadagnino takes up the mantle of remaking Suspiria, he sets his film in a divided Berlin, with a colour palette and atmosphere that evokes Zulawski’s Possession. Here, Suzy (Dakota Johnson) becomes Susannah, a young woman who has fled her Amish upbringing to be anointed in the legacy of Martha Graham and Pina Bausch. Guadagnino is a director much more interested in the possibilities of dance, and as a result we have the smack of dancers’ feet hitting the floor, the uncanny and sinuous writhing of their shoulder blades, the intensity of a shared glance in collaboration. There is something here about the power of dancing with others, and of course this collectivity is part of the witchy power embodied by Madame Blanc and her fellow teachers, this ability to offer a framework for pushing and training the body, as well as a method for collective, synchronised movement.
When Suzy volunteers to dance the role of the protagonist in Volk, her performance is mirrored in the destruction of another dancer’s body, eviscerated in the neighbouring mirrored studio. Olga’s (Elena Fokina) contorted body emits blood, piss, and drool, as well as whimpers, screams, and sighs. The smell of the dance studio is often the smell of the gusset: sweat, piss, chalk, resin, rubbing alcohol, and sometimes the whiff of someone’s lingering perfume. Guadagnino’s Suspiria gives us this in its array of gorgeous and unsettling dream images: all hair, knives, whispers, and uncanny shivers. But as with the first Suspiria, everything here is aestheticized.
The curving scythes wielded by the witches of this dance school look less like weapons and more like jewellery—we are never sure whether these items should be held or simply worn like a necklace, on a ribbon or a strip of leather. The dancers’ costumes resemble shibari rope ties, the ends dangling like fringe to their bare feet. The other perverse detail here is hair—Suzy’s long, conspicuously red hair, Madame Blanc’s (Tilda Swinton) dark brown hair streaked with grey, held back in long plaits or worn loose like a Pre-Raphallite goddess, like those Beardsley figures on the wall of the headmistress’s office in Argento’s Suspiria. Beardsley’s people are often androgynous, with clouds of hair, and in Guadagnino’s Suspiria hair appears as a curtain of protection, or arcing through the air like a bullwhip.
In the climactic sequence, inside the scarlet cave of Mother Suspiriorum everyone is either naked, or clad in a dress made from the hair of some long-dead girl. The only exceptions are Suzy who appears in a stunning translucent negligee, (the kind of simple yet devastating garment that leaves nothing to the imagination except the exact shade of the wearer’s pubic hair) and la Swinton wearing the kind of priestess-like floor-length dress that only she can pull off.
The sound of Guadagnino’s Suspiria is characterised by the strike of high-heeled boots on pavement and marble, the cackling laughter of women, and the thump of bodies hitting the floor. Even when bodies climb and crawl and writhe, we imagine the scrape of fabric, the squeak and scent of sweaty flesh. Writing about the Argento Suspiria, Powell notes that “By watching characters touch objects and each other on screen, we sense the affect of sensation on the skin’s surface and experience visceral responses of our own.” (2012: 169) but it is in Guadagnino’s Suspiria that we find this affect of sensation most powerfully via the same intimate sound design we hear and feel in Call Me By Your Name: if that film wants us to experience the squelch and ooze of bodies in contact with food, fabric, and each other, then so does Suspiria and so does Bones and All.
Both Suspirias leave me wanting more, so it’s a good thing I’ve not yet seen Argento’s Inferno or Mother of Tears.