Intros: Erik Herrmann & Scott Woods on Dario Argento

Scott Woods on Phenomena

Formless and Colorless: Argento's Deep Red, by Erik Herrmann

Good evening. I'm honored to introduce Dario Argento's Deep Red tonight. I'd like to thank Dave Filipi and the rest of the Wexner film team for their generous invitation. We're so lucky to have an international center for contemporary art in our backyards. Thank you to everyone who works, volunteers, and patronizes the Wex for making that possible. 

As mentioned, I'm an architect teaching at Ohio State's Knowlton School of Architecture. I also co-direct a small experimental practice called Outpost Office, which has a forthcoming installation at the Wexner. Our colorful installation opens early in the Fall, and I hope you'll come back and join us for it. 

A classic Argento mash-up of detective story and horror film, tonight's film Deep Red includes many tropes you might recognize from earlier screenings. The film stars David Hemmings, the star of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, made almost a decade before this film. In Deep Red, Hemmings again plays a detached, self-assured, and leisurely artist. Mirroring Blow-Up, the narrative thrust of Deep Red includes Hemmings witnessing a murder and developing a deadly fascination. 

Of course, this is an Argento film, so accompanying this simple premise is a cadre of quirky characters and macabre twists. 

So, why exactly is an architect introducing a 1970s Italian slasher film? As Hope Madden offered in her intro to Cat of Nine Tails, Argento is attentive to his films' architecture and settings. Deep Red is not different…it is often a viscerally spatial film. There's a lot of commentary I could offer about the settings and architecture of this film, but if you indulge me, I'm less interested in this film's spaces and settings and more interested in its use of color.

Color — a conspicuous quality of all things — is often strangely inconspicuous in architecture.

Modern architecture was primarily whitewashed. Color was dismissed with almost moralistic judgment, which relegated it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. The use of color was considered trivial, while form...the shape of things...was serious work. Architects were encouraged not to get distracted by color, which might steal their attention from allegedly timeless and universal aspects of shape, profile, and composition. Think about how you entered this building and descended into the lobby. There are a few materials in the interior palette...relatively muted palette of light woods and greys. Most of the building is coated in white to accentuate its dizzying array of grids, hanging columns, and sheared walls. The form is prioritized over any color. The Wex is an exception to many rules, but how many of your everyday spaces are also painted white?

In short, color doesn't get its due in architecture. So, over the past few years, our office has become increasingly interested in the relationship between color and form. 

From this perspective, what do I see in Deep Red? I see a filmmaker experimenting with the boundaries of filmic color and form. As you watch the film, I'd like you to join me in observing how Argento experiments with form and color through two leitmotifs: 

• the color red
• mirrors

So first, red:

I'll remind you I am a professor, so we're getting to the part where I read from an obscure text. In 1911, the modernist painting pioneer Wassily Kandinsky wrote of color in paintings: 

"Color cannot stand alone; it cannot dispense with boundaries of some kind. A never-ending extent of Red can only be seen in the mind; when the word red is heard, the color is evoked without definite boundaries."

In his text and paintings, Kandinsky was interested in the limits of unbounded color…the tension between color seen in the everyday real world and the formless color you can hold in your mind's eye. If you imagine red and try to visualize it, an infinite field is possible… but red in the world must be bound. Red in the world must belong to something. 

Red appears in many forms in Deep Red. The action begins in an opulent and immersive velvety interior of brilliant, blinding vermilion. When we meet our protagonist on a barren plaza, red haunts him like a ghost. Look first for his crimson Italian loafers, then red dolls, a red handbag, a pack of Marlboro reds, a red carpet, a red juice machine, a red pinball machine, red candy machines, red marbles, a red phone booth, red hangers, red flowers, a red button-up shirt, a red for sale sign... and, of course, blood. There will be blood.

The red blood in this film comes most closely to the formless Red of Kandinsky. 

A gruesome drowning scene reveals the thin veil separating our bodily forms from formless Red. Later, when Hemmings is frantically scratching at a wall, it seems entirely possible that our world is just a thin layer of form veneered over an infinite expanse of Red. In Deep Red, every "body," animate or inanimate, is a portal to formless Red. 

Now to the second motif: mirrors

Fans of Argento's films will recognize his often-used thematic tropes of sight and the questioning of visual memory. In an interview about the Deep Red, Argento explains how this theme relates to his obsession with mirrors: 

"The mirror fascinates me because of its power to isolate the detail from its general context. A vision of the whole is sometimes deceiving and misleading for both the character in the film and the audience. The detail shown in the mirror can be distinguished more easily."

The mirror repeatedly appears as a bounded surface in the film, its colorless quality manipulating the audience and protagonist alike. If Red is formless color, the mirror is a colorless form. It has no inherent properties, only those derived from its environment. 

For me, as an architect who wants to utilize form and color for new architectural effects, there are a lot of lessons here. I want to experiment with colorless form and formless color. Watching Deep Red, I often marvel at Argento's film as a symbolic dance between these two motifs.

Ultimately, they converge toward a remarkable and memorable closing shot, where Red and the mirror become one. 

I hope you enjoy Deep Red.

Podcast Transcript

Melissa Starker: This is a miniature version of WexCast, the podcast series from the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. For this episode, we’re happy to present an introduction to the wild Dario Argento film from 1985, Phenomena, done by Columbus writer and arts presenter Scott Woods. Phenomena is part of a summer-long salute to the films of the Italian horror icon. If you missed our screening, the full-length Integral Cut that we presented is available in a limited box set through Synapse Films, and the slightly shorter International Cut is now streaming on Shudder. We’ll leave it to our Head of Film/Video, Dave Filipi, to tell you more about the series and Scott Woods.

Dave Filipi: Good evening everyone and thanks for being here. I’m Dave Filipi, the head of Film and Video here at the Wex. It’s my great pleasure to welcome you all to the second to last screening in this summer’s Dario Argento retrospective. So tonight’s screening of Phenomena, it’s—this has really been a fun summer for us, and it’s been great to see people come back to the movies. A few things really have really stood out to me for this series. It’s been fun having the audience reaction to all these crazy Dario Argento films.

All of the films in the series are either brand new or really recent 4K restorations from Cinecitta in Rome, and it’s been fun hearing people who know the films really, really well coming up and saying, you know, “There are two minutes in the film I haven’t seen before”. Because they’re not available either on the American Blu-ray release or when they’ve been released previously, there’s been footage missing. So these are the full cuts from Rome, and tonight’s film is the most extreme example of that. When the film had an American release in the 1980s, and the distributor cut out 20, 22 minutes of film, so this is the full cut that you’re going to be seeing tonight. It has a monkey in it, which always is one of my favorite things in movies.

And then finally, it’s been really fun, throughout the series we’ve been having horror fans from the community introduce some of the films. We’ve had Laura Wimbels from Midnight Video Rental YouTube show—she’s from Cleveland; Hope Madden, who’s a film critic for Columbus Underground and is one of the co-editors of Maddwolf.com, a film website; Erik Herrmann, an architecture professor at Ohio State; and then tonight’s special guest, Scott Woods. [noise from the audience] Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Scott is an acclaimed and influential poet—and not just a poet, but he’s a real advocate for poetry in the city. He’s a journalist whose work over the years has been found in Columbus Alive, Columbus Monthly, now he’s starting to write for Matter News. He’s one of the cofounders of the alternative arts space Streetlight Guild, so follow what they’re doing, and I have to credit one of my colleagues. When we were trying to think of great people from the community to introduce one of the Argento films, someone had reminded me that Scott had written a column relatively recently about some of his favorite horror films, and so we thought, perfect. So yeah, we have a true Columbus icon with us tonight. So please join me in welcoming Scott Woods.

[applause]

[audience laughter]

Scott Woods: That’s a great introduction.

Phenomena… OK, so let’s just get this one out the way, alright? I’m gonna do Phenomena and you’re gonna go, “doo DOO doo…” right? [laughs] Don’t do that.

Phenomena is a 1985 Italian horror film directed and cowritten by Dario Argento. After a run in Italy, Phenomena was distributed in the US, under the title Creepers, minus 20 minutes of things no 1985 American audience could handle, apparently.

Tonight, you, a 2023 American audience, will experience in its original glory, amplified by a fresh remastering, which I will tell you now, won’t change the fact that this was shot in 1985.

[audience laughter]

One of the things that makes recommending older horror films to people who aren’t steeped in the genre is that the further back you go, the rougher the films become. I don’t mean more violent, although Phenomena is quite violent. I mean they look like their era. Horror films get a bad rap for one very good reason: they’re often cheaply made. They know fewer people will see them than, say, Back to the Future, which also came out in 1985, or Beverly Hills Cop, or Rocky IV, or Cocoon, or The Goonies, or Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, God rest his soul. You generally have to make them small, cheap, or both. And keep them titillating, which is another reason why so many horror films feel so sexist: because they are.

If you’ve never seen an Argento movie this is a good one to start with, in the way slamming your hand in a car door takes your mind off of your broken foot. It’s not his best work; it hit earlier in his career as a director. It’s his ninth outing as director out of 21 films total, not counting the many he wrote and produced. This movie screams Italian horror, of which Argento remains one of its most dedicated practitioners. He uses color and characters in ways that dazzle and offer alternate meanings. He paints the screen with physics-altering scenery and behavior. This was back when directors were still inflicting real-world harm on actors in the name of cinema, and so some of the screams are likely real.

About Phenomena, Argento said there was a subtext to the film that explained its oddness… compared to the rest of his oeuvre [laughs]. In his mind, Phenomena took place in a world in which the Nazis had won World War II, and so everything about the world was weird and wrong.

To be clear, Phenomena doesn’t show or say any of this. [audience laughter] It is the roux in which Argento’s imagination stews this supernatural thriller about a teenage girl with a telepathic empathy with insects—the original Ant Man [laughts]—teaming up with a scientist to track down a serial killer. It’s not a film about the war. For Argento, it is one of a million stories that take place in such a world. I tell you this now so that by the time you see the chimpanzee, you’ll be ready for it. [audience laughter] Just kidding, you won’t be ready for it. [more audience laughter]

There is a rumored reboot, or sequel, happening, which is a rarity for Argento’s catalogue. You never feel like anyone but him could make these films. You also don’t feel like anyone else should. As the sequel-slash-reboot will be a US production, it is likely to confirm that feeling.

While I still have a minute, before the show, and a rapt audience, I’d like to engage in active public service and dispel one of the largest myths about horror movies: that Black people die first. This is statistically and patently untrue in just about every horror movie you can name, and yet the myth persists.

Why this myth persists, I chalk up to the trauma inflicted at the end of George Romero’s 1968 pioneering classic Night of the Living Dead. Spoiler alert on a 55 year-old movie: In it, the lone survivor of a zombie invasion, Ben, played by Duane Jones, survives the onslaught only to be shot in the end by a posse roaming the countryside, cleaning out zombies. It is one of the most depressing and fatalistic gut punches in cinema, especially for its time, infusing the film with politics where little seemed to exist. Ben doesn’t die first, but he’s Black so he’s gon’ die. And the response to that is to assume that all Black people in horror films will die. In the Herculean 2022 book on the subject, The Black Guy Dies First, by Coleman and Harris, it is determined the mortality rate of Black people in horror films is about 45 percent—not quite one in two but very close. Very few of them die first.

I theorize that we have been living in a world in which Ben was killed and that maybe, somewhere, there is an audience watching us on screen right now in a world where Ben lived. In any event, there ain’t no Black people in Phenomena. [audience laughter] Enjoy the show. [laughs]

[applause]

Melissa Starker: That was Scott Woods, writer, poet, librarian, and cofounder of Streetlight Guild on the near East Side. You can read more of Woods’ writing at scottwoodswrites.net. You can learn more about the vital work happening at streetlight guild at StreetlightGuild.org. And you can find out more about upcoming screenings and all things Wex at wexarts.org. For the Wexner Center for the Arts, I’m Melissa Starker. Thanks for listening.