Dario Argento

Director, screenwriter and film producer, born in Rome on 7 September 1940. Capable of working on cinematographic genres rarely addressed by Italian cinema (crime, thriller, horror), he has created his own visual and expressive universe, at times indebted to cinema by Mario Bava.
He has also assimilated and re-proposed, always in a personal key, the language of some American directors (Roger Corman, George A. Romero, Wes Craven). His films, strong, tense, rich in suggestions, deliberately anti-realist and above all capable of arousing strong emotions, are born “to be represented and not to be read. They are born through images and not through concatenations of stories” (D. Argento, Profondo thrilling , 1994, p. 351). Starting in 1973, he dedicated himself to the production of not only his own films, but also those of other directors, including Romero, Lamberto Bava, Michele Soavi. Son of the film producer Salvatore and Elda Luxardo, a famous photographer of Brazilian origin, he soon abandoned his studies to move to Paris, where he remained for a year living by his wits. When he returned to Rome, in his early twenties, he began to collaborate on newspapers and magazines (in particular the Roman newspaper “Paese sera” and “Filmcritica”).
In 1967 he began working as a screenwriter for western films and comedies, writing, among other things, together with Bernardo Bertolucci, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone. His directorial debut dates back to 1970 with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which was followed by detective stories of great popular success (including Deep Red, 1975) and films with a more fantastic structure such as Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). The only exception in this highly characterized artistic journey is the historical film, but with sarcastic tones, The Five Days (1973).
His filmography is generally considered to be divided into two phases: in the initial one A. used screenplays with an apparently logical-rational structure, with a series of crimes committed by a murderer who is unmasked at the end of the film. Starting from Profondo rosso, one of the Italian horror films of the last thirty years that has most struck the spectator’s imagination, fantastic elements have prevailed in his stories, and the visual element has become the central aspect of the film, with a mixture of baroque emotions and a soundtrack that ranged from classical music to the most obsessive rock (for the musical choices A. relied in particular on Goblin). In reality, many elements reveal a clear continuity of his work: the claustrophobia of environments and situations (with Turin recreated as a nightmare city), the neuroses of his characters, a free and delirious use of the camera which enhances the strength of the images without worrying too much about the verisimilitude of stories and dialogues. In the detective stories of the early years, for example, a decidedly anti-realistic element recurs: the victims, in fact, are often followed by the camera, which thus seems to represent the murderer’s point of view, but the decisive blow is inflicted by a different visual angle enough to create a surprise effect for the viewer, deliberately violating the golden rules of cinematic crime fiction.
Affected several times by censorship (Profondo rosso was released in France cut by almost half an hour compared to the original version), A. has nevertheless managed to gain a loyal and affectionate audience: his works have been distributed all over the world and he is certainly one of the best-known Italian directors abroad. His first films (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; The Cat O’Nine Tails, 1971; Four Flies on Gray Velvet, 1971) they created a genre and have had numerous imitators in Italy and abroad, as evidenced by the long series of titles in which the fantastic zoology that made it famous is revived. Also conceived for an international cast, but less easy to imitate, his fantastic horror films brought him closer to the best authors of contemporary horror, such as Romero (with whom he established a collaborative relationship, having been co-producer of his film< strong> Dawn of the dead, 1979, Zombi, and having joined him in 1990 in the direction of Two Evil Eyes), and John Carpenter. In 1993 with Trauma, A. inaugurated the cinematic relationship with her daughter Asia which later deepened, in particular for two films in which she was the protagonist: The Stendhal Syndrome< /strong> (1996) and The Phantom of the Opera (1998).