On the occasion of a retrospective of the master of “Giallo” at the Cinémathèque, in Paris, until July 31, Dario and Asia Argento return to their respective filmographs, in an interview with “world”.
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He wrote, in the 1970s and 1980s, one of the most sumptuous pages of horrifying cinema, with elegant and poisonous nightmares named the chills of anxiety (1975), Suspiria (1977), Inferno ( 1980), Darkness (1982) or Phenomena (1985). He continues today, against and against everything, to turn giallo, these famous Italian thrillers with ritual violence pushes, like his latest opus, black glasses (2022).
If the label of the genre has sometimes masked its real contribution, Dario Argento, 81, is now recognized as a great creator of forms, a refined esthete, keen on architecture, painting and opera. Someone who has erected his films as great cathedrals of dread, stained glass cages in haunting colors. A more secret subset opens at the heart of his work: the six psychic fairy tales he shot with his daughter Asia Argento, a 46-year-old volcanic actress, a major figure in international author cinema, also director of ‘An intimate and bubbling triple (Scarlet Diva, in 2000, Jérémie’s book, in 2004, the misunderstood in 2014). The Cinémathèque française, in Paris, receives together the father and the daughter for a retrospective of the master of the Giallo current until July 31.
How the tour of your films, restored by Cinecittà, takes place -I?
Dario Argento: I come back from New York and Lincoln Center, where they have just been shown. Of my twenty films, seventeen were restored, including four in 4K [technical standard of high digital definition]. At the Italian Cultural Institute, a meeting with the public took place, led by the cinema historian Rob King, who studies my works. He said that it had been fifty-three years since I was shooting giallo, more time that John Ford had devoted to do westerns!
What look at each on the work of the other?
Asia Argento: I watched Dario’s films when I was little, even too small: I was 5 when I saw the chills of anxiety. More than formed, I would say that they have de-shaped me, in the sense of a counter-initiation. They shaped my aesthetic sense, forged my nonconformist behavior as an artist, convinced to take a hyperpersonal path. Dario has always been an example for me: his work, his way of speaking in interviews, his way of appearing in front of the world, without ever trying to please others. The obstinacy he has set to give shape to his ideas, his obsessions, his nightmares. Without ever making compromises.
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