I was flipping thru the channels last week and on one of the cheap-assed, fly-by-night, glitchy OTA stations there was something in Italian. I stopped, and as I watched, it became clear that this was pretty advanced filmmaking. The dude in it looked kind of familiar, somehow. The station’s hardware kept glitching and the English overdub kept going in and out. I had my suspicions, and when I saw the color of the blood, I knew it was Argento.
It was Profundo Rosso. The overdubs weren’t glitching, it was actually filmed half in English and half in Italian. The dude was familiar because he was the guy from Blow-Up.
I missed a fair bit of the first part but kept watching until the end. It requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, but I was definitely on board. I’m not really interested in horror or shock, but just the way Argento speaks through his camera is profound, irrespective of the type of story being told. Personally, I was into the quality of the film stock, how it informed the sort of sleepy 70s Italian vibe, and the session musicians on the score were laying down some heavy funk that didn’t really go with a horror/suspense story at all, but captured me in regards to how it played off the aforementioned visual elements, and also in-and-of-itself. so, once again, mis-en-scene carries the day.
