Argento: Phenomena (1985)

One of the curious features of giallo is that – unlike virtually any other genre – it benefits from being dubbed, or from transnational casts that feel dubbed, since so much of its horror stems from the disassociation of sound and image – the space between sound and image – that Peter Strickland captured so uncannily in Berberian Sound Studio. Released in 1985, Phenomena is one of Dario Argento’s dubbiest films, at least from his classic period, taking the basic narrative of Suspiria – a serial killer stalking a girl’s school, this time in the Alps – but extending it in ever more preposterous and absurd directions. With Jennifer Connelly as the main character, Donald Pleasance as her mentor, a variety of Italian and Swiss extras, and a chimpanzee as a main character, there’s very little effort to regulate tone, manner or inflection – in fact, it is probably one of Argento’s most tone-deaf films, at least in a conventional sense, as everyone seems to be speaking in a voice that is not his or her own. Of course, that’s a very natural register for Argento’s particular brand of supernatural slasher film, which usually fixates on the telepathic communion between killer and victim more than its American counterpart. At the same time, that studied tone-deafness is the perfect starting-point for what turns out to be one of the most flamboyant dissasociations of sound and image in Argento’s career, with great swathes of the film poised at that moment when a montage sequence has started to go on a little too long, and you start to forget how the sound and images you’re experiencing relate to the narrative, or even to each other. That can be bewildering, but it also imbues sound and image – and images in particular – with the freshness of silent cinema, or a dream sequence – or a silent cinema dream sequence – as Argento sketches out something like a pre-conscious, phenomenal world, a world in which the visceral experience of looking precedes meaning, language or sonic accompaniment. With sight disassociated from any other sense, sight itself starts to feel somewhat prehensile, which perhaps explains why the actual murder sequences somehow manage to be both hyper-violent and non-physical at the same time, as if looking and murdering were functions of the same organ. At the same time, to help things along the way, Argento clutters and complicates many of his scenes with more than we can visually process or navigate at any one time, creating a spatial surplus, a lurid, exotic sense of space, that makes your eyes feel as if they have to work extra hard to traverse the tangled, distorted passage from one space to the next, even or especially when various eccentric transportation devices are inserted into the narrative to provide you with a bit of assistance, funiculairing, driving and elevating your eyes from mise-en-abyme to mise-en-abyme. In that sense, the Alps feel like the perfect backdrop, providing Argento with vistas that force you to redefine your sense of scale moment by moment, as well as putting more and more pressure on your eyes to keep up with the oversaturated circumambience of it all. Insofar as there's a story to ground all these visual challenges, it's partly about theorising or explaining this hypersight, as Argento variously imagines the film from the perspective of sleepwalkers, insects, serial killers and sex offenders. But, in the end, it feels as if it's the audience's perception that most fascinates him, the way that a cinephile will attach to a sound or image, beyond any rhyme or reason, long after the film has finished, until it's more real, in some sense than the film itself. In other words, for Argento, cinephilia is a way of grasping the hyperreal potential of film as a medium, which makes Phenomena's hyperlyricism feel like a consummation of cinephilia as well, devoid of anything but cinephilic moments, invitations to cinephilia - shots of wind in trees abound - that quickly make you feel as if you're experiening the after-effects of a horror film more than a fully-fledged horror film per se. And it's that sense of being haunted without having been entertained, of experiencing phenomena without a film to ground them, that makes the sense of horror so anti-cathartic and unsettling, in one of the least satisfying - but most terrifying - efforts of Argento's long career, destined to enrage critics and haunt cinephiles for decades to come.