Phenomena (1985)

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Nothing is there to come
And nothing passed
But an eternal now
Does always last.

Abraham Cowley

Screw the past!

There is a deep malaise that exists in Dario Argento's critical approach to cinema, and all in all it takes its root in this Phenomena, film that marks for many of its fans the beginning of a form of decadence. Yet even today, the filmmaker cites this work as one of his favorites. The reason for a great rejection by some can then appear obvious: it is the film of a radical change in its author. It is a magnificent work on the end of the horror cinema, and Argento probably already knows that he will no longer be able to serve the genre as before. Especially since the whole coincides with a maturity and a new stylistic progression that will make his cinema take a dimension more resolutely contemplative and experimental than analytical. Arrived with the very introspective Darkness to a first limit of his work, the pursuit of his work will be done beyond the borders of the mental and the symbolic, to enter a quest for the invisible and the impalpable universe is no longer closed but becomes open. Adolescence becomes the favored body of change, while sexuality and guilt become more and more ambiguous notions. Served by the particularly captivating performance of a Jennifer Connely who was just leaving Léone, Phenomena, with all her poetry, is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cinematographic trips that is.

From the third Mater to the figure of the tale

This is probably why Phénomena is trying to sound like an 80s pop movie for Dario Argento, because there is a real desire to fully reconnect with the public by delivering a film that is seen and appreciated by many people. people. The work on the soundtrack, inviting great names of the scenes (hard) rock and metal of the moment (Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Andy Sex Gang, Bill Wyman) is as much experimentation as a certain commercial cunning at a compilator soundtrack that advertises the film. A technique that Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer have popularized with Flashdance and that emulates everywhere ... Argento does not address the same audience as the FM tubes of these American productions, but he says that the young audience of horror cinema of the time is related to this music just on the sidelines but not too much. It is amusing to see that in 1973, it was the theme of Profondo Rosso which was a real hit resulting from a cinematographic success. Here Argento will seek to create the musical tube upstream to launch his film. He also puts on the occasion to the exercise of the video clip, illustrating the sublime theme of Claudio Simonetti while his assistant Michele Soavi takes care of putting in images The Valley of Bill Wyman.

Dario has often explained the genesis of his film by the desire to devote a work revolving around insects, yet we also sometimes feel to witness an abortive scenario and reworked of what could have been the third part of the trilogy "mater", triptych on witchcraft started with Suspiria and Inferno. All the scenes of the boarding school and the larvae devouring corpses evoke the first film while the final between fire, under ground and underwater sequence refers to the images of the second. The presence of the killer evokes the most gallant elements of Argento's cinema, but with a totally different reading of these images brought about by a real change of perspective. Phenomena indeed holds fairy tale where Jennifer embodies a kind of Alice in the Land of Horrors, innocent character who sees himself by his paranormal faculties projected in the disturbing back of the surface of things. Like Alice, Jennifer is a character who resolutely goes forward, almost crossing obstacles as if it could not be otherwise. Phenomena is an entire film turned on this idea of ??strolling towards the unknown, from worry born beauty. We find in the structure other references such as those clearly displayed in the opening scene, illustrating a girl alone in the woods strolling to the cottage which is the landmark of the monster. Phenomena thus proves to be a very personal variation on the fear of the wolf, and even more so on that of parents who abandon and harm their children.

Decomposition of the family, old age and adolescent bodies: a new approach of the characters

"It seems to me that the family represents the origin of the evil in our society Phenomena allows me to discuss this idea again (...) It is enough to see the way in which I treat the characters interpreted by my daughter and by my ex- woman to understand how my film is Oedipal: mother and daughter are put to the test! It is the same for Christmas: I loved the idea that this symbol of family rejoicing is, for Jennifer, experienced as the day of her mother's departure, everyone thinks that Christmas is always beautiful and cheerful and that's not always the reality. " (1)

In Profondo Rosso, Dario Argento already made the family the initial traumatic element through a child attending the murder of his father by his own mother. Christmas was also at the rendezvous, since all this painting took place in front of the sacro saint fir ... The representation was then full of distancing, and it is with an obvious sardonic pleasure that the filmmaker directed this true engraving of horror . The Revolution for Argento will begin in the revisiting of this scene within Phenomena.

For if there is a family, it is a decomposed family this time. Argento at the time of the filming is experiencing the end of his marriage with actress Daria Niccolodi, who finds herself strangely here in the dark role of Ms. Bruckner, far from the image of innocence and old maid who 'she was previously in front of the camera of her husband (image she takes for 80 minutes in this film to better deceive the viewer). As his family explodes, the director chooses to look at the representations of very ambiguous and ambiguous relationships between parents and their children. The opening scene may appear as the mere murder of a girl, it also resonates in parallel as an image of infanticide, because the actress used is the daughter of the filmmaker, Fiore Argento.

Born of a rape, Patau, the monstrous and deformed child, has the childish voice of Asia Argento, the other daughter of the filmmaker, and embodies this offspring which creates an ambivalent feeling in the mother, who hates her but it protects her just as much as it is like giving birth to her own contact with the monstrous, her own madness that she tries to stifle ("This child worries me a lot, his birth has turned my life upside down. he's going to drive me crazy, "she says to Jennifer. Planned as a real ogre at the start in the original scenario, the father of Patau is in the film more noticeable just at the turn of a plan, precisely to reinforce this dualism between the mother and the son which is the dualism parent / child. A confrontation and hatred are also reflected through all that can represent the boarding school where Jennifer is enclosed, character oppressive and rigid, close to the prison or psychiatric hospital, where our heroine must undergo several tests there on his health mental.

By killing his daughter Fiore on the screen, Argento has made the troubled theme of the family something that is directly related to him, the creator. The assassin of Darkness was an author of crime novels and a projection of the filmmaker Argento himself. This film was a turning point, as its culmination marked the end of the filmmaker's distant and external gaze on his characters, making him his own psychoanalytic source. Phenomena, as a next step, integrates Argento's own family environment to signify that we are clearly in a work that touches more directly on the intimate, personal torment. This is probably why for the first time, the characters take a real thickness, a dimension they did not have before. Here Argento is particularly inclined to feel compassion for them, they are no longer just theoretical figures. The few still theoretical elements are those that give the keys to understand the process of a work that becomes much more personal: if Fiore is killed by his father filmmaker, it is also to replace it with his double of cinema Jennifer Corvino, a another celebrity girl forced to watch her father's movies in a loop. Here, the motif of creation takes the form of a search from the artist's own torments. The cinema becomes a form of escape where we face the unknown to track down its nature ... The whole holding less of the exorcism than the exploration of a new territory.

In the same way, the fact that all Phenomena take as their motive the insects, almost seeking to offer them a soul, is a kind of look that the Argento with the entomological tendencies of the past bore on himself in 1984. John McGregor (Donald Pleasance) directly practices this profession, and to see him in a wheelchair borrowed from this humanity, before being murdered, is also to observe this change of conception in the artist, more human and open. McGregor himself expresses his conception of scientific research that is not far from what the director is now looking for at all costs: "It's new, for a scientist that's the essence of discovery." discovered so many things that my colleagues thought absurd ". The character of Pleasance also touches us because he embodies a kind of aging artisan, a man of old who no longer seems in step with the rest of society: "I understand what it is to be different and everything which goes with: pity, irony, repugnance, irritation ... We can take you to hate you ". The fact is that by seeking a little to be fashionable with this film, Argento finally identifies much with the philosophy of his character. John McGregor, it's also a bit of all genre cinema that is disappearing, and we can not help but feel a certain melancholy in his appearances in the guise of a great actor in the history of this cinema.

Finished the Goblin's childish refrain to illustrate the traumatized child with a hint of irony, now places to an emotion more first degree with the scene of the monologue on the evening of Christmas. This time Argento (as in many other dialogues scenes of his film, which are particularly successful) lets the words, the music and his actress express themselves. Christmas is the night of the abandonment of the mother, the destruction of the family (note that this long depressive monologue on the end of the year party arrives on the screens the same year as that of Phoebe Cates in Gremlins ). This scene remains today one of the most touching of the director. With Professor McGregor and Sophie, Argento also shows that Jennifer creates a family much more present, a family of hearts, more seine than that of blood and birth, because of freedom. At the same time, it will be noted that the filmmaker attaches great importance to emphasizing the virginal aspect of his heroine, while imparting an imagery mixed with both sweetness and eroticism. The whiteness of dresses and nightgowns is measured by the smallest space of sublimated skin. It is a look that already carries in its germs the ambiguity of the trilogy of Asia, but the body and the pre-adolescent psyche seem to really fascinate the filmmaker. Thus, the very successful vomiting scene easily foreshadows anorexia in Trauma.

Cinematographic strolls

We do not know how far that is true according to the sources, but the famous opening of It was once in the West with its temporal stretching and the gag of the fly was often attributed as coming from the spirit of the co- screenwriter Dario Argento. In any case, the filmmaker likes the deserted spaces, often large urban spaces besides which he likes to empty to make them as abstract as possible, often claiming an influence at this level of Michelangelo Antonioni. Just as Fritz Lang's parentage is felt when it comes to composing a stuffy universe into the interiors. In any case, the setting is closed, it is a cage often mental in which a series of significant and implacable events takes place. Everything works by the existence of the camera as a main character in its own right which, by its figures of style and its visual ideas, elaborates the speech and defines the boundaries of the universe.

What about the cage in Phenomena? One has the feeling that Dario Argento refused to give him limits, better: it sounds a little as if he had also chosen to get lost and abandon himself to it. We go on a clearly experimental slope. The filmmaker is like his characters in a logic of research and strolling, inside an open space.

In general, the film revolves around a movement of general composition, a form of musicality immediately illustrated by the opening scene which then appears as the tempo given to all the rest of the film. As one moves from Bill Wyman's minimalist bass to a raging Hard Rock, elegant shots (some with steadycam use) illustrate in a very Kubrickian way the young tourist rushing down the winding paths of the forest. Then once we have entered the chalet, Argento gives way to a much more cut editing, where a kind of bestial savagery is expressed with great violence. The amplified Fury succeeds to a throbbing and contemplative rhythm that must arouse discomfort. We are no longer in a logic of paintings of film painter, but in a work that is more of sculpture within the temporality, intensity and rhythm of the various blocks of images (to use the image dear to Tarkovsky). Wandering leads to absolute horror, followed again by a continual wandering of nature. Thus the plan of decapitation in the cascade of water stifles the paroxysm of violence by a kind of order of nature that would resume, each time, his rights ...

It's not innocent if in the movie Jennifer suffers from sleepwalking and has telepathic gifts with insects. This still virgin main character has a particularly open mind to everything that is perception. The age (12/13 years) is the one where we find the most sleepwalking: it is a little preadolescence what anorexia will be in adolescence in Trauma. But it is also cinematographically the means of projecting itself into the idea of ??wandering between dream and reality, a way of being in a total purity of mind and movement, a hypnosis not suggested that goes to the contrary. of the absolute horror on which it emerges. During the very first sequence of sleepwalking, Jennifer is confronted for example with a particularly shocking image of murder, a face in the form of a bloody scream that is suddenly pierced by a spear. Argento suggests that letting go of this innocent, half-conscious stroll leads directly to the scene of a crime and to witnessing a murder, and the "true" image, his obsession of all time.

The sequences of sleepwalking allow the director several graphic research to suggest this state of dreamlike trance: we will remember the wonderful very close-ups of the mouth and the feline look of Connely at the very beginning of his first crisis, or the awakening brutal illustrated by a stall effect very successful. Here again, music is the driving force behind the stage and editing. It is interesting to compare these sequences with the video clip made for the promo of the film and the piece of Simonetti, because we realize that the aesthetic approach is quite close. In any case, there is a succession of corridors, doors, windows, stairs. To abandon oneself is to follow a very linear path, while the awakening returns in total disorientation. Here again, it is the whole structure of the film that joins this observation ... When she wakes up, Jennifer also sees the ground collapse under her feet and is suspended in the air. Collected by two boys who drive, the following turns to the aggressive. It should be noted that when awakening a somnambulist behavior, the subject is very often violent, and we have seen many cases where the latter can attack a third person in a totally drive.

When Jennifer is in a trance, she projects herself into a sort of parallel universe that is nothing other than the psyche to which she connects, projecting her into an exploration of the unconscious that leads her directly to the truth of the world. A door as there are several others inside Phenomena: these are for example the paintings that are found inside the boarding school and towards which one feels irreparably projected. But also the television, which works like a window open to the submerged part of the iceberg, by means of images made abstract and which move inside a dark room, asleep. Everything about communication and networks is strongly highlighted, and the same goes for the phone that recurs on the screen repeatedly, and thus becomes one of the flagship objects of the final, where to follow the direction of the wire refers directly to the bowels which, as very often at Dario Argento, prove the place of secrets.

The telepathy with insects is therefore a nested motif within several others of the same type ...

"I love all of you"

"In ancient Greece, the butterfly symbolized the soul, the psyche, the Greek soul, psukh, what is the connection between insects and the human soul, is it their mystery complex to both?"

These words of John McGregor fit into the most exciting and original element of the film, namely the assumption that by his somnambulism, so his direct escape into the unconscious, Jennifer has managed to develop an extrasensory power allowing him to capture telepathic communication of insects. This paranormal power of insects is of great interest to Dario Argento who has done several researches on the subject before tackling his film:

"I have studied Professor Leclerc's book Entomology and Forensic Medicine, in which I learned that in some cases an entomologist was used to solve murder cases. (Concerning the fly called "The Great Sarcophagus" that we see in the film) It seems that in 1950, a large number of these flies were found on the corpses of five Italian soldiers lost in the Sahara. deduced that these flies had to travel 500 kilometers in order to discover these bodies ... because they only live on the seashore, which means that they spotted the corpses 500 kilometers away! telepathy of insects ... ". (2)

Through Jennifer and Professor McGregor's passion, Phenomena brings to light a form of psychic synergy between all the forces of nature, all organisms that belong to the realm of life. This direct connection also allows the work and Dario Argento to move away from the simple psychoanalysis, attenuate the symbolism: we are in a total union. Through the crows in his next film, Opera, but also in some traces present in Trauma or the rats in The Phantom of the Opera, the filmmaker will resume this idea of ??a connection to a universal psyche, a soul of the living, a common unconscious. But never again will he do so with much belief, because gradually finding himself won by a certain pessimism. In many respects, Argento has reached his peak in the expression of the invisible, and undoubtedly his career in the perfect balance between the new and the old of his filmography. Phenomena is far from being a wobbly work as we have often said, which would exist only by a few flashes ... it is not built at all on this type of scheme. Argento has some sick films in his career, this one is on the contrary a deeply generous and coherent film which gives of the universe and the psychic a vision in its totality. Everything revolves around this central declaration of love in Jennifer's film, when she exclaims "I Love you, I love you all ... I Love all of You" to bring to the windows a whole swarm of flies.

The insect allows incessant comings and goings between what is the domain of the macro and the microphone, revealing a way of feeling what surrounds us completely new. Beauty takes shape from very close-ups on these small bodies that acquire a new dimension (the filmmaker opposes wide shots that sometimes make the man as small as a firefly or a fly), but also on the implementation evidence of the Fohn, the name of the wind blowing here as a character in its own right. The moon in the sky and its direct and cold lighting joins the many artificial lights of the film, like this red ray pointed by McGregor who denudes the eye of evil. Finally, what about the character of the chimpanzee, another expression of this indivisible living? Argento actually films him as a character capable of various emotions and not just a fair beast. The image of the final razor murder by the latter, straight out of Poe and his double murder in the rue Morgue is particularly striking. Regarding this murder, it is probably one of the hardest filmed by Argento, consisting of repeated attacks of the blade through the face in close-up of Daria Nicolodi ... The final plan on the beautiful theme of Simonetti, which illustrates the princess in symbiosis with nature is a way to reactualize this ever-lasting embrace of love and death.

This is the tour de force of the great filmmakers to give us to see differently, and Argento with this film offers as a bonus to its cinema a new dimension more in depth. By rubbing himself directly with what is revealed to be the question of the soul, his work now holds less virtuous formalism. The almost too full of lyricism and hypersensitivity of Phenomena, as in reaction, will be pursued by the icy and dark Opera whose final escape, deeply ambiguous, has the need to confront the sets of the previous film. The darkest film of his career follows the brightest, two extremes for the two summits of the new Dario.

• Last word to John Carpenter ...

"I never really understood why Dario Argento did not get the recognition he deserves, one of his films," Phenomena ", deeply troubled me, made me feel really bad. rare films that I will never show to my children, I can show them "Suspiria" which is very operatic, "Phenomena" is really a very difficult film, I think that explains some things about this lack of recognition for Dario Argento: When you work on this kind of emotions, you run the risk of deeply disturbing the viewer ... therefore the critic, but that does not detract from the beauty of his films, which are sometimes extraordinary. " (3)

(1) Dario Argento, the architect of Phenomena, in L'Ecran Fantastique, n ° 57, June 1985, p.35

(2) Dario Argento, Phenomena's prime contractor, op.cit, p.36

(3) Human Brothers, interview with John Carpenter, in Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 523, April 1998, p.41