Dario Argento, crime architect

Sitges pays homage to master of ' Giallo ' seventies

As a child, when he left class, he went to photography studio of his mor, Elda Luxardo. That's where Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale came to pass. He was hiding in dressing room. Fascinated, he saw models stripped, made up and posed to camera. But he also contemplated how his mor used light, Cow adjusted focus to highlight face of women. It was a fantastic spectacle. "So I learned to put light just to enlighten actresses," recalls Dario Argento. No one like him has stripped women before y killed m in ir films. My wives are murdered. But y are also murderers! '

At four in afternoon, same time he left school in Rome, Dario Argento took a decaffeinato at Hotel Melià in Sitges. He's tired. He comes from Los Angeles, where he has received a tribute from American film Library. Here at Sitges Fantastic film Festival, Guillermo del Toro has chosen his legendary film Suspiria (1977) for a special projection he has presented. "It is a colossal film," claims Del Toro, one of many filmmakers influenced by Argento's cinema (and aestics). Even Tarantino has been inspired by my films. and Nicolas Winding Refn. «And even in South Korea, Park Chan-wook...», Cita Argento with Unconcern.

At its 77 years it is a myth of cinema, of Estetizada violence, of beauty of horror, of subconscious like nightmare. It is last survivor of already extinct genus Giallo, that cinema of Italian mark, between terror and suspense, which practically invented it in 70, after Mario Brava put foundation stone in 60. Next year, his compatriot Luca Guadagnino (director of Melissa P) premiered a ' remake ' of Suspiria starring Mark Swinton and Dakota Johnson. And it's not very funny that y're going to put ir hands on one of ir magnum works. Making a film like Suspiria is very difficult. Certainly, remake does not excite me. I don't know what it's all about. "Only end is very different."

In today's cinema psychological and political part has been lost . Directors only think of action and movement. Nothing else. "Behind it is emptiness, nothingness," he says. Behind Argento films, behind all blood and excesses, disturbing images of Bosco, atmospheres of darker Caravaggio, but also geometry of neo-classical temples, lines of surrealist labyrinths of Magritte. There is always some reference to history of art and architecture. " I am almost an architect taken to cinema," he asserts. Although its architecture is also that of assassination: violent, brutal, psychological. In syndrome of Stendhal (starring his daughter Asia, anor muse of terror, things of DNA ...) intersperses fascination and delirium by an excess of beauty in Uffizi Gallery with story of a psychopath who kills and rapes women.

In this "architecture of assassination", understood in manner of Thomas de Quincey, "as one of fine arts", Dario Argento places Spectator in position of murderer with use of subjective camera. In my first films was very important that Subjectivity, n I changed. "But at first he wanted public to experience guilt because he felt murderer," says Argento. Sometimes he has been labeled misogynist, for suffering women suffer in ir tapes. "How can I be misogynistic if all my films are starring a woman?" I am passionate about female figure! ' he defends. And he says it with same passion with which he looks back at those clandestine moments in his mor's study.