Sung, Not Seen: Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977)
(Intro to Film, Spring 2023)
Alex Noyer’s Sound of Violence (2021) asks a question: what if the first sound you ever heard was one of pain (Noyer)? The heroine, Alexis (Jasmine Savoy Brown), grew up deaf until her hearing returned during the murder of her family when she was ten. As a college student, she studies “experimental sounds,” but while the sound of screaming pigs at a slaughterhouse is beautiful to her—resonant of the first thing she ever heard—those around her are appalled at her choice of musical focus.
While a somewhat roughly-crafted film, the question is one that has stuck with me. Does sound really affect us that much? Edward Branigan brings up the importance of not just sound, but its relation to visuals in his 1989 article, “Sound and Epistemology,” where he discusses how sound is adjectival, yet vision is a noun:
When we see a “lamp” and can name it, the identification is complete and all that could be added would be merely adjectival—a “tall, reading” lamp. When we hear and name a sound, however, the identification remains incomplete. A “whistling” sound still needs to be specified: the whistling of what? from where? the whistling of the wind in the trees from across the river. (Branigan)
Branigan goes on to explore the complementary natures of sound to visual and visual to sound to convey information. He states how, “sound may relate to the image in only two fundamental ways: its information may confirm, or else be made to oppose, the information carried by the image” (Branigan). When it comes to informational opposition, we stumble across the idea of “dissonance”—something few things rely on as much as Dario Argento’s 1977 film, Suspiria. Instead of a conventional, clear narrative, Suspiria frames its story and in-universe logic by placing the viewer in sensory overload through dissonant, shrieking rock music (courtesy of the band Goblin) placed behind fierce, neon colors.
Inspired by Thomas de Quincey’s essay, Suspiria de Profundis (1845), Suspiria’s source material provides the foundation for the hallucinatory experience found within Argento’s film. In Suspiria de Profundis, de Quincey—known for his previous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater—speaks of the secret knowledge found in dreams:
Among the powers in man which suffer by this too intense life of the social instincts, none suffers more than the power of dreaming. Let no man think this a trifle. The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. (de Quincey)
He goes on to explain his own in-dream connections, such as those with the Roman goddess of childbirth, Levana, and the Three Mothers of Sorrow whom haunt her. Suspiria presents a retelling of the oldest mother, Mater Suspiriorum, through the eyes of the plucky young heroine, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper). In the world of Suspiria (and its sequels Inferno (1980) and Mother of Tears (2007)), these three mothers are pure evil, polluting the ground in which they dwell and pouring sorrow into the world.
However, unlike Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 take on Suspiria, very little is explained to the viewer in Argento’s film. If you squint and turn your head sideways and pay incredibly close attention, you might at least able to pick up on the plot of Suzy entering a school, feeling something is wrong, and eventually defeating Mater Suspiriorum. But there is no explanation as to why Suzy is there, or why she is special—or if she is special at all. There is little to no explanation as to who Mater Suspiriorum is outside of one info dump crammed into the middle of the film by a character the viewer will never see again.
Maitland McDonagh says in her essay, “The Elegant Brutality of Dario Argento,” that “His films have become progressively less story-oriented and increasingly visually flamboyant: mise-en-scene is all” (McDonagh). However, I would argue that his story-telling certainly took second place to style even back in Suspiria. While the narrative is murky at best, Argento’s Suspiria contrasts Gudagnino’s desaturated grit with bright pinks, royal blues, fluorescent yellows and, as McDonagh says again, “so much red” (McDonagh). Each bright splash of color accentuates the surrealism of the witch-coven-covering-as-a-ballet-school context Suzy has found herself within; each color tells us this a fairytale. Which leads to the true method of storytelling within Suspiria: dissonance.
Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader stated that, “…color is an aesthetic tool that may or may not be related to what’s happening on screen, but is related to what’s happening in the storyteller’s frame of mind. That’s the true liberation of the sense of color” (Schrader). Earlier in his article, Schrader recounts the history of color in film and how long it took color to not just be a tool for realism, but a tool for imaginative, artistic expression—like painting on a canvas (Schrader). Argento uses this surrealistic embracing of color to the extreme in Suspiria. The neon colors and gentler parts of the soundtrack say “fairytale.” But in spite of Suspiria and Inferno’s whimsical style, Argento contrasts that temptress of innocence with the trademark shocking violence of his giallo roots. The clearest representation of this dissonant combination of elements is the opening ten minutes.
The film opens with the heroine, Suzy Bannion, arriving in Freiburg, Germany from New York. The harsh fluorescent lighting in the airport is contrasted with splashes of lime green, sunshine yellow, and indigo. When she steps from the terminal to the curb, she’s instantly drenched by the ongoing thunderstorm as she struggles to hail a taxi. The storm seems to offer a transition from the bright, safe airport terminal to the dark, ominous future. The music is a twinkling in minor key, a simple melody punctuated with a deep asynchronous drum. It offers the viewer a mystery. And, if they listen listen carefully, they can hear the words “witches” whispered within the melody. This patterns continues for the first five minutes until Suzy arrives at the ballet school just as another girl flees in panic.
As Suzy leaves the school, the music shifts. No longer does Suspiria hint at a whimsical bedtime story. The soundtrack shifts to a rapid beat punctuated with the banshee-like wails of a woman. Each time the frightened woman from earlier—who we now know to be Pat (Eva Axén)—is alone, the wailing continues. Alongside the change in soundtrack, the colors now seem garish, not whimsical. Is Pat crazy? Is there a mystery? Or actual danger? Is the whispering on the wind about “witches” relevant? So much is going on visually and audibly that the viewer is driven to grasp for some answer to have some anchor to something predictable. But each shot offers something new and unexpected: bright walls, a new audible type of wail or scream or shriek, the percussion feels almost erratic. Pat’s sheer terror as the window blows open in her friend’s apartment showcases the unknown fear the audience should be experiencing.
The climax of these opening ten to twelve minutes ends with Pat being strangled, stabbed in the heart, and her bloody body thrown through the stained glass ceiling on a hangman’s noose. And no questions have been answered.
In spite of the lack of narrative clarity—who is Pat? why is she so afraid? who is after her? how did her murderer climb onto the roof?—the audience has been emotionally primed to expect anything. As Branigan stated as to the relation of vision and sound, sound can work for or against the message of the image (Branigan). In Suspiria’s opening moments, the audience is given multiple messages through whimsical color (is this a bedtime story?) and clashing, dissonant music crafted to set one’s nerves on edge (is this a nightmare?). By communicating multiple, conflicting possibilities at once, the audience is given countless possibilities for what could be. This cultivated open-mindedness minimizes the need for a clear narrative. As the audience, we know there’s something to be afraid of and, really, that’s mostly what matters. We do not have to understand the threat for us to know there is a threat.
he last ten minutes also represent an excellent example of sound and color telling the story. Whereas in the beginning of the film the vibrancy of color clashed with the raucous music, the end pairs bright colors with either silence or the earlier bells of whimsy. Suzy finds herself on the hunt for where her friend, Sara, may have disappeared. As she gets closer to the witches hidden lair, the colors get simultaneously more overwhelming and more monochromatic. She steps from the a bright, multi-colored room, to a “yellow brick road” of sorts hallway, then finally, the dark, indigo room where Mater Suspiriorum rests. The dabble between fairytale and nightmare collides.
Suspiria is connected by vibrant colors, jarring sound transitions, and a near-incomprehensible plot. While on one hand, it is easy to define the plot as “American battle witch queen” even that is difficult to ascertain without external research. De Quincey’s essay on the idea of the Three Mothers of Sorrow allows a bit more context, yet not enough direct data to offer answers to the questions Suspiria asks. However, by using such strong visual and audible clues, the film remains an almost ethereal experience. The information given by the visuals is either confirmed or contradicted by the sound (Branigan), allowing the viewer almost a “yes or no” narrative as they feel their way through the story. Often, plot and story are interconnected. However, in Suspiria’s case, the untold, but painted and sung story reigns supreme.
Works Cited
Argento, Dario, director. Inferno. 20th Century Fox, 1980, https://www.amazon.com/Inferno-Leigh-McCloskey/dp/B0778Z4Q7L/. Accessed 10 May 2023.
Argento, Dario, director. Suspiria. Produzioni Atlas Consorziate (P.A.C.), 1977.
Branigan, Edward. “Sound and Epistemology.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 4, 1989, pp. 311–324. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/431131.
McDonagh, Maitland. “The Elegant Brutality of Dario Argento.” Film, vol. 29, no. 1, 1993, pp. 55–58. JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.uccs.edu/stable/43406162.
Noyer, Alex, director. Sound of Violence, Gravitas Ventures, https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Violence-Jasmin-Savoy-Brown/dp/B093BB3VW3/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2022.
de Quincey, Thomas. Suspiria de Profundis. Dover Publications, Inc., 2019.
Schrader, Paul. “COLOR.” Film Society of Lincoln Center, vol. 51, no. 6, 2015, pp. 52–56. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43746004.
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