These notes on Dario Argento's Suspiria  were written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A recently restored 4K DCP of Suspiria will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue (4070 Vilas Hall, 821 UniversityAve) on Saturday, October 29, at 7 p.m. Admission is Free!

By David Vanden Bossche

When asked about the names of horror ‘auteurs’ – the director as ‘auteur’ obviously being derived from texts in Les Cahiers du Cinéma and the channeling of the same ideas into American film criticism by Andrew Sarris – many a horror fan will passionately disagree with critics or scholars, which means that the list of names that most anyone can agree on is rather short. Jacques Tourneur would be there for sure and so would Sam Raimi. One name that would pop up on everyone’s shortlist would definitely be that of Italian horror maestro ‘par excellence’ Dario Argento. If you were to follow up with a question about which of Argento’s films people hold in highest regard, there’s little doubt that Suspiria (1977) would win out. Forget the truly dismal recent remake by Luca Guadagnino – a film that tried so hard to infuse the source material with some kind of misguided ‘gravitas’ that it completely destroyed what makes this original so great – and grab a chance to see on the big screen why Suspiria still packs quite a punch, almost half a century after its initial release.

Dario Argento started his directing career in 1970 with L’Ucello dalle Piume di Cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, one of the key early films in a genre that would become known as ‘Giallo’ films. The literal translation of that term is ‘Yellow’ and it referred to the color of the pages used for printing sensationalist crime stories in Italy at the time. While many different directors would shape the ‘Giallo’ genre in the seventies, Argento remained one of the most prolific amongst them with such titles as Il Gatto a Nove Code/The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971) and Tenebre/Unsane (1982). With Suspiria, Argento started a very different project that was conceptualized as a series of films that would deal with ‘the three mothers’ - three modern-day witches. Inferno from 1980 was the second part of this triptych, but it would take the Italian filmmaker 27 years to finally complete the trilogy in 2007 with La Terza Madre/The Third Mother. Of these three films, Suspiria is without any doubt the best and still remains one of the towering achievements of the European horror scene of its decade.

Radiating an almost suffocating atmosphere of dread from its first images – the arrival of a young girl in Germany during an especially ominous stormy night – the film tells the story of Sarah, a ballerina (Jessica Harper) who comes to study at a renowned dancing academy located in the woods of Badem-Württemberg in Germany. The student she meets at the door – fleeing the school in terror and turning up brutally murdered mere hours later – is but the first sign that things are not all well at the prestigious ‘Tanz Akademie’. It isn’t before long that Sarah starts realizing that the school harbors very dark secrets that are related to an ancient convent of witches. Setting up a striking contrast between the seemingly perfectly organized world of the school and the festering evil lurking within its walls, Argento goes all out in the kind of extreme baroque imagery that would become his signature in years to come. The term ‘horror-opera’ comes to mind when watching some of the exuberant murder scenes in Suspiria, scenes that completely refuse to adhere to any kind of verisimilitude and instead stylize the happenings to a point that renders them as almost abstract uses of shape, color and light. The latter element is one of Suspiria’s most distinguishing features, making prominent use of colored filters and gels that bathe some of the movies’ most memorable moments – the unforgettable finale chief among them – in pools of colored light.

As Mark Cousins and Barry Salt point out, this tendency in European cinematography (the French coined as ‘le cinema du look’) would heavily influence Hollywood style in the next decade and in the work of Argento, it finds some of its most striking use. Dario Argento had already used colored lighting to great effect in his much-admired Profondo Rosso/Deep Red (1975) but the way in which he and director of photography Luciano Tovoli here use the light as a strictly formal element – the equivalent of striking patches of paint that shape the aesthetic of such artists as Francis Bacon or Barrett Newman – is breathtaking. Tovoli would later work with Michelangelo Antonioni and Maurice Pialat (and again with Argento) before moving on to a career in Hollywood that saw him lens films for the likes of Julie Taymor and Barbet Schroeder.

Nearly fifty years after it started building its reputation as one of the finest horror films to come out of its decade, Suspiria is still a film able to baffle its audience with the daring way in which it pushes the envelope of extreme stylization. Throughout the film, there is a true sense of dread and foreboding of doom, but in retrospect one sees that none of this comes from the use of (the now fashionable) jump scares or extreme use of gory imagery (in a way the actual killings are restrained in their execution, albeit imaginatively weird and baroque). The real feeling of unease and dread is derived from strictly visual elements that give the film its unique tone of voice and rethink the concept of a horror film from a purely aesthetic angle. A notion of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s take on ‘the sublime’ creeps in here in the way the use of aesthetic and beauty can harbor the truly awe-inspiring just as much as the frightening, mesmerizing the beholder. Schopenhauer never had the chance to test his ideas against the aesthetics of cinema, but Suspiria surely holds up as a vivid illustration of this idea and still stands as a masterpiece within its genre – or any genre.

These notes on Stuart Gordon's The Pit and the Pendulum were written by Faye Mitchell, who received her MA in Film from the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A 35mm print of The Pit and the Pendulum will screen as part of the Cinematheque's ongoing series honoring the late, great filmmaker Gordon at the Chazen Museum of Art on Sunday, October 16 at 2 p.m. The print comes from the Gordon collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research. Admission is Free.

By Faye Mitchell

Deep in a crypt, a coffin’s lid is removed for a gaggle of spectators. Agents of the Spanish Inquisition quibble and joke about carefully raising its decomposed inhabitant out of his tomb. Out comes a grotesque skeleton, made to face judgment for sins long and forgotten by the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada (Lance Henriksen), who declares the dead man to be a heretic. His descendants’ wealth is seized by the church and the skeleton receives exactly 20 lashes and not a single lash more. The camera cuts between the corpse, strung up on chains to receive his punishment, his distraught family that is made to watch, and the pale, ghoulish faces of the Inquisition, delighting in the barbaric act.

These opening moments of Stuart Gordon’s fifth feature, The Pit and the Pendulum, establish the tone that will predominate much of the film: gross and campy, but also comically absurd. In 1991, Gordon was best known for his low-budget horror films, adapting two of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, chosen partly because they were in the public domain and free to use, into Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986). Two years prior, he had co-written Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, a wildly successful family film starring Rick Moranis, but he returned to the realm of public domain for The Pit. Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli – a frequent collaborator in the director’s early career – pick up the proto-Kafka narrative of the eponymous Edgar Allan Poe short story that the film is loosely adapting and run with it. The Inquisition is plain in its mission but arbitrary in its execution. It seeks confession through torture and rejects any confession offered without it. Once you are deemed guilty, there isn’t enough of either to prove your innocence or earn your freedom. The system is maddening but Paoli imbues the script with enough moments of levity to prevent it from suffocating Gordon’s characteristically goofy filmmaking.

At the center of it all is Torquemada. Henriksen, best known for his role as the android Bishop in Aliens (1986), delivers a powerhouse performance pitched perfectly to the film’s grand campiness. Caught between his devout belief in the religious righteousness of the Inquisition and his sudden lust for a newly accused heretic, Henriksen plays Torquemada’s growing madness as pathetic and frightening. Gordon makes excellent use of close-ups and hard lighting to let Henriksen’s wide-eyed menace control the scene.

For most of its run time, The Pit and the Pendulum does not read like a conventional horror film of the era. There are no jump scares, and the special effects and gore are relatively tame compared to Gordon’s earlier Lovecraft adaptations. Instead, it can be seen as a precursor to the torture porn subgenre of horror, reflected through the prism of its early 90s, low-budget sensibilities. Popularized in the 2000s by films like Hostel (2005) and the Saw franchise, films of this ilk derive their terror from the spectacle of prolonged, often extremely gory, torture sequences. Much has been written on the echoes of 9/11 and its consequences in these films, filmmakers and audiences alike trying to make sense of the United States’ use of torture at Abu Ghraib. The Pit and the Pendulum similarly uses torture as a device to grapple with the historical legacy of organized religion that disenfranchises women and robs them of their agency. It’s far less bloody than these later films but just as upsetting, methodically paced to force the audience to really sit in these moments.

If this sounds crushing to watch, worry not – Gordon is too fun of a filmmaker to be lost in dreariness for too long. His affinity for blood and cheesy, but endearing, special effects revs up as the film goes on, and the titular pit and pendulum both make an appearance in a thrilling and gross climactic set piece. There are even scenes throughout that harken back to the days of good, old fashioned swashbuckling films, but despite juggling these disparate elements – action, absurdist comedy, low-budget horror – the film never feels jarring. It’s a testament to Gordon’s earnestness as a filmmaker that he sells everything in The Pit and the Pendulum without a bit of irony.

These notes on Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club Encore were written by Samantha Janes, PhD student in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. The Cotton Club Encore screened as one of "A Couple of Coppolas" on Saturday, September 24.

By Samantha Janes

From 1923 to 1940, the famous Cotton Club in New York City roared with musical orchestras from the likes of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, singers such as Lena Horne, dances from the legendary Bill Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers, and audiences that included Fanny Brice, Mae West, and Al Jolson. During its initial years of business, the Cotton Club operated with strict segregation laws leading them to serve only white customers and hire all African American performers. These performances often portrayed imagery of the south and depictions of the performers as “exotic” in order to entice the crowd. Numerous performances from these artists would move beyond the walls of the Cotton Club. Hit songs such as “Creole Love Call,” performed by Duke Ellington and Adelaide Hall, and “Stormy Weather,” remembered most from Lena Horne’s performance in the film adaptation, Stormy Weather, were both featured songs at the nightclub. Over the years of its operation, the Cotton Club’s owner, the gangster Owney Madden, emphasized featuring talented performers that would draw in crowds even during the years of prohibition and depression. However, even with the success of the club’s performers, it would take until the late 1930s for the club to begin allowing African American patrons.

Flash forward forty years: the club’s rich history became the center of the project, The Cotton Club, which began formulating in 1980 and premiered in 1984. The film’s controversial production raged with financial issues, leadership changes, and numerous rewrites of the script. Initially, Francis Ford Coppola was not involved in the film’s creation but was drawn into the project when Robert Evans called to ask how to rework the film’s storyline to include Richard Gere’s character as a white musician within the environment of the Cotton Club. Although Coppola was resistant to joining the film, he became the director and brought William Kennedy on as a writer to join the team that already included Mario Puzo (Coppola’s collaborator on The Godfather trilogy). The circumstances surrounding the film’s production were exceptionally strenuous. Numerous scripts were written but then the writers were forced to condense descriptions, cut dialogue, and replace music. Throughout production, there was also a shady financial situation that resulted in budget issues and even a murder. When the original version of The Cotton Club was released in theaters in 1984, it underperformed at the box office and the overall reception was underwhelming considering the hopes placed on the film’s director, plot, and stars. Despite these struggles, the film still garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Film Editing.

Flash forward another thirty-three years after the original release: Coppola premieres The Cotton Club Encore, a re-edited version of the film. After finding the original version of the film on Beta Max tapes, Coppola produced this alternate cut to celebrate the film in a more complete format. The new version of the film attempts to remedy the issues with the strained plot, which, in Coppola’s words, felt “truncated.” Instead, this version refocuses the narrative to balance the storylines between both main characters, Michael “Dixie” Dwyer (Richard Gere), a white musician, and Delbert “Sandman” Williams (Gregory Hines), an African American dancer.

The Cotton Club Encore takes pleasure in leisurely exploring the glamorous and dangerous world surrounding the club’s performers, clientele, and managers. As with most Coppola films, the impeccable casting and cinematography allow the talented performers to dazzle the audience throughout the film. Though the narrative often pulls in different directions as it searches for the balance between the musical and the gangster film, this re-edited version endeavors to flesh out the characters and more clearly establish the experiences of African American characters in Prohibition-era New York. The film delves into Harlem in the late-1920s during the height of the jazz era and sees both Gere and Hines navigate the nightclub scene as struggling performers while dealing with the threats of the criminal underworld. Coppola constructs this intricate world not only by exploring the boisterous atmosphere of Cotton Club but also by establishing intimate relationships for both protagonists. The romantic and familial connections continually form, split apart, and then reconcile throughout the film to prompt the continued momentum of the plot. With a large ensemble cast, the narrative is able to constantly move and introduce new characters in a way that resembles the bustling nature of the city.

While the environment of New York serves as a vibrant backdrop, the scenes in the Cotton Club are where the film shines the brightest. The songs from the late 1920s and early 1930s evoke a keen sense of excitement that make the audience want to be led up the darkened stairs and into the vibrant atmosphere of the club. Overall, the musical performances in The Cotton Club Encore anchor the film as the narrative progresses through the years of the Great Depression and the characters’ shifting lifestyles. Coppola presents the musical elements of the film not just as short numbers but as full performances. This version showcases the addition of three musical numbers initially cut from the 1984 version, including the hauntingly beautiful performance of “Stormy Weather” by Lonette McKee playing Lila Rose and “Tall, Tan, and Terrific” sung by Hines. Although the film’s original cut featured many of the same songs, the re-edited version allows for the richness of the performances to be complimented by stronger characterization within the narrative that was previously subtracted.

While this was not Coppola’s first time releasing a new version of one of his films, the chaotic production history of the original, paired with his desire to unveil the missing narrative elements, makes his decision to revisit the film an understandable one. The Cotton Club Encore takes the good parts of the original and makes them great in ways that permit the talents of the performers, crew, and director to light up the screen. With the new script and musical additions, the film is able to flesh itself out with a stronger narrative that balances both storylines and positions jazz as the lifeblood of the characters. Ultimately, the choice to release The Cotton Club Encore allowed the film to be appreciated by a new audience for its beauty, talent, and tenacity.

These notes on Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon were written by film fan, film scholar, and film preservationist James Kenney, whose other reviews and essays can be found at https://tremblesighwonder.com/. James Kenney kicked off our current season of Peter Bogdanovich movies on June 29 with Squirrels to the Nuts, a movie he helped save from obscurity.  Our Bogdanovich series continues with a 4K DCP of Nickelodeon, shown in a Director's Cut featuring 5 minutes of scenes not included in the film's original release, and presented in black-and-white, as Bogdanovich originally intended. The screening will take place on Wednesday, July 27 at 7 p.m. in our regular Cinematheque venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is Free!

By James Kenney

Peter Bogdanovich’s brilliant one-of-a-kind “slapstick drama” Nickelodeon is, like many of the late filmmaker’s films, a film out of time.  While his contemporaries were producing pessimistic works such as Taxi Driver, The Godfather, The French Connection and Chinatown, Bogdanovich followed up his early nihilistic triumphs Targets and The Last Picture Show with similarly personal projects that nevertheless doubled as family entertainments, all rated G or PG: What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon, a 1976 Columbia release, detailing the chaotic exploits of early independent two-reel silent filmmakers on the West Coast as they battle with the first movie moguls. 

Bogdanovich regular Ryan O’Neal plays a hapless lawyer who becomes a low-budget movie director, Burt Reynolds plays the guy at alligator wrestling matches that introduces alligators to each other and then “gets out of the way” who becomes a cowboy star, and Tatum O’Neal, fresh off her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, returns alongside Stella Stevens, and newcomers John Ritter and Jane Hitchcock as members of the film company.  Brian Keith (in a role Bogdanovich designed for Orson Welles) plays the bellicose independent producer who puts dollars and cents over O’Neal’s increasingly artistic impulses, O’Neal’s personal journey reflecting the entire film industry’s increasing maturity as filmmakers learned the genuine magic that a film camera could engender.

A movie about movies was inevitable for Bogdanovich, with his encyclopedic knowledge of motion picture lore, and he rewrote W.D. Richter’s original screenplay incorporating many anecdotes shared with him by the great early filmmakers he’d interviewed, such as Allan Dwan, Raoul Walsh, and Leo McCarey. Due to the previous year’s At Long Last Love’s well-chronicled commercial and critical failure, Bogdanovich for the first time had to “battle” with his producers during the making of Nickelodeon, having his initial casting choices of John Ritter in O’Neal’s part, Jeff Bridges in Reynolds’ part, and Cybill Shepherd in newcomer Jane Hitchcock’s part overruled by producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff. Bogdanovich, alongside cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, also conceived of the film in black & white, which had not caused a problem for Bogdanovich on Picture Show and Paper Moon, but after two commercial disappointments in a row (the first being the “art film” Daisy Miller) Bogdanovich made some concessions, and Nickelodeon was released in color.

Nevertheless, Nickelodeon works, delightfully, Bogdanovich’s attention to detail, comedic sensibilities and reverence for film history paying off wonderfully in a film that begins as a chaotic madhouse screwball comedy detailing the first uncertain steps made by pioneer filmmakers (whose films would often be shown with the reels out of order, audiences not noticing or caring). The tone shifts to a more thoughtful, measured one as the stakes rise, nickels turn to dollars, and genuine artists like D.W. Griffith recognize the value of cinema as an artistic statement. The opening shot of the film sums up the delicate meticulousness of Bogdanovich’s mis en scene and his dry sense of humor; we note the ceiling fans and sweaty faces in the 1910 courtroom (sans air-conditioning), as lawyer O’Neal is distracted reading a July 30, 1910 Saturday Evening Post featuring “part two of The Ranger’s Revenge” on its cover. This one “simple” shot establishes the time period and milieu; also that perhaps O’Neal is not destined for a career in law and more interested in the world of the imagination; and thirdly (perhaps only caught on second or third viewing) that he himself is not particularly creative at this point, as he soon after gets his first directing gig with Keith by stealing the idea of a “ranger” protagonist from this story. 

O’Neal and Reynolds are game (Reynolds joked in the Nickelodeon press materials that his earlier films “were the kind shown in airplanes and prisons so nobody could leave”), and perhaps after the enmity in the media provoked by Bogdanovich and Shepherd's real-life and highly publicized coupling, introducing the sweet, fresh-faced Hitchcock as the film’s ingenue proved wise. Bogdanovich told Peter Tonguette in his book Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations With the New Hollywood Director (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) that his initial conception was of a female lead that was more “threatening”; Hitchcock was “very good, but she’s in the Lillian Gish department and we wanted somebody more in the Theda Bara department.”

The version being screened at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cinematheque is Bogdanovich’s director’s cut, which returns the film to black-and-white as Bogdanovich desired and adding about five minutes to the running time, largely restoring Stevens’ love-triangle with O’Neal and Ritter that had been excised from the theatrical cut. As Bogdanovich told Tonguette “We shot [Nickelodeon] with the idea that eventually it would be printed in black-and-white. We designed it so that it would eventually look good in black-and-white because it’s got a lot of shadows and contrasts and so on, which you don’t normally do with color.”

Nickelodeon the film, in tone and temperament knowingly matures as its characters mature (John Milius’ Big Wednesday, made two years later, appropriates this unusual tonal approach). Columbia’s promotional copy that described the film as “fast, funny, frantic, frenetic and flavorful” is suspiciously alliterative but wholly correct in describing Nickelodeon, which will genuinely make you feel like you are there at the beginnings of cinema while also fashioning an unusual collection of characters you will grow fond of and miss when the film ends. 

As the advertising for Nickelodeon promised at the time, “Love. Action. Comedy. Suspense. Excitement.  Before Rhett kissed Scarlett. Before Laurel met Hardy. Before Butch Cassidy met the Sundance Kid. Before any movie ever made you laugh or cry or fall in love. There was a handful of adventurers who made flickering pictures you could see for a nickel.” Bogdanovich in the years following its release voiced some uncertainty with the tonal shifts in the film, but with Nickelodeon Bogdanovich created something wholly unique, not seen before or since, a “slapstick drama” which both captures the reality of the early frenzied pioneer days of silent films, when for a nickel audiences witnessed flickering images dancing across makeshift screens, and the dawning realization that so much more could be done with these flickering images— there is no other film quite like Nickelodeon, true to the tempestuous time in which it is set, when the screen had not truly found its voice, and true to the personal artistic filmmaking that for a fleeting moment in the 1970s allowed Hollywood directors like Scorsese, Coppola and Bogdanovich to share personal obsessions with audiences enthusiastic to take the journey with them.