The Light Phantasmagoric: Dario Argento's "The Mother of Tears"

Argento’s newest, The Mother of Tears (2007), suffers a dearth of atmosphere compared to many of Argento’s earlier films (I would use 1977’s Suspiria—the first in a 30-year-long trilogy that Mother bookends—as the cut-off point for his earlier works). This fact might lead viewers to wonder if Argento is getting a tad generic in his old age. Luckily, the nebulous Italian Horror category (I won’t trip down the pitfall of calling it a proper genre though I would defend that the system produced films with a strong vein of recognizable similarities) is a uniquely odd bedrock foundation from which to atrophy into the generic while still maintaining interesting passages.

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The Fearful Symmetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò"

Above: Drawn and quartered

In the Cinema of Bad Sex, has there ever been an entry more monumental than Salò? Italian poet, director and cultural heretic Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious lamination of the Marquis de Sade’s fantastically cruel The 120 Days of Sodom atop the all-too-actual bedlam of Fascist Italy’s final days has only grown in infamy since its 1975 completion. Its controversial premise: four perverted and powerful Libertines-the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President—kidnap 9 young men and 9 young women from a village and take them to a secluded palace to exploit their bodies and beings over the course of several days filled with sexual humiliation, torture, rape and ultimately wholesale murder. Thanks in part to the very censorship and banning that aimed to suppress it, as well as years of tantalizingly limited home media availability that at one time spurred on collectors to pay upwards of $2000 per out-of-print disc, Salò, recently back in print in the United States through the Criterion Collection, may be more monumental than ever. The monument, of course, would be a phallic obelisk, its presence visible for miles even though the majority of its physical bulk remains unreachable no matter how much time you spend around it. Monolithic. Impermeable. Yet in practical terms, ultimately of questionable civic or social utility. Ultimately just taking up space.

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Werner Herzog: Conquistador of the Useless at the End of the World

Above: The seal-whisperers in ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

“I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years,” Werner Herzog stated in Paul Cronin’s interview compilation Herzog on Herzog (2002 UK release with a revised edition in the works). It is a sentiment he has repeatedly expressed in numerous interviews over the course of his career, all the while incorporating images from his global travels into a collective, life-long gesamtkunstwerk that has charted the cultivation and maturation of his thoughts and visual expression over a period of decades. For that matter, the man has averaged an output of more than a movie a year since 1968. What the hell have I accomplished this year?

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