Femininomena

Dario Argento, the Italian horror director and father-in-law (sort of) to the late great Anthony Bourdain, is a very strange man who has had many contentious relationships and made a lot of enemies in Italian film culture over the decades. It’s probably a bad idea from a health-and-safety standpoint to let him keep making the kinds of movies he does, even though many of those movies are very good. Reading the things he said about his movies, at least in English translation, is almost as surreal and troubling an experience as watching them. It always reminds me a little of the commentary that Ikuhara Kunihiko did on individual episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena (translated in the liner material for my Nozomi DVD box sets of that show), except Argento is at least trying to invite his interlocutor, his Model Reader, to understand the movies on a somewhat more conventional level, whereas Ikuhara is more interested in adding more of the same.