Artistic imagery in Dario Argento’s cinema

Giulio Giusti
The University of Manchester
2012

PhDs

Redazione CUCWritten by:

L’immaginario artistico nel cinema di Dario Argento
Artistic imagery in Dario Argento’s cinema

Autore | Author
Giulio Giusti
giulio.l.giusti@gmail.com
http://birmingham.academia.edu/GiulioGiusti

Corso di dottorato | PhD Program
Italian Studies
The University of Manchester
Tutor Francesca Billiani
2012

Sinossi | Abstract
My doctoral thesis engages with the use of art-historical references within Dario Argento’s oeuvre and argues for the importance of such references in terms of reading the main films of my primary corpus. My own analysis draws on the existing literature dealing with the contextualization of Argento’s cinema within Italian Horror in terms of narrative and style and connects this literature with recent intra-artistic studies on the interplay between painting and cinema conducted by Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Leutrat, and Angela Dalle Vacche. Through this combination of theoretical viewpoints, I discuss how art-historical references are integrated into the films analyzed via copying and quotation and how they function in the film texts in terms of colour, framing, lighting, narrative progression, and symbolism. Because of my intra-artistic approach, which takes in both Argento’s attention to aesthetic detail and to the synergy of the aesthetic and the narrative within a film through the art historical repertoire, I highlight a new aspect of the semantic, stylistic, and technical complexity of the director’s cinema in terms of influence, referentiality, and intertextuality.

My doctoral thesis engages with the use of art-historical references within Dario Argento’s oeuvre and argues for the importance of such references in terms of reading the main films of my primary corpus. My own analysis draws on the existing literature dealing with the contextualization of Argento’s cinema within Italian Horror in terms of narrative and style and connects this literature with recent intra-artistic studies on the interplay between painting and cinema conducted by Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Leutrat, and Angela Dalle Vacche. Through this combination of theoretical viewpoints, I discuss how art-historical references are integrated into the films analyzed via copying and quotation and how they function in the film texts in terms of colour, framing, lighting, narrative progression, and symbolism. Because of my intra-artistic approach, which takes in both Argento’s attention to aesthetic detail and to the synergy of the aesthetic and the narrative within a film through the art historical repertoire, I highlight a new aspect of the semantic, stylistic, and technical complexity of the director’s cinema in terms of influence, referentiality, and intertextuality.

Tesi online | Online repository

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