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A brief dissertation update

This morning, I finished the first draft of a chapter of my dissertation, which pertains to the films of Dario Argento and their treatment of gender. This will actually be the second chapter of the finished piece - I'm holding off on writing this first, which will be an introduction to the subject matter and a review of existing literature, because I've not finished all my intended reading yet.

Anyway, something that I forgot to mention is that the book Tenebre by Xavier Mendik finally arrived on Tuesday. This was actually a second copy, since the first failed to materialise (I assume some sticky-fingered postie pinched it), but the good people at Inkt sent another copy out to me at no extra charge.

At 47 pages of actual text (excluding notes, bibliography, index and film credits), it's not a particularly strenuous read, but the themes Mendik deals with are quite complex, and I suspect would have phased me completely if I hadn't read some of his other essays on Tenebre before. As it happens, it seems that everything he's ever written on this film is essentially the same piece, with various instances of rewording, restructuring and expansion or reduction. Fittingly, this published book is the most complete of the bunch (whereas his video essay on the British DVD is the most abridged). Mendik, it should be pointed out, is probably guilty of over-analysis to some extent, and his book was not of as much use to my dissertation as I had been hoping (largely because his areas of interest are not the same as mine), but I must confess to finding his interpretation of the film preferable to that of Chris Barber and Stephen Thrower in Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento, who often seem to be fumbling in the dark in an attempt to provide a hidden meaning for every single shot.

Anyway, my 2,666 word overview of Argento's portrayal of gender (a good 666 words longer than I had intended, but I'm not going to edit it down at this stage) is split pretty evenly across The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Profondo Rosso and Tenebre. In some respects, Tenebre actually feels a little out of place in this line-up, partly because it is a product of the 1980s rather than the 1970s, but also because it is thematically extremely different from its predecessors. Still, hopefully I've managed to put together a fairly coherent argument, which will provide the basis for digging into the non-Argento gialli and exposing their conservatism and hypocrisy. If anyone is interested in reading my draft, be sure to let me know.

14:17