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Dr Anna Powell
Manchester Metropolitan University

A Touch of Terror: Suspiria and Deleuze’s Cinematic Sensorium

Photograph of Dr Anna Powell making presentation

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Dario Argento’s Suspiria frightens and arouses the spectator via touch. Colour and tactility are central to the film’s impact on the sensorium. Argento’s lurid, saturated colours (particularly reds and purple/blue) lack nuance and assault the eyes. His use of colour stock is tactile as well as visual. It touches the viewer in ways that extend actual images of the flesh being touched by repellent objects and textures throughout the film. It vibrates in us intensively, oppressing yet arousing us. This paper asserts that this process can be explored via Deleuze’s work with the aesthetic sensorium. Deleuze’s focus on the dynamics of colour and touch, particularly in his study of the painter Francis Bacon offers suggestive ways into Suspiria’s impact on the spectator. This approach to Argento’s work requires critical defamiliarisation as the focus shifts from representation to the machinic sensorium and the film as direct experience. Deleuze’s work with colour affect highlights the relationship of eye and hand. Touch and sight are interconnected in three different degrees: the digital, the manual and the haptic. Distinctive elements of touch are included in sight. The haptic sense elides the visual and the tactile in the ‘tactile-optical function’.

Deleuze adds the term ‘tactisigns’ to his sensory categories of ‘sonsigns’ and opsigns. Tactisigns reveal ‘a touching which is specific to the gaze’. In this context, the tactile is not an extensive act of the hand, but an intensive sensation of touch. The tactisign is pivotal in Argento’s scenes of sensory horror and enhances the potency of their virtual presence. As well as terrifying sights and sounds, we perceive affective textures of a terrifying nature, such as the wet stickiness of human blood, blades slicing into flesh or the ‘squidginess’ of maggots on bare feet.

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European Nightmares - An International Conference on European Horror Cinema

1st – 2nd June 2006

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