Both movies feature set-pieces depicting violent, orgiastic dancing (in a nice bit of synchronicity, Possession\u2019s<\/i> Ana, like the villains of the original Suspiria<\/i>, is a ballet instructor); both feature actors playing multiple characters in order to achieve a sense of the uncanny; both are soaked in viscera and gore; both contain delightfully gruesome practical creature effects; and both make several overt pronouncements that link motherhood to divinity, and divinity to disease.<\/span><\/p>\n Most importantly, both share a setting: West Berlin during the late \u201870s. The Berlin Wall is an ever-present backdrop in both films, yet unlike most films where it plays a prominent role (such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold<\/i> [1965] or The Lives of Others <\/i>[2006]), the wall is not a force of obstruction in either Possession<\/i> or Suspiria.<\/i> Rather, it is a fissure, a crack in the world through which the disease of evil is able to pierce our reality.<\/span><\/p>\n Like the visual palettes of each film \u2014 the bleached, ashen cinematography of Suspiria<\/i>, and the harsh primary colors of Possession <\/i>\u2014 their examinations of West Berlin\u2019s political landscape during this period are linked by their oppositional approach. <\/span><\/p>\n As Zulawski notes in Daniel Bird\u2019s documentary The Other Side of the Wall: The Making of Possession <\/i>(2009), shooting his film in West Berlin was done \u201cnot for reasons of exotic background, but reasons of profound necessity.\u201d Born in Poland during the Nazi occupation, Zulawski left his homeland a year before embarking upon Possession<\/i>, when his science fiction epic On the Silver Globe <\/i>(1977) was shut down by order of the Polish Ministry of Culture two weeks before filming completed. His personal despondence over the concurrent dissolution of his marriage to the actress Ma\u0142gorzata Braunek<\/span> (who, like Ana in Possession<\/i>, left him for a New Age spiritualist and charlatan), made West Berlin, with its \u201cproximity to the vicious world behind the wall,\u201d the natural setting for his next project, which would be his most immediately personal.<\/span><\/p>\n In place of the pervasive sense of dread visited upon West Berlin by the specter of its neighboring outland, Guadagnino turns his attention to the chaotic factioning within its own borders, as embodied by the terrorist acts committed by and on behalf of the Red Army Faction (RAF), or Baader-Meinhof Group, the militant leftist organization responsible for a series of attacks throughout the decade. <\/span><\/p>\n Guadagnino uses the violent headlines of the day \u2014 none of which get any mention in the original Suspiria<\/i> \u2014 to mirror the witches\u2019 power struggle that makes up the main thrust of the story. They also serve as a stand-in for the similar turmoil embroiling Guadagnino\u2019s homeland during his own childhood \u2014 namely, the acts of the Brigate Rosse<\/span><\/a> and Cosa Nostra. (Hailing from Sicily, home of the Mafia, it makes sense that Guadagino\u2019s Suspiria<\/i> resembles a mob drama as often as it does a horror film.)<\/span><\/p>\n Whereas Guadagnino\u2019s film doesn\u2019t take a moral stance on the actions or ideology of the RAF, Zulawski makes no attempt to hide his disdain for the totalitarian East, though he does show equal antipathy toward the amoral intelligence agencies operating out of the West. <\/span><\/p>\n In Possession<\/i>, Ana\u2019s doppelg\u00e4nger, the patient school teacher Helen, sums up Zulawski\u2019s viewpoint: <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI come from a place where evil seems easier to pinpoint because you can see it in the flesh. It becomes people, so you know exactly the danger of being deformed by it. Which doesn\u2019t mean I admire your world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n No doubt that between two, Possession<\/i> is the greater film on every level, especially when it comes to its political concerns. Not that Suspiria<\/i> ever stood a chance in this regard \u2014 it is, in the end, a period piece, one that can merely look back and try to recreate an epoch. Possession<\/i>, having been shot on location, serves as its own documentary and time capsule. The Berlin Wall\u00a0 <\/span>is the real<\/i> Berlin Wall. Zulawski, having experienced this political reality firsthand, has an innate understanding of it that Guadagnino can\u2019t match, though he clearly feels no need to translate that understanding to his audience in a comprehensible way \u2014 the utterly confusing manner in which the espionage subplot is presented in Possession<\/i> make an already difficult film even more challenging, and unlike other elements and plot points, repeat viewing do little to clear up the viewer\u2019s initial confusion. Far from proving a detriment, this narrative choice imbues the film with a sense of black humor that perfectly encapsulates the absurdities of the Cold War. By contrast, the straightforward exposition that Guadagnino uses to flesh out the world of his film feels especially laden and obvious (the first lines of the movie are literally \u201cFree Baader! Free Meinhof!\u201d). <\/span><\/p>\n Possession<\/i>, made at beginning of ratcheting nuclear rhetoric and fears of mutually assured destruction, is ultimately an apocalyptic vision. Evil is triumphant, its triumph announced by a soundtrack of air raid sirens and descending missiles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In Suspiria<\/i>, evil is likewise triumphant, yet life goes on. Walls come down, seasons change, technology advances. Revolutions die out, as do empires. Evil remains, feeding off our shame and guilt, but so too does love, the proof of its existence etched into our very surroundings.<\/span><\/p>\n Both Possession<\/i> and Suspiria<\/i> use the “sliced-up pair\u201d that is West Berlin at the beginning of the end of the Cold War to explore the smear of evil upon the world. Zulawski\u2019s film can only howl in the face of that evil, with no hope of ever fully comprehending it. Guadignino\u2019s film, meanwhile, tries to compartmentalize it, so as to figure out a way to live alongside it. <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to say which response is ultimately bleaker, or more terrifying.<\/span><\/p>\n Much has been said about the relationship between Luca Guadagnino\u2019s new remake of Suspiria and Dario Argento\u2019s 1977 original. Guadagnino […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":10580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Possession_4-1-300x164.png\")
<\/a>Possession<\/i> is a high-pitched fever dream of a film concerning the violent dissolution of the marriage between Mark (Sam Neill) and Ana (Adjani) after Ana takes a new lover, who it turns out is the monstrous \u2014 but likely divine \u2014 product of her own miscarriage in an underground U-Bahn station. It\u2019s entirely unique on a tonal level, but it has much in common with other domestic psychodramas-cum-body horror classics, including David Lynch\u2019s Eraserhead<\/i> (1977), David Cronenberg\u2019s The Brood <\/i>(1979), and Lars Von Trier\u2019s Antichrist <\/i>(2009) \u2014\u00a0and now Suspiria<\/i>, with which it shares more in common than perhaps any film to date. <\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/suspiria-1-1-300x161.jpg\")
<\/a>Guadagnino has called<\/span><\/a> Suspiria <\/i>his most personal film, although it is not an expectoration of deep-seated emotions, but an exegesis on the influences that shaped his aesthetic sensibility \u2014 Argento\u2019s Suspiria <\/i>first and foremost, but also the films of West German director Rainer Werner Fassbender (who Zulawski used as the basis for the antagonist of his own film about political terrorism and disillusionment, Le Femme Publique<\/i> [1984]), as well as the work of several feminist artists across a number of disciplines \u2014 dance, painting, sculpture, and photography (including the late Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, whose estate sued Amazon Studios<\/span><\/a> for copyright infringement).<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/tilda-swinton-1-224x300.jpg\")
<\/a>That said, Suspiria<\/i> is not wholly unsuccessful in its depiction of history. Though a number of its detractors argue otherwise<\/span><\/a>, its evocation of the Holocaust and exploration of collective guilt are both emotionally impactful as well as surprisingly complex. Guadagnino doesn\u2019t take the expected route of making his witches stand-ins for the Nazis, nor does he make the film\u2019s ostensible hero \u2014 the brave and kindly Dr. Jozef Klemperer (Tilda Swinton, billed as Lutz Ebersdorf and gender-bending under a ton of prosthetics) \u2014 a complete innocent. All the forces at work, be they compassionate or malevolent, are blind to the repeated ascendance of ultimate evil, and that blindness is the cause of their undoings. <\/span><\/p>\n
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