Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Suspiria
2018 · Luca Guadagnino · Suspiria on Sightlines
She runs from the rehearsal, and the building answers by locking her in a room made of mirrors. Elsewhere in the same building, on the same afternoon, an American named Susie Bannion is dancing her audition for the first time, hard, better than anyone expected. Every landing Susie makes arrives inside Olga's body. A hip turns the wrong way. A jaw goes. Nothing physical crosses between the two rooms. What crosses is the edit.
Deleuze kept a distinction from the Soviets that is worth carrying into this film. Griffith's parallel montage holds two lines apart so they can converge: the train, the tied girl, the rescue that lands on time. Eisenstein collides two shots so a third thing appears in the gap, something present in neither of them. Deleuze calls that the qualitative jump. Walter Fasano cuts Susie's audition exactly that way. Leap, fracture, leap, fracture. The two women never share a frame or a corridor, and the sorcery is never shown, because the sorcery is the cut. That is Guadagnino's invention here. He takes the violence out of the thing being photographed and puts it into the join between two things photographed. Argento built each killing as an elaborately blocked set-piece; 2018 keeps the blocking, makes it real choreography, and lets the editing table do the murder.
So the dancing is not décor. Deleuze noticed that past a certain point in a dance film the dancer stops being the source of the movement: the movement gets bigger than the body, the world starts moving, and the dancer becomes the place where it happens. He called it the movement of world. In a musical it feels like joy. Here it feeds. Susie is not casting anything; she is where the casting passes through, and Damien Jalet's choreography is built to show it. The recurring piece, danced in red rope-like harness, isn't expression. It is machinery for binding and breaking bodies at a distance. The debt is old and exact. The Red Shoes made ballet a possessing force that reduces a dancer to an instrument, and Possession gave Cold War Berlin its vocabulary of anguish erupting as convulsion, Adjani's subway spasm sitting right under Jalet's ruptures.
Deleuze's late writing turned toward bodies: what a posture carries, rather than what a character achieves. He has a term for it, the gest, a stance that lays bare a social relation instead of a private feeling. The recurring piece is called Volk, the German word for a people. Women in Berlin in the autumn of 1977, roped in blood-red, dancing the people while radios report the RAF kidnappings and the Lufthansa hijacking. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema can no longer assume a people to speak for. The people are missing, and a film has to invent one. This coven is the invention. It holds votes. It has factions and a succession crisis. It is a small nation constituting itself by ballot and by ritual, because the one outside the window has a wall through the middle of it and a war still living inside its oldest citizens.
Those radios are doing formal work. Deleuze separates the out-of-field that is simply next door from the absolute kind, where the frame opens onto something with no location in space at all. The German Autumn is never shown. It arrives as sound. So does the film's other history: Klemperer's wife Anke, lost in the war, present only as an old man's grief. What lies outside this frame is not a street. It is guilt, and guilt has no address.
Under the committee meetings there is a chamber. Deleuze's account of naturalism describes the arrangement precisely: a milieu you can describe in full detail, with an address and a schedule and an institution, which turns out to be the crust over an originary world of raw appetite. Suspiria builds that as architecture. Upstairs, the Markos Tanz Company and its paperwork. Below, the ritual room. Staging the coven as an institution rather than gothic caricature is what makes the descent land — you have watched these women argue procedure, so when they feed it reads as policy.
And the institution is rotting. Deleuze found in Visconti a particular kind of crystal: an ordered world whose real subject is the rate of its own decomposition, an aristocracy sinking inside its beautiful rooms. Mother Markos is that image in flesh, a matriarch putrefying while she demands a fresh body, and the academy interiors were shot in a decaying Art Nouveau hotel whose faded grandeur makes the argument without a line of dialogue. The mirrored studio is the same figure's other half. Mirrors are Deleuze's standing example of the crystal, the point where a thing and its double can no longer be told apart, and the room where Olga is destroyed is mirrored on every side. A sealed world with no outside.
The colour is withheld deliberately. Argento pulled his impossible reds from the last working Technicolor imbibition process in Rome, and his imitators usually copy that palette. Mukdeeprom and Guadagnino refuse it: two and a half hours of ash, ochre and Berlin gray on 35mm, then payment in full at the sabbath, where red stops being a colour in the scene and becomes the scene. Deleuze's colour-image is exactly this, a colour that absorbs everything around it. Thom Yorke's score answers Goblin's driving rock the same way. Fragile, then flood.
One more falsification. Tilda Swinton plays Blanc, plays Markos, and plays the old psychotherapist Klemperer under prosthetics, first credited as Lutz Ebersdorf. Deleuze's forger makes truth by making it up, and this forgery runs past the audience as well as the characters: the only sober rationalist in the story is a woman in an old man's face, and the credits were in on it. Susie's blankness is the same trick at a slower speed, an innocence held so long that it curdles, until the sixth act discloses she was never prey.
Watch the audition again and notice what your eye tries to do, whether you can hold both rooms at once or whether the film keeps choosing for you. Then sit with the epilogue. The thing that ate the school gives Klemperer his memory of Anke back, and then lifts the grief off him. That is mercy, and it is administered by a god. The film leaves you unable to say whether you watched a liberation or a change of management. Few remakes reach for that. This one treats its original as something to argue with rather than something to reproduce, and that is the door it opened: after it, a remake can be a counter-reading of its source instead of a louder copy.
Concepts in play
- montage-dialectical-soviet — The audition sequence intercuts Susie's dance with Olga's simultaneous, unseen shattering in a locked mirrored room; the two never share a space, so the spell exists only in the collision of the shots.
- movement of world — Jalet's choreography, above all the recurring piece Volk, is not expressive but operative: Susie's leaps move a world beyond her body, breaking another dancer at a distance — the dance absorbs the dancer.
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — Dance is the film's central staging apparatus; meaning is carried by ceremonial and contorted bodies (Volk, the sabbath) rather than by dialogue or decision.
- the gest — Volk — the German word for a people — danced by women in blood-red rope costuming in Berlin, 1977, while radio bulletins report the RAF kidnappings; the posture exposes a national relation, not a private feeling.
- the people are missing — A coven staged as an institution with committee votes and factional politics, inside a divided, wall-split Berlin whose oldest citizens still carry the war; the film invents a matriarchal counter-people where no Volk is available.
- out-of-field-absolute — The German Autumn enters only as sound — radio reports of the kidnappings and the Lufthansa hijacking — and Klemperer's wartime loss of Anke is present as grief rather than as locatable space.
- derived milieu — The Markos Tanz Company rendered with bureaucratic realism: enrolment, rehearsal schedule, seniority, internal votes between the Blanc and Markos factions.
- originary world — Beneath the academy's corridors lies a subterranean ritual space where the coven's appetite is enacted — the school revealed as the crust over a savage world of drives.
- crystal-decomposition — Mother Markos, the putrefying matriarch demanding a fresh body, presiding over a hierarchical order housed in the decaying Art Nouveau grandeur of the Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori interiors.
- saturated crystal — Olga is destroyed in a locked, fully mirrored room — an enclosed world of doubles with no exit, the mirrored studio motif taken to saturation.
- affective colour — 152 minutes of desaturated ash, ochre and gray shot photochemically in refusal of Argento's Technicolor imbibition reds, with the withheld red returning as eruption in the sabbath.
- le faussaire — Swinton's triptych — Blanc, Markos, and Klemperer under old-age prosthetics credited as Lutz Ebersdorf — plus Susie's blankness as mask, resolved by the late revelation that she is Mater Suspiriorum.