Introduction: Early Modern Horror
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oxartj/kcr040
ISSN1741-7287
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoThe conjunction between early modern art and horror is best encapsulated in the disturbing opening sequence to Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome (Fig. 1). The film is a conventional giallo (detective story) and the title is based on a psychosomatic condition, identified in 1989 by the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Margherini, in which victims experience dizziness, nausea, hallucinations, and fainting episodes triggered by the sight of too much art and beauty.1 As the movie begins, we find ourselves in the suffocating streets of Florence in the summertime, where we follow Anna Manni, a young female police detective, to the Uffizi where she is chasing up an anonymous tip regarding a serial rapist. From the claustrophobia outside, the spectator is then led through the lofty corridors and porous galleries of the museum in a series of vertiginous panning shots, which speed up and slow down with the soundtrack in order to visualise and externalise Anna's increasing sense of dislocation and anxiety. Before Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano, Anna suddenly becomes spellbound by the violent vista – the sound of the soldiers and horses being massacred on the battlefield escape from the painted surface and seep into her embodied experience of the artwork. The monocular and machinic gaze of a tourist with a camera breaks her hallucinatory state pulling her out of the pictorial space and back into the actuality of the everyday. However, as Anna moves through the rooms, the tenuous membrane between representation and reality begins to dissolve.
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