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The Dying Diva: Violent Ends for Clara Calamai in Ossessione and Profondo Rosso

2008; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/001458580804200204

2168-989X

Cinema and Media Studies

Actress Clara Calamai faces violent death at the conclusion of both Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943) and Dario Argento's Profondo rosso (1975). Narrative similarities and the casting of the same actress in the lead roles create physical and historical links between Visconti's and Argento's films, links that inspire a series of questions about the role of this donna delinquente and about the relationship between the two films. What messages, written on Calamai's body and scrawled in her blood, might we read in the final, hauntingly similar images? In the transition from film to film, the diva's dying frame becomes a physical palimpsest that reveals, under the layers of her flesh, traces of what came before, an organic monument to the passage of time. Ossessione and Profondo rosso reflect divergent epistemologies of crime, socio-political attitudes that speak both to the periods in which the films were produced and to the relationship between two moments in Italian cinema.