"If you make a film normally it's all right, the distributors are helpful and cooperative. But if you make a film that's a little stange, a little bizarre, then all the time it's a struggle with them"
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Argento is naming the quiet violence of “cooperation”: it exists only as long as an artist stays legible to the market. Make a film “normally” and the system smiles, because normal is a template distributors already know how to sell. Posters, trailers, loglines, target demos - the machine runs on recognizability. The moment a movie gets “a little strange, a little bizarre,” the help turns into friction, not because anyone is personally offended, but because strangeness breaks the industry’s basic promise to financiers: predictability.
The wording matters. “All right” is faint praise; it implies that even smooth distribution is merely tolerable, not inspiring. Then he shifts to “all the time it’s a struggle,” a phrase that captures how resistance isn’t a single censorship-like moment but a constant attrition: notes, recuts, marketing battles, release-window punishments, the soft threat of being shelved. Argento’s cinema - giallo, horror, baroque set-pieces, color and violence pushed into dream logic - depends on sensory excess and narrative weirdness. That’s precisely what makes it culturally durable and commercially anxious.
Context sharpens the critique: Italian genre filmmakers of Argento’s era often survived through international sales and co-productions, where distributors weren’t curators but gatekeepers with spreadsheets. His line exposes a core paradox of pop art: audiences later mythologize the “bizarre,” but the business model treats it as a defect to be managed. The struggle isn’t against taste; it’s against risk.
The wording matters. “All right” is faint praise; it implies that even smooth distribution is merely tolerable, not inspiring. Then he shifts to “all the time it’s a struggle,” a phrase that captures how resistance isn’t a single censorship-like moment but a constant attrition: notes, recuts, marketing battles, release-window punishments, the soft threat of being shelved. Argento’s cinema - giallo, horror, baroque set-pieces, color and violence pushed into dream logic - depends on sensory excess and narrative weirdness. That’s precisely what makes it culturally durable and commercially anxious.
Context sharpens the critique: Italian genre filmmakers of Argento’s era often survived through international sales and co-productions, where distributors weren’t curators but gatekeepers with spreadsheets. His line exposes a core paradox of pop art: audiences later mythologize the “bizarre,” but the business model treats it as a defect to be managed. The struggle isn’t against taste; it’s against risk.
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| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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