Profondo rosso : notes pour un ciné-spectacle

June 2013

The album is a set comprising a book and a CD. In this raw, heavy object, filled to the brim, tracks and prints excavate the sensorial experience of the eponymous show (see link)—from its incandescent soundtrack to its historical-political stakes…

1975: Profondo Rosso, Dario Argento’s masterpiece, is released in Italian cinemas. A few months later, in the night of November 1-2, 1975, Pasolini is assassinated on an Ostie beach near Rome, in circumstances that to this day remain unclear. Italy is in the throes of its Romping May, a decade of insurrections in which new forms of life and struggle are being invented in the face of a State bent on deploying its tension strategy. But what if this period were not an anomaly? What if Italy were not an exception? And what if all this were a metaphor, a sign of what is happening to us all—Italians, French, Europeans—almost half a century later: the arrival of a “new Fascism,” as Pasolini called it? After weaving uncommon connections between Pasolini, Argento and the Years of Lead in our cine-concert, we invited authors, artists and intellectuals to continue the exploration in the pages of our book-and-CD set.

Book design and mock-up: Béryl de La Frandière

Cover illustration and printing: Lison de Ridder

Irrepressible need to own it? Click here.