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McDonagh, Maitland. Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. Expanded edition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. xxvii + 293 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-8166-6707-3. $22.95.
Maitland McDonagh's Broken Minors/Broken Minds was originally published in hardcover in the UK in 1991 and released in a US paperback edition three years later. The fruit of a master's thesis at Columbia University, it was the first book-length critical study - and one of the earliest works of criticism of any kind - devoted to the films of Italian director Dario Argento. Given that Argento's deliriously macabre movies were just being discovered by US viewers thanks to (admittedly often bowdlerized) VHS versions, McDonagh's book was timely and well received. It was also smart and well written, canvassing Argento's work from his first feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to his collaborative Poe adaptation Two Evil Eyes (1990, with George A. Romero) , and attending shrewdly to both cinematic technique and the vagaries of production and reception. The volume was capped with an interview McDonagh conducted (c. 1985) with the director, who speaks engagingly of his disparate influences - Jung, Weegee, the Surrealists, Raymond Chandler - and rather mysteriously about his aesthetic philosophy: "I work in a surrealistic way, like being in a trance. . . . When I finish a picture, I'm always surprised by the things I see. It's like automatic writing, as though someone else suggested ideas. Like a schizophrenic. As though I have a second soul" (249). The book was also liberally sprinkled with illustrations, including stills, posters, and behind-the-scenes photos, making it a very attractive piece of work (though unfortunately, given Argento's flamboyant color schemes, all of the pics were in black-and-white).
The interview with Argento, as well as the original seven chapters, introduction, epilogue, and most of the illustrations, are reproduced in the new Minnesota Press edition, with an eighth chapter analyzing Argento's 1993 film Trauma (this is actually an edited version of the afterword to the 1994 American edition) and a second introduction that briskly discusses his six other films released between 1996 and 2009. While the filmography at the end of the book has been updated, the...