Producer, writer, and actor Daria Nicolodi is often identified simply as Dario Argento’s muse. This vague term is frequently used to obscure women’s status as active professional collaborators, a role Nicolodi certainly played both onscreen and behind the scenes of career-defining Argento films. While many critics have acknowledged Nicolodi’s influence, there is a hesitance to identify her as more than an extension of her long-term partner. In this fascinating and necessary lecture, Dr. Anne Young presents her incisive research into Daria Nicolodi’s career and efforts to claim the credit she was owed.
“The Screams of His Poor Bride” will discuss Nicolodi’s often-unacknowledged contributions to Italian genre classics and identify her artistic trademarks. It will also examine how she re-appropriated her essential contributions to SUSPIRIA through her scripts for the low-budget, often-maligned Luigi Cozzi films PAGANINI HORROR and DE PROFUNDIS (aka THE BLACK CAT). These films subversively interweave Nicolodi’s original ideas with her commentary on the danger posed to female creators by the worship of male auteurs. This will provide an inroad to discussing how women’s work is often uncredited and even unpaid, creating the harmful impression that there is a genuine lack of important female achievements. Through a historical analysis of women’s labor in general, and Daria Nicolodi’s legacy specifically, we can come to understand how certain contributions are erased, and how they can be identified and reclaimed.
Anne Young is a critic and scholar who holds a PhD in English from the University of Western Ontario, and has a focus on nineteenth-century British literature and literary theory. Her work has been published in the academic journals LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Gothic Studies, Monstrum, and Horror Studies.
