Mario Bava

The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur

Leon Hunt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501390852
• eBook ISBN: 9781501356537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's 'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film authorship, given that several of them were released in different versions and his contributions to others were not always credited? How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is sometimes credited with having pioneered? This volume addresses these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult classics like Kill, Baby … Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.

1

Between expendability and connoisseurship – situating Bava

Back then Mario Bava was underrated. Now, thankfully, he’s overrated.

MARIO MONICELLI (2007:37)

Mario Monicelli’s judgement of Mario Bava’s elevated reputation might at first glance seem like an inauspicious, or overly defensive, point from which to begin a book on Bava. Certainly, it runs counter to the more romantic narrative of an unfairly neglected filmmaker belatedly getting the recognition he always deserved. A bit of context needs to be added here, therefore. Monicelli acknowledges that the films Bava directed were not to his own taste, not because he thought them poorly made but because he was not interested in the cinema of fantasy and special effects. Rather, he preferred to celebrate Bava’s work as a cinematographer for films such as Guardie e ladri (1951), the comic vehicle for Totò and Aldo Fabrizi that Monicelli co-directed with Steno. But even without that declaration of taste, Monicelli adds an important qualification to what might otherwise sound like a dig at his former cameraman – ‘thankfully’ (‘per fortuna’ in the original Italian) – which seems to suggest that Bava is more deserving of being over- than underrated. There is a further layer to this, however, as far as reputations go. Monicelli is still regarded as a major filmmaker in Italy, with a number of classics to his name, but in spite of some notable international hits, he never quite achieved lasting auteur status in Anglophone film culture, which – if availability on digital media is anything to go by – has largely polarized Italian cinema into arthouse/auteur cinema (Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni) and cult/genre (Leone, Argento, Fulci, etc.).¹ Outside Italy, Bava, while still a cult figure, is probably now better known and certainly more widely available than Monicelli. This is not meant to sound like a validating victory for the neglected ‘artisan’ because it has little to do with the respective quality of their output. But it brings us to some of the central concerns of this book. How do reputations – and particularly cult reputations – take shape over time and in different locations? How do we approach a filmmaker like Bava, whose achievements are often compromised by their production circumstances? How and where do we situate him and what issues do his films raise with regards to cultural value? To value is to ‘rank or rate in an actual or imagined pecking order something or someone over another’ (Hubner 2011: 1), but that pecking order is complicated by a filmmaker like Bava, who is simultaneously marginal and (cult-)canonical.

Mario Bava is the quintessential cult filmmaker, even though such a statement raises as many questions as it answers. According to Joe Dante, ‘Before people knew what cult movies were, [his films] were cult movies’ (Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre, 2000), while Alberto Pezzotta suggests that he can be seen as Italy’s first cult director (2020a: 9). While a fuller interrogation of the different theories of cult is beyond the scope of this discussion, it is worth saying something about Bava’s status as a cult filmmaker. The word ‘cult’ has been broadly used in two overlapping senses, as both a mode of consumption, a ‘movement beyond reason’ (Telotte 1991: 5) that can transform almost any commodity into a cult object, whether blockbuster or B-movie, and a type of textual classification that suggests the oppositional, the unusual or the niche, the counterpoint to its ‘undefined and vaguely imaged Other’ – the mainstream (Jancovich, Reboll, Stringer and Willis 2003: 1). The notion of the ‘cult film’ often operates discursively as a marker of compensatory subcultural distinction for films that ‘failed’ critically or commercially or whose earlier mass appeal has faded with time, but it also sometimes re-brands films that have passed from one cultural context to another. Which ‘mainstream’ does Bava stand in opposition to? The canonized Italian auteur cinema of the 1960s? The ‘corporate’ genre cinema of today? In either broad sense of the term, cult’s battleground is that of taste, offering counter-canons to more ‘respectable’ or consensual ones and elevated positions to relatively marginal figures such as Bava. While cult can never be reduced to textual qualities, Bava’s films are cult-friendly in a number of ways – in their chosen genres, their stylistic eccentricity, violence and eroticism and the fact that they have not always been easy to see. Add to this their perceived lack of ‘legitimate’ critical appreciation and the way that they lend themselves to an ‘illegitimate’ aesthetic appreciation that both challenges and reproduces certain hierarchies of taste.

Bava has been described as a major figure in ‘world horror’ (Hutchings 2016: 81) and was the subject of one of the most lavish books ever devoted to a single filmmaker (Lucas 2007). His cult reputation is that of a pioneering figure both in Italian horror and the giallo all’italiana or Italian-style thriller later popularized by Dario Argento, a master of special effects, an ‘influence’ (if not always an acknowledged one) on better known films by Argento, Fellini or Ridley Scott, a ‘Serie B’ director who made films look more expensive than they were, a cinematic stylist skilled in fashioning macabre atmospheres and luridly violent set pieces. In the area of Italian horror and the Italian thriller, only Dario Argento has received more attention and adulation, and unlike Bava, he received enough of it in his own lifetime to tide him through his later decline as a filmmaker (Hunter 2010). However, cult reputations are always qualified in some way, and Bava remains a relatively minor figure in the larger cinematic canon, even if he has some famous admirers. ‘Mario Bava is one of those filmmakers that other filmmakers really like’, observes Kim Newman in the British TV documentary Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre, and Bavaphile cineastes include the aforementioned Joe Dante, as well as Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton. These endorsements often come with similar caveats and an acknowledgement of the restrictions he faced, as if to answer their own question about why he is not more highly regarded. His heroic battle with poor scripts and low budgets is a prominent part of the Bava narrative, and perhaps one of the reasons why he is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, seemingly confirming that it is possible for a director to transcend his or her material through sheer visionary zeal. Luc Moullet even wonders if Bava deliberately sought ‘bad scenarios and impossible actors … as if he were asking what he could do with such vile material’ (1997: 51) – as Italy churned out genre films in the 1960s and 1970s, he would not have needed to look far. Scorsese and Burton make exactly the same claim about Bava’s films. ‘If you asked me to tell you the plot of any given Mario Bava film, I don’t think I could’, writes Scorsese in his foreword to Tim Lucas’s book on Bava (2007: 13), while Burton claims not to remember the plot of even his favourite Bava film – ‘I’ve seen Black Sunday [La maschera del demonio] I don’t know how many times, but if you asked me what the story was (about), I couldn’t tell you’ (ibid.: 24). Both frame this as a positive, rather than a negative – Bava’s art characterized as oneiric, atmospheric, visually expressive rather than aligned with storytelling – but we also recall Umberto Eco’s claim that a cult film tends to be ‘ramshackle, rickety’, an object that you can ‘break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one remembers only parts of it’ (2008: 68). Bava’s films often seem to be more easily remembered as parts than as wholes.

Bava’s case has much to tell us about how the cult auteur circulates and is celebrated. He can be seen as an ‘unstable auteur’ in the same way that Valentina Vitali identifies certain genres as occupying an ‘unstable position in the canon’ (2016: 4). Significantly, Bava worked primarily in such ‘unstable’ genres – horror, the peplum or mythical-historical adventure film, the giallo-thriller, the ‘sexy’ comedy. Once difficult to see after (and sometimes during) their original release, Bava’s films are now all easily available, most of them in prestigiously packaged Blu-ray editions. Then there is Tim Lucas’s Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, over 1000 pages long and providing the most detailed account of Bava’s career to date, with an unprecedented amount of attention given to his earlier career as cinematographer and special effects expert. While lavishly produced, its only resemblance to a coffee table book is that it is large enough to use as an actual coffee table. It is one of only two full-length books on Bava in English, and Lucas approaches his subject as an erudite and dedicated cinephile-scholar – he edited the magazine Video Watchdog, which specialized in cult, exploitation and other niche cinemas. Peter Hutchings takes Lucas’s book – rightly, I think – as clinching a certain status for Bava (2016: 79). But beyond cult fandom, critical and academic interest in Italian genre cinema (a cultish field within the academy), that status is still a limited one and I would venture is likely to remain so. Not only is Bava not Hitchcock – a critical and academic field in himself – he isn’t even Sergio Leone, arguably the most canonical of Italian genre directors. A further instability lies in the tension between what we know of Bava’s production context – a work-for-hire director in a precariously over-productive and chaotic sub-industry – and the claims sometimes made for him as an unappreciated genius-auteur. Auteurism has long had to negotiate such tensions, the figure of the auteur, as Hutchings aptly puts it, ‘the phantasmatic outcome of cinephile activity’ (2001: 29), rather than a working filmmaker in a particular production context. But this is exacerbated by several other factors in the case of Bava – the multiple versions of his films and the blurring of the different kinds of creative labour he brought to different projects (fully credited director, uncredited director and fixer of troubled productions, director of photography, special effects). Lucas’s book is no less interesting or valuable for not being able to resolve the tension between Bava as artisan-for-hire and the claims he wants to make for him as a ‘great, if underappreciated, cinematic artist’ (Hutchings 2016: 89). On the one hand, he never loses sight of either the production context or the collaborative nature of filmmaking. He gives particular emphasis, for example, to the role of Ubaldo Terzano, Bava’s camera operator and subsequently Director of Photography on his earlier films as director. Interestingly, while the Bava narrative often finds others taking credit for his contributions to certain films, here it seems to have been Terzano who felt that he was not getting enough credit for his creative labour, and Lucas seems to agree when evaluating the films made after La strada per Forte Alamo/The Road to Fort Alamo (1964):

Seldom in Bava’s later work will we encounter the kind of slow, insinuating tracking shots that Terzano piloted so capably, and never again will Bava’s images be quite as sensuous in their interplay of light and shadow as they were during the tenure of Terzano.

(2007: 591)

On the other hand, Lucas’s investment in Bava-as-auteur sometimes leads him to overclaim; ‘if it could be said of any individual, Bava was the postwar Italian cinema’, he declares at one point (ibid.: 29). That is quite a claim to make for a filmmaker whose films rarely made much of an impression at the local box office, who worked mainly in genres marginal and ‘foreign’ to Italian cinema, and who was less broad ranging in his output than comparable directors such as Lucio Fulci or Antonio Margheriti. Sometimes, Lucas acknowledges that the best version of a Bava film is the one refashioned by others for a foreign market, while elsewhere it becomes a matter of concern that a particular version of a film ‘hardly qualifies as “A Mario Bava film” at all’ (ibid.: 692). The question of what exactly constitutes a ‘Mario Bava film’ is one I shall return to in the next chapter.

The notion of the auteur is a central issue in this book – books on directors are part of the legacy of auteurism – and yet my approach is not an auteurist one in the traditional sense. I am not interested in establishing whether Bava’s films reflect his personality or some sort of authorial vision. It is relatively easy to argue that there is an unmistakable Bava ‘look’ or atmosphere in a number of his films, owing in particular to his artisanal skills as a cinematographer and special effects expert. But Bava’s technical skills also leave him vulnerable to the accusation that he was somehow ‘incomplete’ as a director. According to screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, Ubaldo Terzano – who admittedly might have had an axe to grind – was heard saying on the set of La frusta e il corpo/The Whip and the Body (1963) that the film did not have a director, but rather two directors of photography, by implication himself and Bava (Acerbo and Pisoni 2007b: 89). There is certainly a distinctive approach in Bava’s handling of the macabre, the violent and the fantastical, but this is less evident when the material is out of his comfort zone (his Westerns, for example) or working more successfully in a less familiar genre where he tries something different (the claustrophobic handheld camerawork in Cani arrabbiati/Rabid Dogs). Alberto Pezzotta characterizes Bava aptly as ‘a professional who moves in different contexts, negotiating or surrendering his freedom every time. Without always having something to say, as the auteur theory wants, but holding onto the possibility of an outlet for moods, flights of fancy, visionary flashes’ (2007: 102). For my purposes, Bava can be taken to be an auteur not so much because of any intrinsic property in his films – a ‘personal’ vision or style – but because his name is central to the way his films now circulate rhetorically and in their remediation as ‘Mario Bava films’. In other words, what I mean by an auteur is any filmmaker – most commonly a director, but Bava is interesting in going beyond that – who facilitates a particular kind of connoisseurship, ‘the pleasures of collectability … and historical knowledge’ (Church 2016: 2). One can collect Bava, accumulate expertise on his films and mansplain them to the uninitiated, track down his more obscure work, rank his films in order of merit and one has been able to read about him as a filmmaker of interest for some time. While the first full-length book on the director, Pascal Martinet’s French language Mario Bava, was published in 1984, there was critical interest in him long before that. Nor am I invested in trying to elevate Bava’s critical reputation, even though writing a book like this by its very nature establishes him as a worthwhile object of study and therefore in some way ‘important’ (and I am not going to pretend that I was not led to this project in the first place by my own love of Bava’s films). My interest lies more in how canons and reputations take shape, and how Bava’s critical reception marks certain mutations in cinephilia. The fact that there is more interest in Bava than before and that his films circulate widely in both best possible versions and their different release versions is not because we now have a better understanding of them (although greater access might make them easier to judge), but because a number of factors surrounding his films – technological, critical and cultural – have changed.

Here are a number of things we ‘know’ about Mario Bava:

1. Bava’s is a cinematographer’s cinema. Bava belongs to a lineage of directors of photography who became directors. A small number of these pursued directorial careers that equalled or surpassed their already distinguished work as DPs – Nicolas Roeg and Zhang Yimou, for example. But more often, DPs-turned-directors have been vulnerable to being seen as making visually striking films that lack the extra substance that a more accomplished director might bring. Mario Monicelli’s view that Bava was a better cinematographer than he was a director was probably a common one in Italy, but most critical and fan work on Bava (Lucas is a notable exception) shows little interest in his work prior to his taking over I vampiri (1957) from Riccardo Freda, his work as a DP subsumed into his reputation as horror/exploitation auteur.

2. Bava’s films are the triumph of atmosphere over narrative. Lucas calls Bava ‘a mediumistic conductor, an orchestrator of macabre atmospheres’, an ‘inarticulate artist who spoke his heart by transposing text into image, circumstance into design and emotion into colour’ (2007: 21). Ib Melchior, brought in by American International Pictures to try to impose some sense on the script for Terrore nello spazio/Planet of the Vampires (1965), seems to be making a similar observation – ‘I think that he emphasised mood, rather than action … most of it was mood’ (Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre). In films where dialogue must be easily translatable into (and often performed in) multiple languages, script pages were sometimes being produced on the day of shooting and different versions were prepared for different markets, one might expect narrative coherence to be a casualty. But even so, in some writing on Bava there is a willing away of narrative and a cinephile desire for Bava to move into near abstraction, the ‘cinema-as-dream’ that Tim Burton talks about in relation to his films (Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre). The review of Ecologia del delitto/Reazione a catena/Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) in The Aurum Film Encyclopedia regrets that ‘Bava doesn’t quite manage to get rid of all vestiges of characterization or “psychological realism” so the film falls short of being the symphony of violence it might have become in a non-commercial context’ (Hardy et al. 1985: 233).² It may well be part of the ‘Bava effect’ that fuels this desire to banish narrative and fall into atmosphere, spectacle and sensation – or to deploy it as strategic defence against critical dismissal of Bava as a poor storyteller – but it is worth looking more closely at how the films actually work.

3. Bava was a pioneer. While Riccardo Freda directed the first Italian horror film, I vampiri, in 1956, it is Bava (who photographed the film, handled its special effects and then completed the film when Freda abandoned it) who is more often seen as the ‘father’ of Italian horror. He would direct even more of another Freda film, Caltiki, il mostro immortale/Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959), but it is his official directorial debut La maschera del demonio/The Mask of Satan/Black Sunday (1960) that is usually seen as marking a distinctive ‘Made in Italy’ approach to the genre. He is also credited with creating a new genre, albeit one that would be popularized more fully by Dario Argento – the Italian-style thriller, the giallo or giallo all’italiana. These are both retrospective accolades that have a canon-building as well as reputation-building function.

4. Bava was Italian cinema’s ‘Maestro of Horror’. Bava worked in a number of genres and cycles, but horror occupies a privileged position in how he is understood and approached. Baschiera and Hunter suggest that Dario Argento was Italian cinema’s ‘first horror specialist’, while others (including Bava) had to wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Between expendability and connoisseurship – situating Bava
• 2 Artisan or auteur/artisan as auteur – Bava and authorship
• 3 Navigating filoni – from Hercules to il gotico italiano
• 4 Il giallo all’italiana – Bava and the Italian-style thriller
• 5 The poetics of ‘Serie B’ – Bava and film style
• 6 ‘Grandi stronzate’? Critical reception and reputation
• Afterword
• Select Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint