Among the many great and frustrating benefits of living in Los Angeles is the absolute plethora of film screenings. Great, for obvious reasons, but frustrating because it is practically impossible to see everything. This past weekend nothing was opening worth seeing - I've yet to see a Tyler Perry film, and I'm okay with that - so instead I ventured out to the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theater and enjoyed a few Mario Bava classics.
Before this weekend I had only a superficial familiarity with Bava (and really, my knowledge remains more or less superficial). I knew "Black Sunday", his first and probably most famous film. Beyond that the only others I had seen were "Blood And Black Lace" and "Lisa and The Devil". The difference in style among these three pictures was so profound that I, being an unapologetic auteurist, dismissed the director out of hand. I was interested in exploring the Italian horror genre, and found Dario Argento's very unified aesthetic much more worthy of my attention. My bad. I have been missing out on some truly epic, important, and (regardless of what I initially thought) very aesthetically unified works of pure cinema.
Saturday I checked out "The Whip And The Body" (1963), a gothic horror story set in a castle located somewhere between Transylvania and Timburtonland. All hell breaks loose when Christopher Lee's Kurt Menliff shows up after being somewhere else for several years. In Kurt's absence, his brother Christian has married Kurt's former lover, Nevenka. Kurt decides the best way to deal with this is to find the sexy and sultry Nevenka horseback riding on the beach, flirt with her a bit, kiss her, push her down onto a rock, pull out his riding whip, and summarily whip her until she squirms and screams in orgasmic frenzy. She resists very little, and when she finally offers a coy smile Kurt declares, "You always loved violence!" To this she smiles and offers her back for more sado-masochistic lashings.
When Kurt is found dead in his room later that night, the hunt is on for the killer. But before anyone can find any murderers, the ghost of Kurt starts floating around, his trusty riding whip in hand, whipping Nevenka every chance he gets. And while she is scared of the ghost, she never ceases to love the whip! Kurt's ghost kills a few more people. Or is it someone else? Who cares?
What's great about "The Whip And The Body" is that at no point do the survivors, who are now "hunting" for Kurt's murderer, ever sit down and logically try to figure out what the hell happened. Who needs that old rigmarole anyway? It is much more satisfying to have solitary members of the castle cast walk around with candles and torches, peaking into rooms and venturing into dark, shadowy cellars.
Bava's trademark expressionist lighting guarantees that in every tomb and every bedroom and behind each and every creaking door we'll find, if nothing else, a wall cursed with deathly blue lighting or drowned in blood-curdling red. More often than not, both colors, along with potent greens and yellows fill every room, creating a sort of nightmare world as seen through a filthy rainbow.
More than any of the other pictures I saw this weekend, "The Whip And The Body" is primarily an exercise in expressionist color lighting. Cinematographer/Director Ernest Dickerson ("Do The Right Thing") introduced the film, and made sure to call attention to the way in which Bava used blacks, that is, the absence of light. It was something worth paying attention to in a film that is so thoroughly committed to using color - and its absence - as a means of communicating emotions, atmosphere, and in large part, story.
Dickerson also described Bava as one of cinema's supreme absurdist filmmakers, coupling him with David Lynch. This characterization cannot be under appreciated, and this observation aided in the viewing of all the Bava films I watched.
Sunday the first film I caught was "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" (1963). Opening with a fantastic shot of an airplane taking off into a dirty black-and-white sky, Bava gives the audience a young girl heading off to Italy to visit an old lady friend as protagonist. When the girl, Nora Davis (Laticia Roman), can't find her pack of cigarettes, a handsome fellow traveler offers her one to smoke, and then gives her the whole pack. As they go through customs, we discover that the generous gentleman is actually smuggling marijuana in the cigarettes, and the authorities violently, if not a bit comically, drag him off. The stage is thus officially set for this strange, and often comic whodunit.