Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Blood and Black Lace
1964 · Mario Bava · Blood and Black Lace on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how many mannequins share the frame with the live models. (staging)
Bava arranges victims among dress forms, reflects faces in triple mirrors, and tangles limbs with mannequin limbs, until live and inanimate become hard to tell apart.
Payoff: The salon sells women as merchandise, and the mannequins keep proving a model and a dummy serve the same function. In the reading: dividual. Deleuze's dividual treats a crowd as one body instead of separate people; the models and mannequins become interchangeable stock.
Watch a single face lit in two different colors at once. (light)
Bava keys faces from below and the side with saturated gels, magenta down one half and green or blue down the other, through the whole film.
Payoff: The color carries the mood directly, so a face reads as a surface instead of an expression. In the reading: affective color. Deleuze calls this a color image, color that carries feeling itself rather than describing an actor's emotion.
Track how often the camera looks past an object to a face. (camera)
Bava shoots through beaded curtains, dress forms, hanging fabric, and glass, so a foreground object sits between you and nearly every character.
Payoff: The clutter of merchandise is always between you and the people, because the people are merchandise too.
Listen for the cool lounge music playing under moments of dread. (sound)
Carlo Rustichelli's bossa nova theme plays over stalking and killing with no change in tone, as if the violence were part of the lifestyle.
Payoff: The music never warns you, so any dread has to come from what you see, not what you hear.
Notice how much longer a killing runs than a plot scene. (cutting)
Mario Serandrei, who also cut Visconti's prestige pictures, holds each murder long enough to build dread, then hurries through the scenes that connect them.
Payoff: The film's attention visibly sits with the killings, not with the mystery meant to connect them.
Once you have seen it
Watch what happens right after the police arrest every male suspect. (structure)
The detective locks up all the men at once, and a killing happens anyway. Motive has been spread so evenly across the cast that it explains nothing.
Payoff: The mystery machinery is emptied out on purpose. No investigator solves anything; the killers' greed simply exhausts itself.
Notice that every murder weapon is furniture or a household object. (setting)
A wall-mounted gauntlet, a stove meant for warmth, a bathtub: Bava kills his models with objects the salon's world already contains.
Payoff: The décor is not a backdrop to the violence. It is what does the violence. In the reading: originary-world. Deleuze calls the raw appetite under an ordinary setting the originary world; here that appetite literally picks up furniture.
Follow the mirrors and try to map the salon's actual layout. (staging)
Glass paintings, forced perspective and mirrors build a space with impossible depth that never resolves into a layout you could walk.
Payoff: You can never map the salon, so you can never calculate where the killer is standing.
Carry this in: Watch the mannequins. Bava lights the living and the dummies exactly alike and never tells you which is which.