Blood and Black Lace · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Before anyone speaks, the cast stands still.

Ninety seconds of credits: actors posed among dress forms and shop dummies in a Roman salon, lit in shifting pools of magenta and green while the camera drifts past them on one of Bava's hand-built dollies, fluid and faintly unsteady. Nobody moves. And you notice, without being told, that you can't reliably say which figures are breathing. That is the whole film, delivered before a line of dialogue. Everything after it, the stolen diary, the countess, the inspector, the six killings, is machinery for keeping the confusion running.

Mario Bava's invention here is a costume with nobody inside it: white featureless hood, black fedora, trench coat, leather gloves. Hundreds of killers wore it over the next two decades, and it crossed the Atlantic to found the slasher film. But the costume follows from something stranger. Bava built a murder mystery with the mystery taken out and pure design put in the hole.

Deleuze, writing about Stroheim and Buñuel, describes a kind of film in which an ordinary setting turns out to be a thin crust over a world of raw appetite. He calls the setting the derived milieu and the appetite beneath it the originary world, and together they drive what he names the impulse-image: not characters with motives, but drives that use characters up. A haute couture salon is a derived milieu of a very high order. Silk, lamps, triple mirrors, and a business whose actual product is women converted into images. Bava exposes the originary world under it by one repeated staging rule: every murder weapon is furniture. A spiked gauntlet taken off the wall of an antique shop. A stove, a thing for warming a house, held against a woman's face until the face is gone. A bathtub, the water reddening. The décor kills. The salon isn't where the violence happens. It's what is doing the violence, and the man in the hood is its hand.

Deleuze says the impulse-image always runs downhill; he calls it a line of slope, an entropy the film can't reverse. The Italian title counts it out: Sei donne per l'assassino, six women for the murderer. Mario Serandrei, the editor who cut Ossessione and The Leopard and who coined the word neorealismo, gives the killings room to breathe and hurries through the connective plotting. The rhythm tells you where the film's interest lives. It is an anthology of atrocities with narrative mortar between, and the American slasher took that structure whole.

The colour is doing specific work, and it helps to know why. Eastmancolor in 1964 was the cheap stock, the one that made Italian genre production possible, and it was thought chromatically inferior to Technicolor. Bava treated the weakness as a licence. He gelled his lamps into unmixed primaries and let the stock render them flat: deep magenta beside acid green beside cold blue in a single frame, with no attempt to reconcile them into any plausible source. Deleuze's colour-image is colour that absorbs a scene rather than describing it, so the feeling sits in the hue instead of the face. Bava keys faces from below and from the side until one actor is split into two colours down the centre line. The face stops reporting an emotion. It becomes a surface for the film's mood to land on.

The space works the same way. That vast mirrored salon with its impossible depth is a modest set multiplied by optics: glass paintings hung in front of the lens, forced perspective, miniatures, rear projection. You cannot map it, and that is the point. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has lost its job as a stage for action and become pure affective potential; he found it in bombed cities and in Bresson's fragments. Bava manufactures one on a budget, in the disconnected variety, space cut into affective pieces that never add up to a floor plan. The payoff is structural. Because you can't map the salon, you can't calculate where the killer is, so suspense built on information gives way to suspense built on disorientation. The cheapness became a method. Set it against Bazin, who argued that deep space preserves the ambiguity of the real and lets you choose where to look. Bava's depth is a forgery assembled inch by inch in front of the lens. Ambiguity with nothing real underneath.

The women are handled as a quantity. Deleuze uses dividual for a group rendered as one affective body, divisions of a single unit rather than individuals, and Bava builds it literally: victims staged among dress forms, faces reflected in triple mirrors, limbs tangled with mannequin limbs until the frame stops discriminating. The post-synchronised dialogue helps by accident. All Italian production of the period was dubbed, so the voices sit slightly outside the bodies producing them, and here that ordinary defect reads as diagnosis, people as surfaces with sound applied afterwards. Carlo Rustichelli scores the killings with cool bossa nova. Nothing in the film's apparatus is upset.

This is where the debt to Peeping Tom comes clear, and where Bava improves on it. Powell had to invent a bladed viewfinder and force his victim to watch herself die in a mirror in order to fuse image-making with murder. Bava needs no invention. He sets his film inside a place whose daily business has already turned the women into images; the runway and the mirrors did the work before the killer arrived. The mannequins themselves come from Mill of the Stone Women, the Italian Eastmancolor gothic that posed women as wax automata, and Bava lights the dummies exactly like the living.

There's a deeper break underneath all this. Cinema began by sampling motion at equal mechanical intervals, what Deleuze after Bergson calls the any-instant-whatever: no moment more important than its neighbours, which is precisely why film could render movement at all. The older arts did the opposite, arresting the privileged instant, the pose, the decisive form. Bava drags cinema back toward the pose. The credit sequence is a tableau. The murders are conceived as compositions before they are conceived as violence. What is new, and cold, is that his poses carry no transcendence. The classical privileged instant was the hero at his defining moment. Bava's is a fashion photograph of a dying woman.

The killer, meanwhile, is nothing but sign. Deleuze calls an object a mark when it means by habit: see this, expect that. Lang's M is built almost entirely of marks, the chalked letter, the shadow on the pillar, the whistled tune, attached to police who never solve anything. Bava keeps the object-signature and discards the detection. He also discards what the German krimi cycle he was competing with always supplied, the comic inspector and the explanatory final act, while Les Diaboliques handed him the late reversal that retroactively voids the investigation.

So the circuit that drives a thriller is simply absent. Nobody perceives a situation and acts to change it. The inspector's work alters nothing, the revelations arrive as an afterthought, and there is no protagonist to stand with. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image and locates it in postwar Italy, which makes it worth noticing again who cut this picture: the man who named neorealism. The diary finishes the job. It records every vice in the house, which gives everyone a motive, which makes motive stop discriminating. That is Deleuze's condemnation of the plot, a diffuse corruption behind the story that dissolves the story's authority. A horror film did this in 1964, inside a genre nobody was searching for ideas.

That's the achievement worth arguing for. Bava proved a film could be organised by set-pieces instead of by story and hold an audience anyway, and that horror's smallest unit could be a composition rather than a shock. Italian audiences stayed away, the notices were dismissive, and the reputation was made afterwards by other filmmakers, which is the usual way a grammar spreads.

The coldness is the part that has aged into something else. Bava doesn't build sympathy and then violate it. He builds beauty and then violates it, which is why 1964 called the film gratuitous and why it now looks like a critique of the spectacle it perfected. Whether he meant it as critique isn't answerable and may not be the useful question. Go back to the credits. He puts the living and the dummies in the same coloured light, lets the camera drift, and declines to tell you which is which. Then he spends eighty minutes showing that nothing in the building depended on the difference. Watch it again and count the dummies. They are in nearly every frame, and once you start seeing them you'll find the film has been stating its argument in the background of every shot, patiently, while you were watching the knife.