Director and screenwriter
Mario Bava, director, screenwriter and director of photography, was born in Sanremo on 31 July 1914 to Eugenio and Emma Carpiti.
He entered the world of cinema from a young age and immediately collaborated with great directors, thanks to his natural talent for the construction of special effects and lighting systems, learned from his father Eugenio Bava, director of photography, set designer and sculptor at the dawn of Italian cinema. Bava began his career as a creator of special effects. A special feature of his work in this field was lighting and image manipulation. During the Second World War Bava worked for the Istituto Luce, manipulating propaganda footage of fake Italian army victories, including a non-existent attack on the island of Malta.
At the age of twenty, he married and began to create the opening credits for Italian versions of American films.
He died on 25 April 1980 in Rome.
His career in the cinema
The first film in which he participated as a cameraman was "Il socio invisibile" (1939), directed by Roberto Roberti, alias Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone. Also in 1939, Bava began a collaboration with Roberto Rossellini. He directed the photography of two short films directed by the master of Italian Neorealism: "Tacchino prepotente" and "La vispa Teresa".
In 1941 he met Francesco De Robertis, whom he considered a master. Between 1941 and 1943 Mario Bava was camera operator for many of De Robertis' films, such as "La nave bianca" (co-directed by Roberto Rossellini), "Uomini sul fondo", "Alfa Tau!" e "Uomini e cieli" whose photography he also directed together with Carlo Bellerio.
In 1943 he directed the photography of the feature film "L'avventura di Annabella", directed by Luigi Menardi. He then took care of photography for films by directors such as Mario Monicelli and Luigi Comencini.
In 1946 he made his debut in film directing, directing the short film "L'orecchio". Five other short films followed, he also directed documentaries, then he was put under contract by Lux, a famous Italian film production company directed at the time by Carlo Ponti. He worked as director of photography with directors such as Steno ("Guardie e ladri"), Mario Soldati and Aldo Fabrizi.
In 1956 he directed the photography of "I vampiri" (The Vampires), directed by Riccardo Freda, a film that is considered the initiator of Italian horror; he also took care of the special effects (Gianna Maria Canale's ageing became famous, made without editing, thanks to the help of coloured lights and wax), supervised the editing and completed the filming, but was not accredited. Bava worked with Freda twice more: in 1958 for "Agi Murad, il Diavolo bianco", and in 1959 for "Caltiki, il mostro immortale".
Also for this film, Bava directed the photography and completed the shooting but was not accredited. He also took care of the special effects, using tripe to make the monster protagonist of the film, inspired by the one in Blob - Mortal Fluid. In 1959 he was also the cinematographer of "Ercole e la regina di Lidia".
Also in 1959, he completed the filming of "La battaglia di Maratona", initially directed by Jacques Tourneur. To repay them, the producers of the film decided to make Bava's debut as a feature film director. The choice fell on "La maschera del demonio", directed in 1960: it was the first Italian Gothic horror film and was played by Barbara Steele, launched by this film as a star of the horror genre. The film, based on a story by Nikolaj Vasil'evič Gogol' entitled Il Vij, grossed little on its release (about 139 million lire), but soon became a classic. Bava also took care of the elegant cinematography and the craft but effective special effects.
The next work was "Ercole al centro della terra", directed in 1961. It is a peplum contaminated with horror. The film grossed 398 million lire and was a great success abroad.
Also in 1961, Bava directed "Gli invasori", another adventurous film, and completed the shooting of "Le meraviglie di Aladino", a film started by Henry Levin.
He also experimented with the spaghetti western genre, officially directing two films: the "serious" "La strada per Fort Alamo", directed using the pseudonym John Old, and the parodyistic "Roy Colt & Winchester Jack". He also co-directed, not accredited, with Antonio Román "Ringo del Nebraska".
Bava was always very critical with his films. Some of them he just couldn't stand them. For example "Le spie vengono dal semifreddo", a comedy starring Franco and Ciccio, the erotic thriller "Quante volte... quella notte" and especially "5 bambole per la luna d'agosto".
In 1962 Bava directed "La ragazza che sapeva troppo", a thriller contaminated with sentimental comedy, which founded the Italian thriller. Some sequences and topoi of this film will be filmed in all the following Italian thrillers, especially by Dario Argento.
In 1963 he directed "La frusta e il corpo" (using the pseudonym John M. Old) which marked the meeting with the producer Alfred Leone and suffered some censorship regarding the sadomasochistic relationship between a woman and her jailer. The film was not a great success, grossing 72 million lire.
Also in 1963 the director directed an episodic film, "I tre volti della paura". At the end of the film, with Boris Karloff on horseback, Bava shows the spectator, with a zoom back, the set of the film, thus revealing its fiction. This can be considered one of the first cases of metacinema. This film also inspired the name of one of the most important rock bands in history, Black Sabbath, considered by some to be the initiators of the heavy metal genre. It was bassist Geezer Butler who proposed the name to the band after seeing the film, which in England and English-speaking countries had the title "Black Sabbath".
In 1964 he directed "Sei donne per l'assassino", which definitively codified the Italian thriller. The film shows various murders, one different from the other, and also brings on stage for the first time a covered-faced murderer wearing a mackintosh and a pair of gloves.
In 1965 he directed his only science fiction film, "Terrore nello spazio", heavily contaminated with horror. The film is considered a little gem and will inspire Ridley Scott's Alien. The film was made with few means and bare sets. Bava always said that he only had two big rocks available that he moved around the set. The film was quite successful in the United States, where it was distributed by American International Pictures.
In 1966 Bava returned to the Gothic style directing Operation Fear, a film full of visual inventions.
In 1967 Eugenio Bava died. The following year his son directed a very pop version of "Diabolik", based on the famous comic strip. The film was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, thanks to whom Bava found himself with the largest budget of his career: 200 million old lire. However, the Sanremo director succeeded in not spending all the money at his disposal. Bava, however, was not very happy with the film, complaining that De Laurentiis had forced him not to shoot brutal scenes for fear of censorship. De Laurentiis proposed to Bava to direct a sequel, but the director refused.
In 1969 he shot "Il rosso segno della follia", a thriller of fierce sarcasm, in Spain.
"Reazione a catena", in 1971, started another genre, the slasher, and inspired the series "Friday the 13th". It is a ruthless film, in which Bava demonstrates his disinterest in the human race. The film is also known for its many experimentalisms, especially the nonchalant use of the out of focus.
In 1972 it was the turn of "Lisa e il diavolo", who had many problems with the production and had two versions. The one reassembled with the addition of some scenes of exorcism, by producer Alfred Leone, entitled "La casa dell'esorcismo" was always rejected by the director, who in fact did not sign it.
In the same year Bava shot "Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga", a tribute to Gothic horror at a time when Italian horror was going in another direction after the advent of Dario Argento.
But what is considered by some to be the director's true masterpiece is not a horror, but a thriller: "Cani arrabbiati" (Angry Dogs) is Bava's cursed film. Made in 1974, it never made it to the theatres, blocked by the bankruptcy of the production company. Only in 1995 was it recovered and released on DVD, with the title "Semaforo rosso".
After Cani arrabbiati Bava directed two other films: "Schock" is a psychological horror film dating back to 1977. It was played by Daria Nicolodi and some sequences were directed by Lamberto Bava, who made his directorial debut. "La Venere d'Ille" is a television film co-directed with his son Lamberto.
In 1980 he directed some special effects concerning "Inferno", directed by Dario Argento. In particular, Bava created the sequence in which the Mater Tenebrarum is transformed into Death and some models concerning the skyscrapers of New York.
Bava died on April 25th 1980, shortly before starting shooting a new film that was to be called "Star Express" and was to mark his return to science fiction.
The Critics
Mario Bava is mainly known for his expressionistic use of colour. Films like Six Women for the Killer and Terror in Space show intense and strong colours that attack and almost hypnotize the viewer.
Set designs are also an important part of his work, especially in his gothic horror films such as Operation Fear, The Three Faces of Fear and The Devil's Mask. Diabolik's pop sets are also significant.
Bava's best known stylistic style was the zoom, an expedient widely used in Italian genre cinema of the sixties and seventies. Bava was one of the first Italian directors to use it, and he included it in his films often considered exaggerated by some critics (as in 5 dolls for the August moon or Terror in space).
Thanks also to his ingenuity and the tricks already mentioned, he was able to make some of the settings that were actually shot with very limited means seem impressive. Also from the screenplay point of view, his films made school: many of his narrative ideas, especially regarding the stories of terror, although they were often improvised during the shooting, were given homage or reused by directors of successive generations (both Italian and foreign).
Mario Bava is admired by many American directors. Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Joe Dante, John Landis and Quentin Tarantino have repeatedly stated that they were inspired by him.
« I also really like Mario Bava's films, in which there is practically no history, only atmosphere, with all that fog and the ladies walking along the corridors: they are a sort of Italian Gothic. Bava seems to me to belong to the last century ». (Martin Scorsese).
Tim Burton in his The Mystery of Sleepy Hollow explicitly mentions The Devil's Mask. He was also very surprised when, during the presentation of his film in Rome, some Italian journalists declared that they did not know Mario Bava.
Quentin Tarantino, on the other hand, declared that behind every frame of his film is the genius of Mario Bava.
These directors' statements are contained in the documentary broadcast by Sky in 2004, Mario Bava - Operazione Paura, directed by Gabriele Acerbo and Roberto Pisoni. The documentary also contains interviews and statements by Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Dino De Laurentiis, Ennio Morricone, Roger Corman, Mario Monicelli, Sergio Stivaletti, Lamberto Bava, Roman Coppola, John Philip Law, Elke Sommer and Alfred Leone.
Federico Fellini also paid homage to Bava: in his Toby Dammit, an episode of the collective film Tre passi nel delirio (Three Steps into Delirium), there is in fact a little girl who is very reminiscent of the one in Operazione paura (which was actually a child). In reality the homage seems more like a plagiarism, so much so that Fellini had never warned Bava about the sequence in his film. Bava noticed this by watching the film in the cinema.
Roman Coppola shot CQ in 2001, including many quotations from Diabolik.
David Lynch, in the last episode of the television series The Secrets of Twin Peaks, paid homage to Bava by filming the sequence in which agent Dale Cooper is being chased by his evil double, a clear reference to the similar scene in Operation Fear.
Other quotes include Arrivederci amore, ciao, directed by Michele Soavi in 2005. Soavi re-proposes the famous scene of Schock, in which Daria Nicolodi is lying on the bed and from above the camera shows her hair moving in a strange way, rebelling against the force of gravity.
Bava had many unfulfilled projects in his career: besides the already mentioned Star Express he had other science fiction films in mind: Baby Kong was supposed to be the story of King Kong's son. The screenplay was already ready, as were the special effects. The film was to be shot in Ponza, but in the end it was never made, as there was another film, King Kong produced by De Laurentiis, which was to be released the same year.
Other science fiction film projects were: Star Riders, Anomalia e Il vagabondo delle stelle.
« His genius, and the legacy for those who come after him, lies in the fact that whatever the conditions, magnificent work can be done » (Roger Corman on Mario Bava)
Italian critics have always considered Bava a B-movie director. The only appreciations were for the special effects of his films.
It was only after his death that a re-evaluation of his work began; on the contrary, in the United States and France he was immediately considered a master.
(source: Marco Mauro: taken from Wikipedia)