Mario Bava

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Mario Bava (born July 31, 1914 in Sanremo , † April 25, 1980 in Rome ) was an Italian film director , cameraman and screenwriter . The focus of his work was in horror film and in Giallo . His most famous film is The Hour When Dracula Comes in 1960 .

biography

Bava's father Eugenio Bava , originally a sculptor and painter , worked as a cameraman even in the early days of Italian cinema . After a failed art course, Mario Bava assisted his father with filming. Soon he was working as a cameraman and assistant director himself. The first directorial assignment was rather accidental: When the director Riccardo Freda had a falling out with the producer on the set of the film The Vampire of Notre Dame , Bava was unceremoniously commissioned to complete the film.

In 1960, Bava made his first own film with The Hour When Dracula Comes . The atmospherically dense black-and-white film was internationally successful and gave Bava a great reputation. It sparked a wave of Italian " Gothic " horror films that would last for a decade or so. Today, The Hour When Dracula Comes is considered a classic of the genre that has significantly influenced many directors. The previously unknown leading actress Barbara Steele achieved her breakthrough with her double role: She was soon considered an icon of the horror film and was cast accordingly for many years. The film remained the only collaboration between Bava and her.

Bava shot his next film, Vampires Against Heracles (1961), in color. The sophisticated color dramaturgy of his films was to become his trademark. In the following, Bava worked almost exclusively as a director. He worked as a contract worker in almost all popular genres of the strongly trend-oriented Italian commercial cinema. On a visual level, they clearly stood out from the usual average productions. Since Bava also had a reputation for being able to manage budgets well, it was often and gladly used by the producers. Danger: Diabolics! , an adaptation of the super criminal comic Diabolik , which is very popular in Italy , was realized in 1967 with just half the budget, despite considerable effects and many show values. However, he had only a small budget available for most of his work: the backdrop of the planet in Planet of the Vampires (1965) was created using only two artificial rocks and a smoke machine.

The detective film Bloody Silk , shot in 1964 , had clear narrative and dramaturgical weaknesses, but made up for them with sophisticated camera work. In addition, with Bloody Silk and the previous The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo), Bava "invented" the sub-genre of Giallos (Italian for yellow), a variant of the thriller that got its name from the yellow, which has long been very popular in Italy Envelopes of the underlying lurid detective novels. The Giallo got its charm mainly from the display of speculatively staged murder scenes and a psychopathological characterization of the perpetrator. Bloody silk , itself still staged rather cautiously, drew dozens of incomparably more explicit follow-up films , which from the late 1960s mixed with the increasingly exploitively staged Edgar Wallace films.

Bava also adapted to contemporary tastes: Im Blutrausch des Satans (1971), interspersed with drastic murderous scenes, is considered one of the early representatives of the slasher film . This and his subsequent films visibly lacked the visual appeal that characterized Bava's earlier work. Since they were also treated negligently by producers and distributors and subsequently changed, Bava withdrew from the film business in the late 1970s.

His son Lamberto Bava , who was his assistant director for many years, works as a director himself.

Filmography (selection)

Director

camera operator

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tim Lucas: Bava's Terrors, Part 2 , in: Fangoria Magazine , # 43, p. 31.
personal data
SURNAME Bava, Mario
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Old, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian film director, cameraman and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Sanremo
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1980
Place of death Rome