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Whim of your whim of a wet witch lit by hag-tag cinematography
desperate for coffin scene, beyond it
getting there
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[Bava Methodology]
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PARA-CONSENSUAL
PARA-CON
CON PARROT
CON SENT TO PARAGUAY CON
CONSTANT PARALEGAL SENSUALIST CONTESTS CONSENT IN FULL BODY FULL NUDE COFFIN SCEN-
A TO B TO FULCI HITCHCOCK FULCI
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Bava Junior at twice-his-height wheel
scared of wheel
wheel that looks like Istituto Luce, turns like it
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Accept anything they give me
Not a marketing agency
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Steer with god hand, chin, elbow, forehead and lighting schematic
Eyebags wondering what it’s all about
Horror is for thing in corner
Cornered and arch
Shadow in pocket of bolder shadow’s shadow pal
Much to be ashamed of
Sorry dad
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[Plot]
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Trapped cemetery, not so cold, extras that are excited to be there, who understand where there is.
Pop-up witch trial in corso, efficient judge, also brother.
If you had just put down that Munich Manual, the John Dee sex tape, then we could have continued our feudalist dreams, but no, you had to be Asa Vajda, J pronounced like a Y, and now look where we are
eleven o clock in a graveyard
morning time
grey as Hull
with this spiky thing Ubaldo made to put on his wife so he wouldn’t have to finger her anymore.
You like this, B?
More than the pendulum?
[Moon Eyes]
Can you imagine if I took this hammer and genuinely nailed this lunacy to your face?
Ja, screams are barren when there’s no if-a-bitch inquisition about, but do it anyway
and curse later generations, not me
we’re family close.
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[Torture Mask Solipsism]
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Get angle right and may not kill, beyond that can holiday together, in next fief over, on back of right-place-right-list peasant maid, ordered into dark bush symptom of expressionistic sacrifice [well-lit]
to milk cow ostensibly
cow also abandoned
both valued same as other, cow bit bit more cos at least has shack around it, but peasant maid, nothing, only stool to be slaughtered on, yet not slaughtered on cos reanimated satanist has better things to do, mask off
at least that’s how it’s remembered
in this scape
pleasant time scrape between betwixt
next survivable puritan
loon
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[The Ones Who Make It All Tick]
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In the castle, it was hauntological fun time.
Get up, exit chamber, shout at help, pose in base symbolic storm with dogs that won’t turn, find fault in father’s faulting of centuries old satanist pic that still has a place
in our hearts, there is early bed time
no matter what age you are cos tomorrow will be a hard day of getting up and exiting chamber and shouting at the help and what if the dogs decide to turn that day, what if they sense the future direction of the image you capture them in, what if the dogs want more than just
endless enjoyment of introducing yourself as an academic
German university of course
before Hegel but not beneath him cos he knew Bava would do all of this, as did the hero of our story, Andrej, a giant strutting dick with lips who doesn’t care what young B. does in her free time as long as it doesn’t involve besting him in private conversation or asking if it’s in yet.
Is the brother a threat?
Be amiable and hope he falls down a hole
at some point
probably will cos what else would happen to a good-looking man who wanders a castle all day, the same castle stalked by the reanimated satanist, they have to meet eventually, and how do you kill something that really doesn’t want to die
without one more crack at Asa Vajda
who’s content to lie ripe in her coffin, directing things, reading Goethe, slowly and with special attention paid to the sunny bits
god it’s dark in this crypt, can’t even make out the tip of the doctor’s cock
is he supposed to be this charming
or is it epistemological sophistry?
Could be the lights
yeah lights
film crew look like wraiths back there, outlines of them
no
is that my stake?
Looks cheap, lindenwood not
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[Barbara-ella]
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For this scene, I lay in the coffin under leash-like orders from Mario don’t call me maestro all the time Bava who was channelling Ernst, channelling and rejecting cos a coffin shaped like the Russian orthodox cross was not his kind of caper, and
the weirdness had to come from my eyes, allegedly, but Mario, I said [in my guise as the young B. of that time], my eyes can only do so much before they start to water, and he said, si, but lighting, 70% effective, big hero dick man, enigma face, keep blouse buttoned up tight and don’t forget to rub pussy off camera
yet
in some ways, I resented the sexualisation of the stake burning scene, strapping me to a long wooden thing and calling it punishment club, but Mario and his wife both wanted me to die euphoric instead of the original ending which had me posing with the two dogs again, glaring at an even taller, more single-minded man-shaped libido machine as he told his mentor to find his own way back to the inn cos he was off to have some well-lit atavism behind one of the cracked gravestones, and after that some hentai fun with cow left unguarded in the shack with no TV, no radio, no beat poetry zines, no
chance of fingering myself next to my father’s open coffin cos Mario wouldn’t allow it, said it was too Jungian, which I think was a mistake as Jung would’ve loved that kind of debauched baronial eroticism, and as the future version of myself right now, with the knowledge of how it all dried up in later years, I truly think…truly, truly think…that fathers create daughters like this when they keep paintings of ancestors who look like that daughter in the main hall and behind that painting is a secret passage leading to the coffin wreck of said ancestor and what does that mean if not I want to fuck my own daughter and all people who look like her even in skeletal form cos if I don’t then why would she bother fingering herself over my corpse in the ancestral hall?
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[Inevitable Analysis]
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Is it too much to call Bava a genius, do we have to do that, wasn’t he just good at lighting? Even said it himself, created scenes out of emergency, no real script, papier mâché rocks equals alien planet, we can respect it and enjoy it but it doesn’t really mean anything, does it?
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Substance/depth in Black Sunday: Asa Vajda makes no Satanist references, has no serious reflections on anything, just wants to inhabit the body of a younger B. All that time dead and got no thoughts on Satan or void solitude, no anxiety about re-entering a human body and existing within its confines, no reluctance about living in the same castle she was expelled from two centuries earlier, is there no room for any of this? No Andrej scenes we could cut, Italian Studio System?
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Perhaps the vague dread of the younger B. is vassal anxiety projected from the psyche of Asa Vajda, the need to escape versus the desire to stay and become that painting, to open her legs for the brother or walking dick hero, whichever one survives longest, the idea that wandering around chambers built on the back of the working class without lifting a finger to make breakfast or do a bit of dusting now and then is inherently conservative, which is the eternal adjunct of capitalism, which is something only a summertime Satanist would be comfortable with, so she’s either one of those or the real deal, either set on running a tighter castle as overlord or Agorist looking for a sexier commune, or anarchist looking to plant an oak stake in the main hall and burn the whole mess into mood-lit ash, replace it with nothing cos frankly she wouldn’t be the boss anymore.
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Wishing his critics to know he had no budget, was Bava hoping they’d be even more impressed?
It poses as practicality…look what I did with pebbles…but also rejection of critics who revered other film-makers as geniuses.
Did that irk him?
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Such was the genius of the screenwriters, myself included, that absolutely nothing remained of Gogol’s tale
Based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story Viy in no discernible way.
Themes of sovereign decay, holy place desecration, dual roles symbolising good and evil – all visual, yet completely unexplored via character or action.
The painting of Satanist B. kept on the wall, after her disgrace and execution centuries earlier, perhaps a nod to the shackles of a tradition inculcated from above? Chained inexorably to original sin.
But then who was the sinner? Asa Vajda or the feudalist brother who executed her?
Mussolini or Sorel?
Structures decrepit yet still inter-connected by a secret fireplace passageway, specifically the crypt and the castle, the horror and the renovated horror, the general air of superstition that would all go away if they just knocked the crypt down and burnt Asa’s skeleton.
But tradition. Even with the nightmares.
Did Bava intend any of this, with his budgetary limitations? When he sketched out the crypt set design and hung the Satanist B. painting and added in the secret passageway, did he think, yes, this is related to systemic aristocratic decay, symbolic of it? Or was it just incidental?
Working on something for any length of time, with a functioning brain…maybe. Yes. Probably. Bava’s a genius. Every shadow a thread, every secret passageway the subconscious etc.
But then aren’t crypts usually decrepit in the gothic style?
i.e. legwork done by others
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[A Type Of Climax]
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In the well-lit finale, the brother gives up his chance to bed the sister he spent the shadow version of the film fantasising about and falls down a hole that seemingly has no end, perhaps symbolic, perhaps just a hole, and
our giant upright dick costume, Andrej, is given the implicit all clear to [reluctantly] send bad B. to the stake and good B. to his bed [previously hers] where he will keep her in a constant state of maybe tonight I’ll listen to your feelings again
like I did that one time
in the sterile arboretum [well-lit]
but in all probability I’ll be downstairs with my phrenology paper, measuring the new butler’s skull, seeing if it’s applicable across class lines
and if you get really lonely
you can use the spike mask that Ubaldo made
but not Ubaldo himself
he’s poor and untalented and doesn’t understand cinematography at all whereas I Mario own the light and all its pet residue, not to mention the
wait, she went where?
The dogs again?
But they’re not even
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Oli Johns is at normal speed another green-skinned alien with dark blood patch on his degree, wondering if it’s the same purple orb each time or something northern, a spray tan KOL, demon harassed by painting-less demons, keep spraying until crux of the matter becomes soulmate with work pretty much nowhere including Spork Press, Psycho Holosuite, Schism Press, Psycho Holosuite, Nauseated Drive and Psycho Holosuite.
PsYChO hOLosUitE [zine] 