Reel Politique: Book News, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark
Just a few minutes ago the mail carrier delivered my personal copy of the one book that film geeks across the country—nay, the world!—have been waiting for…and for almost a decade. It’s Tim Lucas’s Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, the Video Watchdog editor’s critical biography of the multi-faceted Italian genre director. From its shiny dust jacket bearing an image from the film Black Sunday, its star Barbara Steele looking unsettlingly like Brooke Shields, to its list of patrons in the back, it’s a massive work. At 1,128 pages, it’s got the dimensions and heft of a family Bible. And given Mr. Lucas’s diligent attention to accuracy and detail as practiced in his magazine since 1990, one can assume, as I assert in a profile of Mr. Lucas slated to appear soon in The Believer, Colors will no doubt be the definitive biography of Bava and possibly one of the best, if not the best, books on a film director ever published. It’s also exquisitely designed, by Mr. Lucas’s wife, Donna. But at $250 dollars a copy, and given that it is wholly self-published, the volume may have a limited impact unless readers and reviewers get the word out.
Who is Bava? It’s possible that most people have seen at least one of his films without really knowing it (one of Mr. Lucas’s goals in the book is to unveil the “hidden” films of Bava’s filmography). He did Spaghetti Westerns, a Hercules movie, an adaptation of the comic book Diabolik, and probably invented the giallo or Italian slasher movie. His most famous titles are Black Mask, Black Sabbath, which influenced Quentin Tarantino, Planet of the Vampires, and Danger: Diabolik. Kill Baby Kill is widely held to be his masterpiece, an exotic mood piece about a doctor who stumbles into a town tormented by the ghost of a dead child.
A cinematographer turned director, Bava is most famous for the moody lighting and use of strong color in his films, and the book comes with an introduction penned by Martin Scorsese, who extols Bava’s use of color. Yet there is also broad scope to his word. His early black and white films are lustrous, and one of his last films, Rabid Dogs, is a mostly hand-held real time heist-gone-bad tale. Suffice it to say, if there is anything you’re ever going to want to know about Bava, it’s going to be in this book.