At his best, Mario Bava commands the dark domain of the giallo like no other director. In films like Black Sunday, Bay of Blood and Kill, Baby… Kill! Bava masterfully orchestrates set design, lighting, camerawork and staging to conjure an atmosphere of doom and death, charged with a unnerving eroticism that marks his distinctive brand on the genre. Given the meticulous craft that goes into Bava’s most memorable set pieces, it’s surprising learn that Bava would sign on as a last-minute replacement for a project, but such is the case with Five Dolls for an August Moon, an uncharacteristically loose but revealing work with distinct charms all its own… especially for those who have a thing for eyes.
According to Bava afficionado Troy Howarth, Bava wasn’t terribly fond of the assignment, reportedly saying “they paid me on Saturday and we started shooting on Monday.” Bava paid little heed to the convoluted murder mystery script, whose succession of characters getting killed is a clear knock off of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Bava apparently didn’t have the time and budget to stage his famously elaborate set pieces, so he had to employ other techniques to summon the sinister, erotic allure that is his trademark. As this video shows, there’s a whole lot of eye action going on.
There are shots that cut from one person’s eyes to another’s, as well as rack focus shots, shots that pan laterally, connecting the gazes of characters, each time posing a question as to the relationship between them. Do they look with mutual suspicion or mutual conspiracy? Who knows what about whom? This film thoroughly refutes the adage that to look into someone’s eyes is to peer through a window into their soul. Here the gazes are blank masks in a story where nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted.
The plot requires multiple viewings to suss out, and may not even be that critical anyway—at least it certainly doesn’t seem to be Bava’s point of focus. He’s clearly more interested in finding a way to express the plot’s intrigue and network of murderous mistrust in purely visual terms, conveying in a panning movement across multiple sets of eyes what reams of exposition could not. In the place of elaborate Gothic stagecraft of his more famous films, the looks in Five Dolls for an August Moon create their own kind of architecture. With this relatively simple strategy, he’s able to find a new way of articulating what makes his films special: the act of seeing as sensual motion.
For comparison, watch this video I made last year exploring the elaborate dark erotic spaces of Bava’s earlier film Blood and Black Lace.
Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, critic and video essayist. He tweets as alsolikelife.
