Russia By Way of Italy? “Baba Yaga” (1973)

Every country, every culture has a unique approach to cinema and each has distinct approaches to the horror genre and various sub-genres. “Horror” tends to invite a greater amount of risk-taking on the filmmaker’s part and this for any number of reasons.

The genre traffics in the nightmarish, a context which opens the possibilities of less linear storytelling. Consequently, horror films have laid the groundwork for, if not largely presaged, avant-garde filmmaking and the more directly fractured mix-and-match of imagery and ideas of Surrealist filmmakers. The irrational is the bedrock of horror cinema.

Not all examples of the genre are masterpieces, of course. But even a half-thought-out or semi-realized film can reveal a trove of ideas and imagery if executed competently enough. In some cases, an entire film can evoke a kind of dream state through camera work and editing, forgetting about narrative logic, continuity, or acting performances.

1973’s “Baba Yaga” is one of those. Carroll Baker, now far past her “Baby Doll” years is a mysterious woman who appears from nowhere into Valentina’s life. Valentina (Isabelle De Funès) is a photographer of some merit who is approached leaving her lover, the film director Arno (George Eastman) at three in the morning after a spirited party. She insists on walking home across a palazzo, encounters a dog lying on its side in the middle of the square, surrounded by candles. She is cuddling and comforting the pooch when a car comes screeching onto the scene and here I’m not sure if the dog is struck or merely run off. In any case, a car door opens (we never get a good look at it, it looks like an older Bentley and what I could make out, it was a gorgeous ride) and Carrol Baker apologizes for frightening Valentina and insists on driving the young lady home. 

Baker introduces herself as “Baba Yaga” and while I don’t expect everyone to know who Baba Yaga is or have any more than fleeting grasp of Slavic mythology, in my movie the first question Valentina would ask is, “gee, interesting name, where’re you from?” Setting aside that Baker is as far from a crone standing on chicken legs, the choice of moniker felt like a misdirect, and at this point in the movie, I was ready to follow. If the first sign that the film you’re watching may not be related to the creature of the title is any indication, it signals that you best abandon too much academic pedantry. 

Baba impresses on Valentina that she come visit her but for obvious reasons, Valentina isn’t too on board with the idea, especially when after Baba’s car ran over a dog, she tells the photographer, “that wasn’t a dog.” Another aspect that goes unmentioned is that Valentina entered a ceremony - perhaps a sacrificial one - or a trap. Or both. This is another aspect of the more surreal nature of forms like this: leaving it up to the audience to provide connections. We can infer that this was a trap that Baba Yaga was laying for whomever would be roaming that specific square at night, or perhaps, being a witch, she just knew that it would be Valentina who would be drawn to the site and into her clutches. Choose your own adventure, kids!

I better hold up here for a second and mention that “Baba Yaga” is based on a story by Guido Crepax, one of the finest comic book creators from the sixties and seventies (and later). Crepax often told erotically tinged, if not outright erotic, tales, beautifully rendered and often illogical enough that you could be forgiven for wondering why more of his work wasn’t adapted to the screen, particularly for films like this. That said, a huge amount of credit goes to Aiace Parolini’s cinematography and certainly Corrado Farina’s direction and script.

The film’s imagery is often as dreamlike as the narrative. When Valentina’s dozing off and dreaming, the imagery shifts into some arch content where she encounters a Nazi officer or a World War One German firing squad. The images become desaturated to almost kodalithic contrast or they are filmed with a kind of David Hamiltonish content, replete with lush ambiance and filters. During the more explicitly erotic moments, Parolini and Farina use a kind of Xeroxographic sequence of lips and bodies and shots of mouths in back and forth cross cuts. There is a full array of techniques on display here and all used to good effect. Huge kudos, by the way, for one of the most artfully carried out love scenes between De Funès and Eastman.

The film is referred to as a giallo, but I have to disagree. While it has the dream logic of an Argento or a Bava, absent is the often accompanying gore and violence. This actually accentuates a sense of foreboding, that something even weirder or more disturbing is to follow. In several ways, this proves to be the case.

Eventually, Valentina calls on Baba Yaga, who gives her, rather forcibly, a quasi-Victorian porcelain doll in leather fetish gear. Additionally, Baba has told Valentina that she is resting and for Valentina to feel free and photograph whatever she wants of the house. Later, Baba holds Valentina’s camera in such a way that it becomes obvious she’s either festishizing it or cursing it. Or both. Certainly, the latter, given what follows.

Valentina returns to her studio/apartment with Annette, the doll, who comes to life in Valentina’s dreams as Ely Galleani, a young actress of obvious pulchritude, if limited range (something Galleani herself admitted as she retired from the industry a few years later; she has a pretty interesting story and kind of worth looking into). However, shit hits the fan such that whenever Valentina shoots with the camera, people get injured or die. 

Arno dismisses much of this, of course, until a shoot with a model when Valentina switches to a Canon to avoid using the other camera. The lights go out, come back on and the model notes that she was pricked by something. After she leaves, Valentina realizes that Annette has moved, her hairpin and the original camera are on the floor.

Arno smartly suggests she develop the film despite the fact that the lights were out and what do they find? Annette come to life wielding that hairpin! 

Valentina returns to Baba’s lair to confront her and bring this charade to a close and is shown just how much control over her Baba Yaga has. In a fairly charged third act, Valentina is bound and flogged by Annette as Baba Yaga is visually aroused, we cut back to Arno finding Baba Yaga’s address and he’s off to find and free Valentina. He beheads Annette in her human form as she’s about to shiv him with her hairpin when he’s alerted by Valentina. As her head hits the floor, it reverts to the doll’s head. Baba Yaga is dispensed with when she falls into a bottomless pit that Valentina had come across earlier. Arno pushes the doll’s head into the hole, as well, and the door opens with a neighbor and the police barging in, asking the couple what they’re doing there.

They tell them they’re visiting the lady who lives there and the neighbor says no one has lived her for years. The cops pull the rug away from the hole and reveal a floor underneath. One of the officers descends and says there’s nothing there but a doll’s head. Arno and Valentina switch the story for the cops; that Valentina’s a photographer and she just wanted to shoot the place. Fine, come by the station and we’ll talk about it. The camera closes the film on Baba Yaga’s cat sitting in front of a board she used to carry out her spells. 

Reading over this, it is an altogether inane flick. But like many inane flicks, it somehow holds interest. The performances are all subdued to the point of narcolepsy. Baker eschews any opportunity for going as large as she could have; De Funès does what she can and conveys a kind of intelligence and is suitably tough, though miles away from the Emma Peel you get the feeling the film needs her to be. Eastman (birth name Luigi Montefiori) is the real actor here, sort of an Adam Driver in a more talkative role. I don’t think he has Driver’s chops but for the purposes of Farina’s work here, he does.

Corrado Farina was principally a documentary filmmaker and only shot two features; this one and 1971’s “They Have Changed Their Face”/“…Hanno cambiato faccia” which was much better received, less plagued by lack of funding and studio interference and is pretty well-regarded. 

“Baba Yaga” had a troubled birth; Farina didn’t get the cast he wanted, backers changed (though this isn’t so unusual), producers changed, Baker was cast “in haste”(1), but it was in post that the film became far different from its original idea. Producers recut the film while Farina was on vacation. Orson Welles could relate. The cuts were done directly on the negative, so Farina had no alternate print (and no B roll or dailies or rushes, even, to pull from).

Farina and his assistant director Giulio Berruti re-edited what they could and the film runs a brisk 78 minutes. However, owing to that, the sociopolitical subtext that Farina (and likely Crepax, too) built into the film was gone. There is a conversation at the outset of the film that feel so truncated with half-thought-out conversations about capitalism and Marxism and filmmaking. Someone mentions Godard and Valentina says she prefers Laurel and Hardy. Arno, we discover later, is a Marxist who does commercials to fund his projects. There is an obviously reduced dialog about what good does Valentina’s work do and all of this comes off as sophomoric or as a genre film struggling for relevance. Farina was pissed enough about the final product that fought to have his name removed from the film.

It was slammed on release and today has gained a following of part curiosity and part genuine affection for the film as it is. I would love to be able to try to flesh out where Farina was going with his political subtext and the now chopped up dialogs about class and capital, but the abortion carried out on the film in post has done its work. The best way, perhaps the only way, to approach the work is as traumcinema. It works quite well as a loose narrative hanging on series of striking images and atmosphere. 

It is a testimony to the specifically Italian form of horror films that even a slashed up movie can still succeed - in an admittedly different form from what it was originally conceived - as an atmospheric exploration of dream imagery.

I found it also interesting that, aside from the use of some of the newer lenses now available in the seventies, the film feels very much like a product of the sixties. Indeed, I wonder if the Godard reference was more of a commentary on Godard’s late sixties/early seventies films he did with the Vertov Group. It was during this period that Godard was boring a lot of people with his more overt political awareness, infusing his work with a tedious didacticism. Consequently, Valentina’s crack about Godard feels much more on point. But the way that early sequence is shot is reminiscent of the French master himself with polemic and with criss-crossing in overlapping dialog and a general kind of earnestness that Farina might actually be mocking. We’ll never know, sadly.

Note:

1. Wikipedia entry on “Baba Yaga”; see footnote 4.

For more on Baba Yaga

Seriously, one of the great figures in any culture’s mythology. My favorite place to start is Aleksandr Afanasyev’s “Russian Folk-Tales” which is still in print. There’s a more serious study on her by Andreas John, and of course, you should do yourself a favor and read Gogol’s “Ukrainian cycle”, “Viy” for how the figure (and folklore in general) is adapted by a modern master. 

As with so many of the European horror and horror-adjacent films, the cinematography is often gorgeous. What follows is a small collection of images from the film. Click on the image to launch a slide show and see the image in a larger frame.