Beyond Time and Place: Barbara Steele
I was filming in Austria on Halloween night in the ancient mining town of Eisenstadt, the film Tief Oben. We had great steaming wooden vats of hot red wine for everybody to keep them going. It was arctic weather, snowing fiercely when the director suddenly asked all the extras to be naked other than their boots and the little mining lamps on their heads. Naturally they refused. At which point the director tore off his own clothes in a rage as a challenge…and was the lone white freezing body in the dark night.
In the middle of this frenzied rebellion, I decided to walk home alone. The local villagers had made little paper boats that they sent down the river set alight, a ritual of remembrance for their dead relatives…
Suddenly a dozen motorbikes came roaring by with everyone on them dressed as skeletons. They got off their bikes and started to dance around me in a circle holding hands – then they mounted their motorized steeds and took off into the night making unearthly shrieks and whistles….
I continued walking on in this medieval village surrounded by ghosts….
What a ride. In the course of a conversation about something thoroughly innocuous — miscellaneous home repair, let’s say, or weather in Los Angeles, or something equally drowsy — she’ll slide, right before you know it, into surrealist syntax. Suddenly we’re discussing a marriageable chair made from Van Gogh sunlight, then the hordes of damp, obese, bikini-clad horror fans that haunt the autograph shows. She’s rushing off later to an event dubbed Crypticon Seattle, or some such extraordinary thing. Why, only yesterday she archly characterized the looming trauma of the event as “moving into a Dianne Arbus weekend.” It’s downright incongruous. Not the event, really, or even her presence at it (though when you think about it, there is that). No. It’s the whole universe summoned by the totality of this woman’s life through just a few minutes’ gab: the high culture allusions (Arbus, Van Gogh) slamming up against the sweat-soaked, panting cheapness of her destination; as if all of it laid bare particular facts concerning the last century. But then, this essential incongruity has always embraced Barbara Steele.
In Europe — unlike the United States, where certain lines of division are observed more devoutly than we care to admit — the boundaries between high and low culture, art and trash, are not so much permeable as they are wholly non-existent. If Fellini could pop for the price of a dazzling cameo in Otto e Mezzo (1963), chances were that a Mario Bava or a Riccardo Freda could afford you as lead in a still-forbidding gothic chiller or, later, a candy-colored giallo. In other corners of the globe, ours for instance, a career arc like that would be viewed rather askance, a garden variety one-way journey to the skids or, worse, American-International Pictures. Barbara Steele was different. Always. She could leap like a ballerina out of Nightmare Castle and into Young Törless; or from Terror -Creatures from the Grave into L'Armata Brancaleone.
Her original peasant audience would ultimately be replaced.
The Mods were coming, having been eyed by the shrewd and forward looking Devil as he sat in some darkened theater watching Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. If the film’s greatness doesn’t justify the plundering of ancient Greece, then perhaps its opening motto does, a one-liner about inchoate forces, equal parts poetic and historical. In 1950, the year that Cocteau’s bestiary of soulless martinets first appeared on screen, “A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place” opened the sluice gates to mythological gods and imminent forms of evil whose perpetrators — a great number of them — were still alive.
By the Sixties new waves were crashing everywhere at such a rough-and-tumble pace that few could surf them from screen to magical screen. The frisson of La Nouvelle Vague should be appreciated within a tempest of plurality that shook Hollywood, whose producers, trained in the relative stasis of studio-system majesty, were being tossed willy-nilly on the backs of Italian, British and German breakers. And, emerging from this unpredicted deluge of international currents, spawning endlessly exploitive countercurrents, came Barbara Steele, a castaway or, as she herself puts it, “an unwilling immigrant” to the heart of Hollywood-land where she unhappily resides today. Steele remains a prisoner of her proudest memory, Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo, compared to which her horror movies — The Long Hair of Death, An Angel for Satan, Danza Macabra — essentially amount to the gothic flop house of cinema history. Or so the self-tormenting diva chooses to believe.
More than six decades have passed since she played an avenging witch in Black Sunday, but no matter how stubbornly Steele refuses to claim her title as Italy’s reigning Scream Queen, the aura of dry ice and stage blood lingers in the cinematic unconscious, trailing her in gory wreaths. Before the opening credits roll, priestly authority figures intone their denunciations of the witch: their patriarchal power seems distinctly unattractive compared to the emotional display from Steele, who, unlike the rest, is acting like a proper Italian. (It’s not personal pain that matters in these moments, but the channeling of a much larger agony.) Final Impenitence finds its voice as the heavens crash around her: “Go ahead," she thunders, “tie me down to the stake, but you will never escape my hunger, nor that of Satan!” Melting through the period trappings is an affect that is “Sixties” to the point of hysteria. Motion pictures are the original sin, a violation against the real. And Steele knows it, too. Very rarely do actors display such awareness of the implications of their craft (and its limitless) power to condition us. She rises and falls on an ethical seesaw, willfully, defiantly imperfect. Her undead temptress expresses the same hyperbolic agonies as the icons of saints. Were the Italians of 1960 still Catholic enough to register the naive awe that, here and now, leaves this devout atheist with shivers of remorse?
In retrospect, Steele’s single-digit salute seems aimed at every funeral urn in the gothic toy box, her screen-image glowering at lies, illusions and false promises. She has become proverbial, among the first names uttered in connection with Italian Gothic Horror, her personal identity sacrificed to a genre of cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra — just as Steele’s original audience has lost its collective identity. Italy’s post-war economic “miracle” was foisted in large measure by a self-neutering Communist Party, which laid down its revolutionary arms in exchange for seats in the government, at which point the mass shuffle-boarding of the southern poverty class began: 17,000,000 Italian souls — more than a third of the national population — would pay for “Il Boom” on northern assembly lines. Was Fellini’s Chevrolet some symbolic body-on-frame housing for America’s Marshall Plan, the economic engine driving oppression with such propulsive force?
Amidst its hurtling momentum, 8.5 seals in memory that moment when Barbara Steele’s youthful smile beamed from beneath a now-iconic black, wavy-brimmed hat. “Fellini always claimed he never went to the movies,” says Steele, “so I do not know if he ever saw Black Sunday; what I do know is that my friend, the director Gillo Pontecorvo, told me he went one day on a hot afternoon to a tiny cinema in Trastevere that was deserted except for one person who was sitting in the back row – Fellini. I always wondered if the name Princess Asa in Black Sunday was related to the Magician in 8½, calling out ‘Asa nisi masa.’” If Fellini’s ‘Asa’ was incantatory language for ‘Steele’, then banal distinctions separating genre horror from capital ‘A’ cinematic Art simply wither to nothing. Where auteurism once stood now rises a single caryatid balancing Black Sunday and 8½ — indisputable exemplars of presumptively distant worlds connected through some Immaculate Contradiction.
Why should so many visual throwbacks, indeed an entire corpus of barbarous iconography, arrive to boggle the Mod eye? Amid Italy’s love affair with Fellini and its own sexy ebullience, an arch Gothic fountainhead rises up; and this otherwise sun-kissed, suggestive peninsula hungers for crooked headstones, images ripped from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari under German light. The question arises, in my own mind, if nowhere else: mightn’t Italian Gothic Horror have originated in guilt? Was the genre’s unexpected appearance on the screen a belated reaction to Fascism and Mussolini’s infamous Nazi alliance, perhaps? If so, I take my hat off to Italian narcissism, which apparently processed national shame into a viable export, weird tales twisted like strozzapreti. Or “priest strangler” pasta.
Italian Gothic Horror remains the ultimate form of imbroglio on celluloid, seeing in its actors mere compositional elements, its genetic heritage reaching back to Romanticism’s monodrama, Schubert’s song cycle Winter Journey, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Since Cabiria, Italian films have utilized the camera to explore space, show off the sets, and to bring the environment to dimensional life. In horror cinema, this becomes an atmospheric duty: the prowling lens suggests a roving POV dislocated from anyone onscreen.
I would prefer to speak bluntly, or in oracular terms…
“Italy imports light from Germany.”
“Barbara Steele is Horror’s first female star.”
“The American camera-eye is a stalker; the Italian a bewitched cat that sees all.”
If, in other words, Italian Gothic Horror looks backward, then it’s out of necessity. Italy had not yet confronted the not-so-distant past. If any one example typifies the genre’s complicated view of evil, which wonders aloud about precisely where that evil resides — whether in kangaroo courts, the witches they condemn, or a generally cowed national populace — that film is Black Sunday. The opening torture and witch-burning sequence occurs in an uncanny interior-exterior, in which the black cowls of the inquisitors are picked out by blurs of white light filtering through smoke-machine clouds. Mario Bava never gave much of a damn about logic, whether narrative, character, or regarding light sources, so in order that each cluster of figures stand out clearly against the smoky sky, there appear to be multiple moons allowing their luminous glows to filter through just where required. Similarly, the blazing fire in which the masked muscleman, straying in from another, related genre, heats his branding iron, fails to strongly illuminate his glistening pecs — instead, a bright hotspot gleams on his trapezius, its source a complete mystery, though arguably not this film's most puzzling one.
Illogical lighting was commonplace in old Hollywood and old European cinema — thinking seriously about what the cause of Marlene Dietrich's omnipresent backlight might be was something cinematographers only did when they felt like it. Slow film stock meant that when characters carried candles or lanterns, the light had to come from elsewhere, and in great intensity, so that you'll often see shadows cast by candelabra falling upon the actors holding them, an impossibility if the candles were actually lighting the scene. But Bava took this to an extreme, secure in the knowledge that his movies had nothing to do with realism, and when working in color he'd get even wilder, dappling his set with an eerie palette of gelled lamps, none of which had any rational motivation for being there. In Hollywood movies, you only ever saw that kind of lighting in musicals or caverns. Bava's cinema has much in common with both opera and speleology.
Enter a 22-year-old actress holding the patent on gothic atmosphere, and occasionally leasing it to cinema. Not to mention the most gifted film critic who ever lived, johnny-on-the-spot, to glorify her. Pondering Barbara Steele from a distance of three years, because Black Sunday had been banned in England, Steele’s original supplicant, Raymond Durgnat, poured critical infatuation onto the page. And he did so in the spiritual home to every true cinephile, i.e., his mother’s basement. Where does Steele herself emerge from but the “Rank Charm School,” another dark hole in the ground? Actors’ energies were systematically tamped down, imprisoned in elaborate instructions about the “correct” way to walk, to get out of a car, to sit, to stand, every movement roboticized so that actual human emotion is bound to appear like a strange eruption amid the congested artifice, a breaking-through of Life which perversely feels more like demonic possession or madness. Durgnat describes a quality beyond performance, capturing the sylph I know and love: “Surely vast tracts of virgin territory lie unexplored to a screen personality situated, perhaps awkwardly, but how fascinatingly, somewhere in the regions between a Celtic feminine occultism and a devil-may-care energy.”
The id of Irony made flesh, she is an instinctive shape-shifter who can summon a steely, almost self-parodic Vaudeville act of her own presumptive star power (Elizabeth I, by way of Norma Desmond); lashing out wildly against other women like a blind man with a pistol — the word ‘hate" fluorescing, dancing on chapped lips into telephone dada. Steele-speech is composed of startling word-images, piled giddily on top of one another, evoking the landscape around her L.A. home – “coyotes come down the hill like perfect ghosts, walking like Nijinsky,” the Adriatic – “all wonderful 2000-year-old blonde stones – breathing light – like an old cathedral – every cell in my body receives this landscape like a blind man” – Paris –“every encounter is like a little love affair… including the dogs…” – Croatia – “nocturnal medieval eels, swimming in the skull-infested Roman fortress, under the full moon in the inky sea” – or Senator Elizabeth Warren’s earlobes – “two appalling clitorises.”
Durgnat places her between the Ancient and the Mod, while her career naturally equates High and Low. Meanwhile, Pauline Kael, who never publishes her program notes on Black Sunday, sees other strange harmonies. “The resurrected 200-year-old witch Princess Asa and the beautiful Princess Katia are both played by the English actress Barbara Steele in a deadpan manner that makes evil and good all but indistinguishable.” It takes a Brit with roots in Portugal to embody both paganism’s shameless desire and Catholicism’s threat of fire and brimstone — and balance them effortlessly, as Steele does. Her directors also become human fulcrums. Maybe the influence is Rome itself: even the lowliest pornographer or horror movie hack, based in such a city, would be immersed in ancient beauty. The Immortal City could be very immoral too, but the elegance and grandeur would impose themselves even on junk. Black Sunday was shot under battle conditions — a brutally cold December that saw cast and crew extremely ill with a virus — tending to reinforce Steele’s image of herself as a screen presence:
“I don’t want to wear crinoline, I’m just a big blade.”
In the late 1980s, Barbara Steele would find herself surrounded by the ghosts and barbed wire that cling to her psyche to this day. Immediately after producing Paramount’s War and Remembrance, an extremely popular mini-series, she burned every stitch of the clothing she’d worn inside the gates of Auschwitz. I was therefore unsurprised when, last week, my friend shouted: “How could such cruelty be allowed… Now?!”
Having no answers, I left Barbara to contemplate Holocausts past and present in solitude.
Her generation of bombed-out Brits witnessed presumptively adamantine laws created to seal WWII in memory, while keeping the nightmare from rising again. That Western democracies have openly declared their ghouls' burlesque in Gaza is, to her way of thinking, well, unthinkable. All the screen can offer us are references, allusions of the kind that Alain Resnais sought to distill in his 1956 indictment against genocide, Night and Fog.
I merely serve as some half-baked, self-assigned court reporter, catching anecdotes with one hand and passing them along (in no particular order) with the other…
When I ventured, “You're a closet exhibitionist,” she shot back with manic swiftness —"And YOU'RE the closet! A BIG closet, with intricate Elizabethan locks made of brass. The inside is lined with baize so that nothing can be heard, a place where Mozart rehearsals are held.”
Barbara’s warmly ironic “Have a groovy day” brings me up short every time.
by Daniel Riccuito