Playful Provocation: Hypermediacy in Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik

We begin with a heist. But not quite – we really begin with an elaborate ploy, a project of misdirection. Inspector Ginko (Michel Piccoli) has orchestrated a spectacular motorcade to transport a large sum of banknotes; only, this motorcade is not carrying any actual banknotes at all; they are merely the diversion that Ginko has set in motion while he and a small coterie of other undercover officers attempt to transport the real ten million dollars. Ginko assures his commanding officer that such trickery is requisite when trying to avoid the ingenious tactics of the mysterious criminal mastermind, Diabolik (John Phillip Law). 

An extreme high angle shot holds still as the undercovers drive diagonally from bottom right to top left across the screen (Figure 1). Then, a black jaguar appears, and Ennio Morricone’s score lets rip what will become the signature reverb-infused guitar riff identifying the presence of Diabolik. Director Mario Bava neither cuts to a close-up of Diabolik nor simply tracks the black jaguar as it pursues the police. Rather, he zooms in on the car, somewhat awkwardly as the frame is momentarily comprised of a three-quarter view of the vehicle from above (Figure 2), before it peels off and the camera zooms back out and we cut to the next sequence. 

Figure 1 & 2

There are more than 50 instances in Danger: Diabolik (1968) of these zoom techniques – that works out to at least one zoom for roughly every two minutes of the film. They are crucial for not only grasping the film’s modernist aesthetic, but for understanding why Bava has become revered for his strategy of adaptation.¹ Bava’s technical prowess is here deployed for the sake of commenting on the power of filmmaking to create illusions: self-referential deceptions that become both content and form in Danger: Diabolik. Through two different strategies – frames within frames and zoom techniques – Bava captures the paradoxical dynamism of flatness native to his source material.

Bava’s Diabolik is an adaptation of an Italian adult comic series created by Angela and Luciana Giussani in 1962.² The series was the first of its kind: its anti-hero killed mercilessly, stole for purely selfish reasons and had no social ties apart from Eva Kant, Diabolik’s lover who is as disaffected with society and its rules as he is. Bava kept the episodic structure of the series as well as the anarchist sentiments of its protagonists. The narrative structure of the film itself seems to defy regular formats of progressive storytelling. After Diabolik steals the ten million dollars from Ginko, Bava spends 15 minutes showing us his underground lair filled with sports cars and mod-chic furnishings. The climax of this sequence involves Eva (Marisa Mell) spotting a news update about a priceless emerald necklace to be worn by Lady Clark (Caterina Boratto), the wife of the visiting minister of finance from the U.K., when the esteemed couple is to be hosted at the Château de Saint-Just in coming weeks. Another heist, then. And Ginko, it so happens, lies in wait. The film moves like this from one set piece to another – but the set design of these pieces is as clearly contrived as possible, to the advantage of Bava’s sense of adaptation. 

Artificiality is Bava’s goal with the set design. Both the interior of the underground lair and the exteriors of the Château de Saint-Just rely heavily upon matte paintings to produce a sense of scale for the characters and scope for the viewer. But the flatness of these backdrops is what Bava highlights as essential to the medium of comics. He does not, however, mistake flatness for stasis. Bava utilises the flatness of the film screen to echo the comic page. 

For instance, when casing the Château de Saint-Just, Eva and Diabolik sit in the black jaguar parked on the street outside. Bava’s camera is placed, oddly, in the front seat with them, as they look through the windshield and up at the Château (Figure 3). We can only see Eva and Diabolik because their heads are reflected in the rear-view mirror occupying the top half of the frame. Typical mise-en-scène would utilise depth of field for this shot: placing the camera behind Eva and Diabolik, in the backseat perhaps, while they move their heads ever so subtly as they talk to one another in the foreground of the image, while maybe some pedestrians cross the street in the mid-ground seen through the windshield, and finally some indication of action up in the castle, maybe from a backlit window. Bava has none of this. Forsaking depth of field, the image is a tableau of layered frames – or, better yet, comic panels. Crucial to the whole shot is his inclusion of the rear-view mirror, in which we, the audience, can clearly see Eva and Diabolik partially framed. We have then, four frames, or panels, at once: the filmic screen itself; the rear-view mirror which is centered so as to be out there, in the distance, but is in reality occupying the same real space as the camera’s POV; the windshield; and then finally the matte painting of the giant castle. The activity of framing and the role of the camera as an apparatus of mediation channels the enclosure and fragmentation of the comic panel, imposing an awareness of artifice on the viewer.

Figure 3

Bava’s usage of zoom techniques throughout the film serves this same goal of depthless dynamism. Bava avoids dollying the camera, tracking in and out for effect: he does not want this to be a world that we enter into and live in, but a surface we traverse, moving along with Eva and Diabolik in a detached manner. For the thrills and nothing more. On several occasions Bava gives us an establishing shot before zooming in on a seemingly irrelevant detail, then cutting to his interior. These zooms are not merely acts of punctuation used to highlight elements within the frame that possess narrative significance. Rather, the sheer excess and near-wanton deployment of the technique betrays an intention beyond storytelling – especially when the narrative arc is subservient to the episodic enjoyment of ever-escalating feats of thievery and mischief. These zooms do not pull the viewer into a field of view or a vista that recedes; they magnify the surface and confront us with an abruptness of space. 

Much has been said about the Pop Art aesthetics of Danger: Diabolik.³ Vibrant colours, psychedelic imagery and music, references to consumer culture and the role of mass media – and all of this is no doubt present. But what makes Bava a modernist master is his ability to turn his work of adaptation into a series of self-referential techniques that comment upon the act of filmmaking itself.  

Once inside the Château de Saint-Just, Diabolik quickly discovers Ginko’s setup. The emerald necklace is left splayed out on a decorative table in a now unoccupied room. Directly across from the table, concealed at the centre of a large Baroque-era portrait, is a hidden camera – one that Bava dramatically zooms in on before cutting to its reverse side: the inspector and his team observing the video monitor from another room down the hall. Diabolik slowly positions himself at the right angle of the camera’s view before pulling out a Polaroid peel-apart camera and snapping a shot of the scene (Figure 4). He attaches the photograph to an extinguished candle atop a rather tall candle holder placed directly in front of the hidden camera, creating the perfect illusion for the inspector and his team. Cutting back to Ginko, Bava holds on the security monitor: as the filmic screen frames a video recorder framing a polaroid. Misdirection, for Bava, is an art of perspective.

Figure 4

Unlike film, the medium of comics cannot disavow its material conditions: the illusion of movement that belongs solely to the cinematic apparatus is relegated to the reader’s imaginary when enjoying a comic strip. The best directors of the period knew that to translate the mediality of the comic to the medium of film would require disruptive techniques. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, often adopted rather literal inserts in order to capture the unique relation between image and text that remains the purview of comics.⁴ In his Made in U.S.A. (1966), the director weaved in actual frames of colourful word bubbles (fumetti – Italian for the “little puffs of smoke,” which became the word for comics) to accentuate moments of action. Bava, by contrast, eschewing the relation between image and text, found an altogether filmic means for cannibalising the pictorial aesthetics of comics while continually drawing attention to the construction he was displaying. 

Danger: Diabolik is, then, an exercise in what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin dub hypermediacy⁵ – that is, when a cultural work is engaged in drawing attention to itself as a means of mediation. This self-conscious mediation subverts the dominant trend of Western artistic design since the Renaissance: the illusion of immediacy, the denial of any mediating force between the viewer and the work, the fundamental deception of realism. When a work is hypermediated, the viewer enjoys the self-referential ingredients which flaunt the techniques of fabulation. Flatness instead of depth, the iteration of frames within frames, and the zoom technique all elevate Danger: Diabolik to an elite level of hypermediacy. 

Is this hypermediacy not what is principally on display in the film’s most Warholian sequence? Prior to Diabolik’s penetration of the Château, Valmont (Adolfo Celi), criminal kingpin who has been forced into an alliance with the police to capture Diabolik, receives a surreptitiously acquired description of Eva. Valmont calls in Tony (Giuseppe Fazio), who possesses an identikit – an apparatus that creates a visual rendering of a potential person based on an amalgamation of discrete features. Bava – who has Valmont’s crew throughout this exchange framed by an empty and labyrinthine bookcase that creates a compartmentalised series of panels encasing the actors (Figure 5) – carries out this shifting amalgamation through an animated montage that looks ripped from Warhol’s silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe (Figure 6). But in the context of creating a photographic rendering of a person without their having been placed before the camera – particularly for the purpose of capturing a criminal – the scene also evokes the composite photography of Francis Galton, a pioneer of anthropometrics who used standardised images of individual criminals, superimposing them to produce an ideal type or generic rendering.⁶ It is as if Bava could not stop himself from making the construction of the image, and the history of its abuse, a part of the diegesis itself. 

Figure 5 & 6

From its episodic structure to its vertiginous use of zooms to its self-referential deployment of the comic panel as a framing device, Danger: Diabolik finds Bava at his most playful and self-assured assessment of the medium and its power of illusion. Rather than alienating the viewer from the filmic narrative, all of these features stand as an open invitation to revel in the art of adaptation and misdirection. A diabolical magician, indeed. 

Diabolik/Danger: Diabolik (1968 Italy/France 105 mins)

Prod Co: Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica, Marianne Productions Prod: Dino De Laurentiis Dir: Mario Bava Scr: Dino Maiuri, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates, Mario Bava Phot: Antonio Rinaldi Ed: Romana Fortini Mus: Ennio Morricone Prod Des: Carlo Rambaldi Art Dir: Flavio Mogherini, Piero Gherardi Cos Des: Luciana Marinucci, Giulio Coltellacci, Piero Gherardi

Cast: John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Claudio Gora, Mario Donen, Renzo Palmer, Caterina Boratto, Lucia Modugno, Annie Gorassini, Giuseppe Fazio

Endnotes