Baba Yaga (1973)

After meeting a mysterious woman who calls herself Baba Yaga, fashion photographer Valentina (Isabelle de Funès) begins to experience strange dreams and visions and weird happenings, including the deaths of people whose pictures were snapped by one of her cameras the mysterious woman had handled. Convinced that the woman (Carroll Baker) is a witch who is trying to place Valentina under her control, she tries to convince her skeptical boyfriend Arno (George Eastman) to help her break Baba Yaga's supernatural influence.

The story of a lesbian witch who attempts to psychologically control another woman by cursing a camera and sending a familiar in the form of a doll in revealing fetishwear -- who sometimes assumes human form (Ely Galleani) to do Baba Yaga's bidding -- is also the story of compromises in terms of casting, control over the finished work, and to some degree censorship. Neither Isabelle de Funès nor Carroll Baker were Corrado Farina's first choices for the roles they played, but they did very well -- especially Carroll Baker -- under the circumstances. Corrado Farina's finished cut of the film was subjected to some irreversible (and unauthorized) negative cuts as well, and the film was contracted to a financially troubled distributor who could not promote the film properly, so the film sank at the box office and was Farina's second and last feature.

This Italian thriller was based on the comics character created by Guido Crepax, an artist whose comic strips were a great fascination for director/screenwriter Corrado Farina since they began to be serialized in the magazine Linus in the mid-sixties. Crepax's strips were some of the most sophisticated and challenging works in the medium, using a bold black-and-white style and laid out using the logic of film editing. Full of references to art, literature, psychoanalysis and classic film, they were also graphically sexual and often perverse, thoroughly modern and designed for well-read, broad-minded adults. As a filmmaker, Farina had followed the attempts of the time at films based on comic strips with interest (Mario Bava's Diabolik, Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise, Roger Vadim's Barbarella) but found them less true to their sources than he would have liked, and decided to try his hand at a comics-inspired film more integrated with Crepax's cinema-inspired comics. As he himself admits, he was only partly successful, using sequences of high-contrast still photographs in repetitive patterns in imitiation of Crepax's graphics.

In the dream and nightmare sequences which punctuate the action, the film is a little more successful in conveying the phantasmagoria of the Valentina stories. The comics' attempt at being intellectually well-versed comes off a bit superficial in the film: Valentina's studio-apartment is modishy littered with books by Marx, Mickey Mouse, Sade, Beardsley, and there is an art book open to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon next to the clear lucite telephone, she attends showings of films like The Golem, and the dialogue is littered with sometimes embarrassing attempts at intellectual chatter. This turned out to be the second and final feature film from Corrado Farina, so Baba Yaga remains a one-of-a-kind thriller that is stylish and interesting in spite of the compromises made: intelligent, sexy, creepy, and a suspicion of kinkiness.

Baba Yaga is available as a DVD from Blue Underground, a company specializing in European exploitation films, with an interview with director Corrado Farina, a DVD-ROM feature (a .pdf file showing comparisons between Crepax's comics and stills from the film), and a short film by Farina on Crepax's comics, Freud in Color.