shadowplay

I read of Arrigo Frusta in Roberto Curti’s majestic Italian Gothic Horror Films: 1957-1969, a book which generously covers not only the years specified in its title but all the years before. Curti assiduously traces the origins of the Barbara Steele-type Gothic horror in the melodramas and diva dolorosa films of previous decades. Frusta gets a mention because “Maschera tragica (“Tragic Mask,” 1911) by Arrigo Frusta (real name Augusto Sebastiano Ferraris) transposed Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” to
Naples and added to it an optimistic religious conclusion.”

Sadly the film isn’t available, but LA MADRE E LA MORTE (THE MOTHER AND DEATH, also 1911) is. One is immediately reminded of Lang’s DER MUDE TOD/DESTINY.

Death shows up to claim an ailing baby. The mother appeals to heaven and the Angel of Life (hmm, not sure of the scriptural authority behind this figure but there’s an Angel of Death who acts as a kind of celestial hitman for Moses, so I guess he ought to have an opposite number, and she ought to be female. For balance).

"The angel of life indicates the path taken by Death."

Mom follows the direction indicated, somewhat vaguely it must be admitted, by the A of L, and suddenly we’re on a snowy location. I hope mom doesn’t exhaust herself with melodramatic/Italian gesticulation before she reaches her otherworldly destination.

Rather than the conventional three-headed dog, Hades is guarded by a nice old lady who is bribable with items of clothing. This leads to a spectacular icy chasm where mom proceeds cautiously until she’s safely back in the studio. Death has, from the first, strongly resembled portraits of Father Time, only black-robed, and the Kingdom of Death, in its set design, seems to make clear the connection. Death = Time. Seems valid.

This Italian mama is particularly devoted to her offspring and soon has Death on the ropes with an overwhelming crusade of semaphore. His troupe of shockheaded pageboys are no good as backup. But the more she waves her arms, the more he points, and one particular indication causes the image of the departed baby to appear on the face of the nearest grandfather clock. I don’t quite know what to make of this. Is the infant condemned to eternity inhabiting the woodwork, like Joan Chen in Twin Peaks?

Old Father Death now conveys mama to “the Fountain of the Future” which sounds like an Epcot Center display but instead grants a vision via double or triple exposure of the babyfaced grandfather clock, then images of the child growing up — a sort of semi-real fantasy projection, like uncrucified Willem Dafoe’s life in Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST? Our dead baby, who had seemed so noble when he was merely a small corpse, grows up to be a right little bastard, more interested in pounding a tabletop than doing his homework, throwing mama’s soup on the floor, and eventually getting swallied and murdering a man in a tavern brawl. Finally, the ungrateful shit hangs himself in his prison cell, cursing life.

So that’s why we have infant mortality, so there won’t be any bad people. And that must be why, with infant mortality falling, there are so many more bad people. No wonder RFK Jr. is striving to bring back all the old childhood diseases, so we won’t be plagued with men like him anymore.

Mama is now persuaded that her child’s death was for the common good, and Frusti ends with an allegory within an allegory, dissolving from a Madonna pierced with swords to a Madonna clutching bouquets.

This sort of non-diegetic ending, echoing the famous gunshot at the end of Porter’s GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, seems to anticipate the later advances of Griffith, per Tom Gunning, in which concluding scenes which ARE diegetic — part of the story — use the camera as a narrative device to present, demonstrate, dramatize story beats rather than merely recording a set of performances. What’s peculiar is that the non-diegetic version seems at first a more abstruse or sophisticated device than Griffith’s “And so…” shots. But the non-diegetic endings came first.

Quite a weird little tale, and I’d love to see what he got up to with Poe’s Masque. The “optimistic religious conclusion” Curti ascribes to that film seems very much in keeping with the religiose conclusion here. If anyone can point me in the director of Frusta’s TRAGIC MASK I’d be grateful.