his neck swathed in a bloody bandage; as she screams from the shock, she grabs her own throat in a sympathetic response. (Here is the first indication of Nevenka “sharing” Kurt’s feelings, giving a portion of her life in com- pensation for the one she has taken.) In the next scene, Bava follows Nevenka’s train of thought by show- ing her, later that night, reassuring herself by tracing the light at play on the chapel window back to the move- ments of dark clouds across the face of a full moon. To a sane mind, this would resolve the matter, but Bava ex- ecutes a match-dissolve from the cloud-swept moon to a rhyming shot of Nevenka’s black hair swept across the face of a pillow. The camera then moves laterally to a tight-shot of Nevenka’s eyes, open in the dark, sleepless and troubled. After this, the shots become fragmented, mosaical, their framing remarking on a literal breakdown. As the sequence plays out, Kurt materializes from the shad- ows of her room, but he disappears at the moment she shows fear—but worse than being haunted is being without this man she loves, and her immediate regret brings him back. As Kurt’s looming hand tears the back of her nightgown for a taste of his whip, Nevenka’s terror once again over- whelms her receptive feelings and she cries out to Christian for help. It may seem odd that she would turn to Christian in this instance, but while theirs is a loveless marriage, Nevenka has yet to admit her love for Kurt even to herself; indeed, her haunting may well be predicated on her inability to admit her true feelings for the man she has killed, just as she has re- pressed the memory of killing him. At this point, Nevenka is still dependent on her husband to see her through this nightmare; he is her last tie to reality—which also explains her strangely jealous response to over- hearing his declaration of love to Katia, later in the picture.
The character of Nevenka—and the
nature of her story—anticipates Catherine Deneuve’s role of Severine in Luís Buñuel’s celebrated film Belle de Jour (1967) and actually goes much
ITALIAN manifesto featuring Losat’s discovery of the dead Kurt.
