Aging Faces, Voice, and Barbara Steele’s Revenge

"Aging Faces, Voice, and Barbara Steele’s Revenge" begins with fragments from La maschera del demonio (Mario Bava, 1960), an Italian gothic horror film that is essentially about the process of aging as an evil in itself. In this film the English actress Barbara Steele, who would later go on to star in several similar films of the period, plays two women: one young and one old/dead, the former good and the latter evil. The film uses makeup and changes of speed to show the horrific (as well as spectacular) aging process. The video essay then brings in films made by Steele later in her life (including Federico Fellini’s 8½ from 1963, David Cronenberg’s Shivers from 1975, and Gionata Zarantonello’s The Butterfly Room from 2012 in which she plays a murderous elderly woman), allowing the viewer to see a more realistic (?) aging process. At only 40 years old, she speaks to Delphine Seyrig in Sois belle et tais-toi (1981) about her acting career already in the past tense, critical of the films she’s made in a male-dominated industry and how she feels reduced by someone else’s image of her.