...live well for less than you can remember. [Footprints On The Moon (1975)]

Immediately in the gate, and there was a hiccup. Originally the opening film for this Halloween project was the 1974 erotic vampire movie Vampyres (directed by Jose Ramon Larraz), but the film turned out to be a middling chore to sit through not worth a full review. Like many genre films from the United Kingdom, (even as a Brit who wants to love the concept of them as a fan and in a patriotic way), they, the older ones especially, can be immensely disappointing and tediously made – dull story, pedestrian cinematography and editing, strung together by dull exposition dialogue and, with Vampyres’ case, a stilted take on sexuality and the erotic (bar the humbly beautiful Sally Faulkner who is far more interesting and physically attractive in her ordinariness on screen than the generic, forced beauty of the lead actresses Marianne Morris and Anulka who get top billing above everyone else in the cast). There are of course exceptions which are great British genre films, but consistency has probably been the problem that has prevented us from having a continuous flow of films being made until the 2000s onward. British cinema can fall into an inadvertent awkwardness with the quality of the films which causes many to be poor as a result...which digging through the barrel of 1970s films especially means that, for every fascinating one (such as the famous cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s bizarre Freaks remake The Freakmaker (1974)), there’s many more bad ones.

I had a replacement thankfully at hand, the original choice for the Tuesday 2^nd film, not a horror film in the conventional sense but something worth its weight amongst the potential inclusions later down the line. With its cold, strange air it was the perfect choice to start off the monthly series...

From http://i19.fastpic.ru/big/2011/0413/e5/c81fadd174dec2dba7fb0501120160e5.jpeg

Footprints On The Moon (1975)

Dir. Luigi Bazzoni

Italy

Film #1, for Monday 1^st October, of Halloween 31 for 31

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/footprints-on-the-moon/w448/footprints-on-the-moon.jpg?1336315890

Fittingly the debacle with Vampyres perfectly sets up the virtues of the curious Footprints On The Moon. Everything Vampyres does so flatly, the Italian mystery drama did right and feverishly. Following the confusion of a woman Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan) as she suffers from three days of her life missing from her memory, the film is an immensely slow-burner, one which requires great patience but rewards in the end.

The Italian genre films especially in their boom in the 1970s seem far more consistent than their British equivalents from what I’ve seen. Of course, there are plenty of terrible films but probably one of the biggest advantages they had was that the quota of talented individuals in directing, scriptwriting, composing, cinematography and many of other areas of film production was far more noticeable on surface level. Even figures like Lucio Fulci, who are as well known for the varying quality of his work as well as his best amongst his fans, backed up his reputation with the creativity (and a nihilistic personal voice) to craft together even the lowest of budgeted material into something memorable or legitimately great. As the first film I’ve seen from director-writer Luigi Bazzoni, co-written with the author of the original novel (and possible co-director of it) Mario Fanelli, he is a capable director worth looking into. Their script is the best of the work. Delving into the well worn clichés of a main character potentially having a double, or is losing her sanity, bluntly, they yet avoid a laboured work by shaping it into a quietly moody, unbelievably quiet and gentle paced, potboiler  which is immediately unconventional from the first few minutes on. The considered but cold air of the film, in pace and story threading, is matched by an ever growing string of threads. Alice goes to the island of Garma for most of the film, a place she hasn’t been to but may have had, time wounded by holes within its linear line in which either duplicates exist or even a timeloop in the reality exists, and even if the film stays grounded within a realist logic to its tale, following Alice’s perspective and the mood of the film leaves us in a mindframe where anything could happen – reality doubling over itself, replicate itself, remove parts of Alice’s actions from existence, or putting it in random order – and time’s sense of cohesion is smashed to pieces, like the rhythms of music are broken and rearranged into new orders by an experimental rock band of the period, while still remaining in its original shape behind the elusive veils that throw us off. Footsteps... pushes itself into further reaches of the peculiar writing choices by Alice’s constant dreams of an astronaut being left stranded on the Moon as a guinea pig for a survival experiment. Said to be memories of a film she found too distressing to see all the way through, the film splits its own skull, its brain, in a meta-textual way with the fictitious movie, moving between On The Silver Globe-era Andrzej Żuławski images on the Moon itself and scratchy, black and white scenes of scientists watching the proceedings on TVs and controlling them. Is Klaus Kinski, playing the corrupt scientist Blackmann who orders the proceedings, actually playing himself within-a-genre-film-within-a-genre-film, his dubbed-in English voice played on by the presence of non-English subtitles translating his words, or is it merely a twisted fever dream of Alice’s mind in celluloid form, the best kind of material form even above television to have nightmares through? Kinski was already in many genre films by 1975, including Italian spaghetti westerns, so the inspired tangents Bazzoni and Fanelli created for the film possess an ability to self-reflect on themselves - as merely cinematic tropes - as well as pull the rug out from under the viewer continually without fail. That the UK DVD, the only release, to my knowledge, that is available globally, is a hybrid of the best surviving materials of a sadly neglected film adds to the intangibility of the final product. Picture quality can suddenly shift, and for certain scenes that may have been removed to trim the running time down, the English dub is suddenly dropped for Italian dialogue with subtitles for characters who were speaking English seconds before, an accidental flourish of inspiration when the protagonist translates speeches from one language to another, into text form, as a profession. If a better print could be salvaged, it would be for the better, but Footprints... continual sidesteps, until its neither showing its hand or being elusive about its plot, a half space inbetween where the oppressive but mysteriously compelling atmosphere pulls you further onwards, allows technical issues with the source prints and their availability to increase its abstractness.

To Italian genre cinema’s help as well was that the best in its country’s cinematic talent truly did work on the films and put their best work out within it as well as in prestige films. Ennio Morricone’s genre compositions are as well loved and praised as his work for his later compositions for prestige films or for the legendary Sergio Leone westerns. For Footprints..., not only is the editor Roberto Perpignani, who has worked with Bernardo Bertolucci to Miklós Jancsó, and contributes a lot to the film, but for cinematography Bazzoni had the legendary Vittorio Storaro. Within the same year of 1970 Storaro contributed vital work in crafting the masterpiece that would be Bertolucci’s The Conformist and worked on Dario Argento’s debut The Bird With The Crystal Plummage, a strong contender for Argento’s best film, showing the flexibility and craftsmanship the Italians had to switch from varying types of cinema, within bias, and create pieces of art. Vampyrs suffered from the same problem many films from around the world, ever area of cinema, every era include the current one, have in that it defensively goes with a ‘safe’ conventional style of scene capturing, the handheld of now or the static camera work of the 1970s that it is made of, consisting almost always of mid-to-close up shots of the actors and the actions taking place without real purpose, no sense of playing or tampering with the form to create effects, and more problematically, never letting the viewer sink into the environments and ‘feel’ the space of the locations and sets the plot is set in. You don’t have to have a Film Studies knowledge of types of camera shots like I had at college to notice this problem in many films – think how very little you actually ‘see’ in most films on screen, even those that claim to be expansive epics, and how repetitious it is (action film fans already know of this through the almost complete hatred of shaky cam fight scenes after an entire 1980s full of fights shown in their fullest on screen) and how a film like Footprints... thanks to  Storaro lets the buildings and architecture tower Alice from the distance and in close-up. Even with the jungle sets of Apocalypse Now (1979) and the comic book adapatation Dick Tracey (1990) and its primary colour, cartoon noir, Storaro is obsessed with space on screen as much as he is with colour and light, and within Footprint...’s abstract story the sense of space adds to the tensions Alice feels as conspiracy, doubles and a monochrome Kinski tormenting astronauts meld together. It also adds a romantic but elegantly distant framing to the events that pulls it away from its bizarre roots but makes it far more unsettlingly weird in its almost sweet and beautiful cinematography. This, combined with a score from Nicola Piovani, heightens the quality of the film, the music just as vital in taking you by the hand along in the disrupted threads of the story but also in its beauty causing the whole film (intentionally) to feel more alien in tone. One of the most potent examples of ‘odd’ cinema, as someone who was compiling a list of the ‘Cinema of the Abstract’ on this blog before this project, and will add this film to it, are those which match their unconventionality to a serenity and beauty in the quality of the work. From David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) to even Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975),  when the truly stunning contributions to image, sound and music are added to material that is surreal, disturbing, and in the case of Salo, the utterly vile and horrifying, the mix of the different sides of the coin are strange bedfellows who are yet inseparable and may be twins and the same. Alice’s journey by the end of the film is both deeply unsettling but – from the first images of a space shuttle spinning closer to the Moon, the dated effects adding to the off kilter nature of it – gorgeous to view. That even a Frankenstein print, toiled on with clearly great strain and love from Shameless Screen Entertainment, clearly as well film fans who desperately wanted to pluck this obscure gem from the mire because they loved it and pass it onto other film fans like me, actually adds to its beauty as well as abstractions makes it a rare film. Whether you can get with its slow pace, almost complete lack of blood and sex compared to other genre films from the country (the 18 certificate for the UK DVD is for the trailers for all of Shameless’ back catalogue they put on all their discs), and its desire with mood than rationality is up to you, but these divisive factors also can be said to be virtues as well. That Shameless released this as a ‘giallo’ on its back cover blurb is an understandable attempt to fit in into an established frame to entice the curious when the film itself is on its own existence. I thought it would be a giallo going into it but, despite my slim knowledge of the sub-genre, this is far from what I was expecting. Even compared to Argento’s least conventional contributions, Footprints On The Moon is either the most elegant and elusive siren within the Italian murder mystery fold I’ve seen, sat on a mass of intangibility in the clouds alongside the classical The Bird With The Crystal Plumage to the crassness of Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball (1975), or in keeping with the astronautical theme, is on a completely different satellite in space to the entire sub-genre.