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 2nd 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...
Footprints On The Moon (1975)
Dir. Luigi Bazzoni
Italy
Film #1, for Monday 1st October, of Halloween 31 for 31
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.
Told as a documentary, Lake Mungo is the story of the
disappearance of a sixteen year old girl named Alice, her family coping badly
with her loss but, over the next two years, dealing with the possibility that
her ghost haunts their home and certain other areas. Using the tropes of the
stereotypical documentary found on television - talking head interviews, establishing
footage, archival material from the hauntings and slowly discovered events -
the story peels away the layers until the truth about Alice' life and her last
days alive are revealed. It sounds very interesting. The film reaches something
of immense interest when there is more to the story than a mere haunting, the contradictions
of a family where members don't reveal things to the others, expectations are
not met and new discoveries are found, including an almost mythological or Edgar Allen Poe-like conclusion to the
story. But there is a fatal flaw. It may be only a personal one for me as a
viewer, but it's a major aesthetics issue that ruins the film. The documentary
structure itself.
