Footprints on the Moon: The Dreamlike Amnesia Giallo

Le orme was photographed by Vittorio Storaro. Sit with that for a second, because it reframes everything. In 1975 Storaro had already shot The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris for Bernardo Bertolucci. Within four years he would win an Academy Award for Apocalypse Now, and two more would follow for Reds and The Last Emperor. In the middle of that run, one of the two or three greatest cinematographers who has ever lived shot a modest Italian thriller for Luigi Bazzoni, and the film failed, disappeared, and spent the next four decades circulating — when it circulated at all — in prints that destroyed the only reason anyone should have cared.

It has been restored now. It is the most beautiful film the giallo boom produced, and it is barely a giallo at all.

Three days

Alice Cespi is a translator. Florinda Bolkan plays her with a stillness that reads as competence until you realise it is vigilance. Alice wakes and finds that three days are gone. Not blurred, not hazy: absent, with no account of them available to her and no evidence that anything happened except that the calendar says it did. In her flat she finds a torn postcard showing a hotel in a place called Garma, somewhere she has no memory of ever wanting to go.

So she goes.

That is the film’s structure and it is a very old one. A person travels to a place to retrieve themselves, and the place turns out to know more about them than they do. What Bazzoni does with it is remove the safety rail. There is no inspector here, no procedural apparatus, nobody whose job it is to establish facts on Alice’s behalf. She is her own only witness, and her only witness is the thing that has failed.

In Garma she is recognised. People greet her. They call her Nicole. They remember a woman with red hair who was here days ago, who did things, said things, made an impression. Alice’s hair is not red.

Storaro’s light does the plot

Here is the craft argument, and it is the reason to watch. Most amnesia thrillers signal unreliability through editing — the jump cut, the smear, the flash-frame. Bazzoni and Storaro do it through light, and light is far harder to argue with.

Garma is photographed as an over-exposed coastal town: bleached stone, hard white sun, shadows with edges like cut paper. It has the quality of a photograph that has been left in a window too long. The city Alice comes from is cool, grey, correct. The two palettes are so different that the film does not need to tell you Alice has crossed into a different order of reality — your eyes have already filed it. And because the transition is optical rather than editorial, it never reads as a device. You do not catch the film doing it.

Storaro’s other move is negative space. He frames Bolkan small and off-centre, against long white walls and empty squares, and he holds the frames longer than the action justifies. The cumulative effect over ninety minutes is a person being progressively erased by her own surroundings, achieved with composition alone. It is the same instinct Storaro brought to Bazzoni’s earlier The Fifth Cord, where he shrank Franco Nero against modernist concrete until the man became a smudge on the design. Bazzoni is the only director who ever got this specific thing out of Storaro, and he got it twice.

The moon, and Klaus Kinski

Threaded through the film is a recurring nightmare, drawn from a film Alice saw as a child: Footprints on the Moon, a science-fiction picture about an astronaut deliberately abandoned on the lunar surface as part of an experiment. Klaus Kinski appears as its Professor Blackmann, and he is in the actual film for very little screen time, which has not stopped every poster ever printed for it from putting him front and centre.

The film-within-a-film is the picture’s whole thesis, delivered in fragments. A man is left somewhere airless by people who decided in advance that he was expendable, and the experiment is not the abandonment. The experiment is watching what he does about it. Bazzoni cuts to the moon material at intervals throughout, in a completely different texture — grainy, monochrome-adjacent, deliberately cheap — so that Alice’s most stable memory is also her most obviously fake one.

That is a genuinely sophisticated idea about trauma. The thing she can reliably recall is a fiction she watched as a child; the three real days are gone. Anyone who has tried to interrogate their own early memories knows the sensation of finding that the vivid ones came from a screen.

Nicola Piovani scores it, the year after he scored The Perfume of the Lady in Black, and the two films together make a strong case for him as the most interesting composer working in Italian horror after Morricone. He writes Garma as almost pleasant, which by 1975 was becoming a whole school of Italian film music: score the trap as a holiday.

Watch for Nicoletta Elmi as Paola, the child in Garma. Elmi is the red-haired girl of Italian horror — she is in Baron Blood, she is in Deep Red the same year as this, and a decade later she is the usherette tearing tickets in Demons. Casting her here, in a film about a woman being told she has red hair, is either a superb joke or an accident, and I have never been able to decide.

The ancestor

The real parent of this film is Michelangelo Antonioni, and specifically L’Avventura, in which a woman disappears and the film loses interest in finding her because it has become interested in the people who are failing to look. Bazzoni takes that method and applies it to a genre that exists to supply answers. Storaro’s presence makes the descent explicit: this is a man who had shot Bertolucci’s The Conformist, the most beautiful film ever made about a man with no interior, and here he is shooting a woman with no exterior.

There is a strange rhyme in the release calendar, too. Antonioni’s The Passenger, in which a man swaps identities and follows a dead stranger’s appointments across the Mediterranean, came out in 1975 as well. One of those films is on every serious critic’s list. The other spent forty years as a rumour.

The director nobody kept

Luigi Bazzoni made very few films and two of them matter enormously, which is a ratio most working directors would take. He began with The Possessed in 1965, co-directed with Franco Rossellini, an austere black-and-white piece about a writer returning to a lakeside town to find that the woman he loved is dead and the town has agreed on a story about it. That film is one of the genuine ancestors of the giallo and almost nobody cites it. Then The Fifth Cord in 1971, then this, and then he stopped mattering to the industry.

The pattern in all three is identical and it explains why he never had a career. Bazzoni’s subject is a person arriving somewhere and discovering that the place has already agreed on a version of events that excludes them. There is no way to sell that. It has no set-pieces, no monster and no poster, and Italian producers in the seventies were buying set-pieces. He got Storaro twice and Florinda Bolkan once and made the most sustained argument anyone in that industry made about the unreliability of a shared record, and the market’s verdict was that it would rather have another film with a razor in it.

The case against

The film asks a great deal and returns very little in the way of plot, and I will not pretend that is always a virtue. There are stretches in Garma where Bazzoni is simply repeating his device: Alice asks, someone recognises her, she does not understand, cut to the moon. Three or four such rounds would have made the point. He runs more.

The supporting characters are functions. Bolkan carries every frame, and when she is off screen the film has nothing going on except its own gorgeousness, which is a lot of gorgeousness and no engine. And the ending — which I will get to below the line — will strike a fair number of viewers as a director declining to finish his work. I read it differently, though the complaint is fair and I have never been able to dismiss it.

Where to watch: the restoration, or nothing. I mean that with more force than usual. A film whose entire dramatic mechanism is the difference between two qualities of sunlight is destroyed by a soft transfer, and the tape-era copies that circulated for decades are the reason this film’s reputation took until the 2010s to arrive. If you have seen a bad Le orme, you have not seen Le orme.

For the wider shelf, the giallo canon is the map, though this film sits at the edge of it, waving.

Spoilers below

Alice was in Garma. She was there as Nicole, and the film’s slow horror is the accumulating evidence that the woman the town remembers is a real person who really did those things, in that body, with that face, and that Alice has no access to her.

Bazzoni refuses to convert this into a mechanism. There is no drug, no doctor, no scheme, no conspiracy to explain the split, and the film’s detractors have been complaining about that for fifty years. The refusal is the film. A giallo ends with an explanation because the form’s contract is that a hidden fact will be produced and the world will make sense again. Le orme takes the contract and declines to sign, and what it offers instead is the abandonment image: the man on the moon, left by people who decided he was surplus, watched by an audience with no intention of intervening.

That is what has happened to Alice, and Bazzoni’s argument is that it does not require a villain. She has been left somewhere airless by her own mind, which made a decision about her that she was not consulted on and cannot appeal. The film’s last movement lets go of the investigation entirely and settles into the abandonment, and the final images belong to the fiction rather than the case — the moon, the surface, the print in the dust that proves someone stood there and says nothing whatever about who.

The bootprint is the perfect emblem, and it is why the title is not the throwaway the marketing thought it was. A footprint is evidence with no identity attached. It certifies that a person existed at a spot and withholds everything else, and it will sit there, unweathered, for a very long time, being read by people who will never know whose foot it was. Alice spends the film reading her own.