LE ORME
(aka FOOTPRINTS)
(aka FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON)
(aka PRIMAL IMPULSE)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, 1975
96 mins. Italy.
In dubbed English with a few minutes of Italian.
SUNDAY, JULY 23 – DUSK at ARVERNE CINEMA
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (LE ORME will return to Spectacle in August 2023.)
Spectacle is thrilled to partner with Rockaway Film Festival for a special outdoor presentation of Luigi Bazzoni’s surreal psychological thriller LE ORME (1975). Newly scanned in 4K from the original camera negatives by Severin Films, LE ORME will be preceded by cosmic short films by avant-garde filmmaker Jeanne Liotta who will join us in attendance.
In Luigi Bazzoni’s uniquely hallucinatory LE ORME, memories of a science fiction film seen in childhood return to haunt Alice (Florinda Bolkan, of LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN). The fragments of the film lodged in her memory concern an astronaut left behind on the moon; as Alice becomes more and more preoccupied with this vision, her life begins to spin out of control.
Shown at Spectacle in its first “Spectober” programme, LE ORME (originally reedited and rereleased in the States and Europe as PRIMAL IMPULSE) is an unsung masterpiece of 70s genre cinema, marrying the sustained ambient dread of gialli with god-tier cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (just after lensing Elizabeth Taylor in the similarly mental IDENTITK and before Bertolucci’s epic folly NOVOCENTO.) Klaus Kinski features in an extended cameo as the head of Mission Control.
“This hallucinatory Italian film resists easy classification, attempting to subjectively portray the fractured, paranoid psyche of a woman suddenly haunted by memories of a bizarre science fiction film seen in childhood. Florinda Balkan drifts through cinematographer Vittorio Storaro‘s strange, beautiful tableaux much like Monica Vitti in RED DESERT. Often mischaracterized as a giallo—I suppose simply because it’s Italian and stars Balkan—this is more of a haunting puzzle film grinding inexorably toward abject hysterics.” – Screen Slate
“Psychedelically haunting… An existentialist adventure that combines the narrative mystery of SOLARIS with the vivid visions of Argento.” – Electric Sheep Magazine
“Seek it out and unravel its mystery…One of the most unique and overlooked Italian films of the ‘70s.” – Moon In The Gutter
JEANNE LIOTTA makes films, video, moving image installations, projector performances and other media operating at a lively intersection of art, science,& natural philosophy. Her signature 16mm film of the night skies, OBSERVANDO EL CIELO (2007), has won many prizes including the prestigious Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and was voted among the top ten films of the decade by The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Her films and videos have been screened around the world, including The Whitney Biennial, The New York Film Festival, SFMOMA, The Cinematheque Francais, Museo Nitsch in Naples Italy, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Menil Collection Houston, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver . Her works are included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Vienna Film Museum, The European Media Arts Collection, Harvard and Duke Universities. Liotta is a Professor of Moving Image Arts at CU Boulder and is also on the faculty at The Bard MFA program in the Hudson Valley. She is represented by Microscope Gallery, NYC where she has had two solo exhibitions, “Break the Sky”(2018) and “The World is a Picture of The World” (2021). Her films and video works are distributed by Lightcone in Paris, France.
