Guest writer Stephanie Sack on giallo masterpiece of loneliness "Footprints on the Moon" (Bazzoni, 1975, Italy)

Footprints on the Moon, Bazzoni, 1975

I have never been lonelier than when I have been with other people.

That is one of the worst feelings in worlds both known and unknown.  If you are anywhere in or near or approaching that corridor of aching cold, for whatever reason, right now, I got you.  I get it. It's horrible. No thank you.

There is a lot of chatter about loneliness these days.

These are lonely times, exceptionally so. The power of loneliness, necrotic and neurotic, has only begun to be researched as a diagnosis rather than a definition.

Lonely people of all provenances identify their own through a kind of hanky code. These types of clues are, astonishingly, everywhere. 

Wedding rings, for example, are the heteronormative version of a hanky code. It's fun to observe who is and isn't wearing a wedding ring, be it in a film or elsewhere.  It's intel into their relationship with loneliness.

An entire new movement of lonely men have embraced their alienation as an identity, brandishing their impotent warcry through a synthetic language eerily similar to the venomous slang of 1984 and Shakespearean slander in A Clockwork Orange. From the closed captioned colloquialisms of Newspeak to the Slavic-tinged cacophony of Nadsat, isolated groups rely on a private language to recognize loneliness in others; whether or not this language is then further employed to efficiently discuss loneliness is yet to be determined.

Even God has a lonely man, a lonely man with only rain and desire and darkness to keep him company as he fights a lonely post-war war against Manhattan's machines, both through the taxi he tensely pilots and the political group on which he helplessly fixates. The relentless intimacy of this isolation through technology, whether it is automotive or automated, is hella real.

Loneliness on film, when done right, is sublime.  How lonely Dr Harford must feel in his tacky costume at that most Rococo of cocktail parties. How lonely Jeffrey Beaumont must feel in that closet, suddenly thrust further into dangerous mysteries for which he lacks all innate language to describe.  How lonely Travis Bickle is in his cab, in the porn theater, in his dreams. These are powerful and provocative images.

But these towering images of epic cinematic loneliness are all of men.

Beautiful men.  Complicated men.  Smart men.  Men who are changing. Men who want to be good.  Men who behave madly.

I have spent a lot of time with these men on screen. I have spent a lot of time with these men off screen.  I enjoy spending time with both.

However, a man's loneliness is a different experience and therefore a different expression than that of a woman's.

Certainly, loneliness lives precariously close to hopelessness in heads and holograms of all genders and genetics; however, while a man's topography of loneliness is photographed by award-winning directors and lionized by groundbreaking podcast series, the coordinates of loneliness are perceived and received differently by women, and as such, are imprinted differently on film.

A woman's loneliness is wispy and gauzy, whispered and flimsy, and is often profoundly misunderstood for all sorts of heartbreaking reasons by both herself and those she loves most, usually the closest with and to her.  Children. Husbands.  Partners. Lovers. Parents.  Friends.  Family. Everyone.

Women's loneliness sighs as it unfurls. It is diffuse, directionless, draining.  It's shameful. It's boring.  It's exhausting.  It's alienating. It's suffocating. Conversations start and end, but they end badly.  Questions are mistaken for accusations.  Everything is wrong but nothing is wrong, and everything hurts. 

And it's an elusive state not often written about let alone captured by film directors of any eras/creeds/lineages.

And when this formlessly feminine locus of loneliness is authentically captured on the confines of film, especially when it is observed and revealed and preserved by a man, it is beyond sublime.

It is transcendent.

In Luigi Bazzoni's 1975's Giallo "Footprints on the Moon", the silent screams of an astronaut deliberately abandoned by a diabolical scientist to suffocate on the moon haunt the days and nights of a woman who seems to be at the center of a distressing mystery as to who she used to be and who she is now.

Typical of the era's Gialli, and released in the middle of the genre's most celebrated decade, Footprints explores the ideas of operatic violence and psychological obsession as concepts both visually and thematically intertwined. Saturated blue and magnificent turquoise are set against incandescent shades of yellow, pleasurably connecting plot points through the era's overt reliance of beauty and color and light to covertly telegraph a woman's confusion and isolation.

Astonishingly, however, this film's examination of a woman's loneliness is framed through both the delivery and imagery of post-war science fiction.  The idea of mad scientists stranding cosmonauts on a desolate lunar surface speaks to general post-war anxieties about the space race's rocket fuel coming directly from Central Europe's deepest laboratories. The fact that the film's main character saw this story on television as a child also reveals not only the depth of these fears, but their breadth as well.

A language translator, Alice Cespi is accustomed to a solitary city lifestyle thanks to her ability to effectively translate words into thoughts, thoughts, into idioms, and idioms back to words.  She lives by herself, turns in her work assignments by herself, and, before she goes to bed by herself, she takes pills, ostensibly to address ongoing insomnia.  This is a smart woman, a woman who relies on her intellect to ensure her independence, and even has the means to obtain man-made shortcuts to sleep.  Her loneliness keeps her awake at night otherwise.

Alice's slow and strange journey from and to her own feminine footprints was beautifully photographed in Turkey by Vittorio Storarao, one of Italy's most seasoned and sensitive cinematographers.  These uneasy visual alliances and historical haze between the Occident and Orient underscore one of the genre's darkest twist endings, when, with one cut, the Giallo implodes not with an explosive accusation against a sexually-motivated murderer, but with a woman's soul shattering interpretation of her own airless isolation.  It is here her loneliness trespasses and then transcends the boundaries of reality.

And it is sublime.

Depressing, despondent, damning, and enthusiastically recommended.

Written by Stephanie Sack.

https://www.facebook.com/stephanie.sack.5/

https://www.instagram.com/voluptuousrobot/

Check out this post and Stephanie’s blog: https://wearepolaris.org/2020/08/16/following-the-footprints/