by Sara Bickley

A free two-day event at the Paine Street Theater this weekend will showcase an outsider’s macabre yet enchanting vision of Innsmouth as a crumbling village untouched by modernity, surrounded by shimmering waters populated by mermaids and monsters. This is the Innsmouth of pioneering Italian filmmaker Annunciata Bortolami.

Never heard of her? Until six years ago, neither had the man who organized the event. Martin Richárd, Associate Professor of Motion Picture Studies at Dyer College, first learned of Bortolami’s work while preparing class materials for his popular course on Italian exploitation films.

“I’d see references here and there,” he says. “In older books, mostly. I knew nothing about Bortolami, had never seen one of her films, and I started keeping track of these various mentions because I was curious.”

It was difficult to find solid information about Bortolami. Though the filmmaker was a compatriot and contemporary of legends like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, none of her works have been released on video. She doesn’t even have an IMDb page. “There’s hardly any trace of her,” said Richárd. “It’s like she’s been deleted from history.”

Eventually, though, Richárd got in touch with two people who knew Bortolami: Corin Weymouth, a painter who was romantically involved with her in the early 1970s, and Francesca Caffarelli, the script supervisor for her last film, Trasformazione.

They described Bortolami as an eccentric and reclusive woman – and, more surprisingly, as someone with a deep love for Innsmouth. “According to Corin,” says Richárd, “Annunciata summered here every year from 1971 until her disappearance in the mid-1980s. Innsmouth in those days was far from the town it is today, but she loved it. She said it felt more like home than either England or Italy ever would.”

All of her later films, from Il bacio della sirena (1972) onward, were set in a fantasy version of Innsmouth.

Bortolami’s friends also helped Richárd in tracking down prints of those films. Of at least eleven works directed by Bortolami, six have been found. All six will be shown on the main screen at the Paine Street Cinema this weekend, each followed by a discussion. The schedule is as follows:

Saturday
10:00am – Una discesa nel Maelstrom (1968, English title A Descent into the Maelstrom)
1:00pm – Il bacio della sirena (1972, The Mermaid’s Kiss)
4:00pm – La lingua del drago (1973, The Tongue of the Dragon)

Sunday
11:00am – Acqua blu e verde (1975, Water, Blue and Green)
2:00pm – Scogliera del Diavolo (1978, Devil’s Reef)
5:00pm – Trasformazione (1981, Transformation)

Of these films, only Una discesa nel Maelstrom and La lingua del drago exist in English-subtitled versions.

That doesn’t mean anglophones will be left out in the cold. Richárd has enlisted three Italian-speaking former students to prepare translations of the other four films. The translations will be projected using captioning equipment borrowed from the Ipswich Opera Company.

“I’m really gratified that so many people have been willing to volunteer their equipment and services,” says Richárd. “Everyone’s pulling together to create an event that otherwise wouldn’t be possible in this economic climate. That’s because they’re excited about rediscovering, not just a piece of film history, but a piece of our local history too.”

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