70’s

Fascination (1979)

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But first a riddle:
What’s black and white and red all over?…

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Two women in a slaughterhouse!

This shot from the first five lingering minutes of Fascination pretty much sums up our mostly-beloved director Jean Rollin’s style in a nutshell. It’s a beautifully framed and colored piece of bizarre art, a charming, macabre, drawn-out, actionless spectacle to behold.  As with most art for art’s sake, it means nothing except what the viewer decides it means after staring at it for too long.  That said, if you want a slow, subtitled stroll through some castles, vampires and tits, Jean is your guy.

This was the second Jean movie we had seen, and the most noticeable thing about him other than his film editing philosophy of “never cut” is that he is a mind reader.  About the time you’re thinking “god this is boring…. she should take her clothes off,” or “I think the dog should save them,” it happens, in front of you, as if bidden by your very own private thoughts.  This dipping in and out of your inner-voice makes his extended takes and pretty decent cinematography even more hypnotizing and startling at times, one might even say… Fascina-NOPE, not doing that. Thank you.

On with Fascination:

vlcsnap-2016-04-26-05h29m53s323In the early 1900’s, a band of thieves are betrayed by their guy-from-Clockwork Orange cohort, who escapes their guild with a box of pilfered gold.  With the less stylish crooks in hot pursuit, he decides to hide out in a beautiful mansion and finds it occupied by two women, Eva and Elisabeth.

This is a common thread in Jean’s movies – the criminal or streetwise/cynic protagonist escapee (possibly representing naïve realism/humanity if you wanna get into all that shit) stumbling into a mansion of metaphysical importance (symbolizing a mansion of metaphysical importance.)

Also prominently featured in ‘Jean movies’ are a set of twin… minxes? What do you call a thing that looks like a girl or woman but is clearly just a vampire wanting to eat you? My ex-wife! ha! Um.

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Eva and Elisabeth don’t seem too alarmed about being held captive at gunpoint, and keep mentioning that the owner of the mansion will be coming home that night and that the thief should be long gone by then.
He locks them in a room and they decide to have lesbian sex while they wait out the next beat of the plot–the kind of moment where you’re not sure if the movie told you to want this, or if you wanted it all along and Jean just read your thoughts and gave you lesbians.

Aftersex, they leave their room because they had a spare key all along, and play games turning the tables on their armed captor, Eva once again advocates for her own rape, successfully this time, while Elisabeth steals the thief’s gun, but in her unguarded moments seems a bit jealous of her lover being shared, and paradoxically, also a bit concerned for the well-being of the man who is (completely consensually) raping her lover.
Afterrapewhich, Elisabeth once again warns the thief that death is coming to that house and that he should fucking get the hell out, to which he doesn’t reply.

The besieging bandits force an exchange of the stolen-stolen gold, and Eva nonchalantly proffers herself for rape once again but then proceeds to reap the entire band of miscreants, hence this movie’s glorious cover art – the shot that made you say, “fuck yeah, I’ll watch that!”
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Though Eva has fervently lain with our misogynistic hero, only Elisabeth seems to truly care about his dumb ass, constantly warning him that he should leave the mansion and that Eva is trying to stall him from leaving; this perversely intrigues the fool to stay and see what will happen next, and after sunset the mistress of the mansion arrives.
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We quickly get the sense that our thiefy protagonist is a mouse cockily flirting with a harem of cats who are all speaking of ‘having him for dinner’.  And after he makes some quip about how silky and feline their fur is, they say again ‘look, we’re gonna eat you, just so you know’, to which he smiles, shakes his mousey head and sips some wine.*
*At a certain point all analogies break down, it’s just how they work.

The rest of the coven arrives, in full seance gear, telling him flat out that he will die, they worship death, this is their annual sacrifice, and these are his final hours. He takes this all very lightheartedly and asks no questions of any relevance, apparently thinking it’s all a joke (“its all” in this sentence refers to women, spirituality, ritual murder, and his own life.) This is one of the movies that cemented our habit of yelling ‘”What do you mean?” He promptly asked.’ at the screen.

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Only when he finds the murdered corpse of one of the bandits does he decide he’s not having fun anymore and begins to leave.
Eva is sent to axe him (yes literally, because it’s that kind of movie) but is betrayed by Elisabeth, the bitch, and shot.  Her blood attracts the coven who choose to eat her instead of their victim or traitor.
Elisabeth flees with Dickwad before she realizes she loved Eva and never loved him so she shoots him too, and is accepted back into the mansion after reporting that he killed Eva and she avenged her.

The downright joy we get from most of Jean Rollin’s movies comes from the fun he has with his vampires: we love vampires and his are some of the best in the biz (technically the women in this movie are never explicitly called vampires–they might just be a cult of women who upgraded from cow to human blood, but, Palm or Christmas, a tree’s a tree.)  Surprisingly unique in each of his movies, his takes on blood-drinkers and their supernatural kin are usually just damn interesting, and fit well with his directorial style that teeters between plodding and dreamlike.

vlcsnap-2016-04-25-23h07m41s647When confined to interior sets, Jean likes symmetry and color, like a slightly less annoying Wes Anderson.

Jean has a good eye for castles, graveyards, and other ruinous environments he finds in France, these are often wide shot and blandly lit or colored, and given small, brightly costumed people wandering through them.  It seems in a visual sense he gets joy from giving life to a crypt, by sowing bright actors in a desolate field.  This usually lends itself to fun composition, as a small dot of light will travel from one end to the other of a bland wasteland – can you see why he “gets” vampires yet? – and his inability to yell ‘cut!’ to end a shot makes you marinate in his world and start to accept a slower pace that either makes you feel relaxed and artsy or bored and frustrated (sometimes a bit of both) depending on why you came to his films.

Nightmares Come At Night / Les Cauchemars Naissent La Nuit (1972)

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Nightmares Come At Night

This came up on our Netflix recommendations after watching some trashy B-movie lost even to our forgiving history. Its title (it sounds less ridiculous in French, but who wants that?) and cover were irresistible; they promised pure trash. We didn’t expect something so disorientingly beautiful.

This was our entree into the work of Jesús “Jess” Franco, a man of many names and no taste. Estimates of his total output vary, but he himself placed it at over 200 movies, released under the names Jesús Franco, Jess Franco, Jess Frank, Clifford Brown, David Khune, James P. Johnson, and many more, including variants of all the above. Other than a few well-produced studio efforts, they were filmed on tiny and declining budgets, one movie often Frankensteined together from fragments filmed experimentally while working on others. It’s an intimidating, confusing-as-balls filmography, so a good entry point is worth something—and Nightmares was fascinating enough to get us hooked.

After opening credits with more unabashed nudity than a whole 21st-century American movie, plus disorienting zooms and camera effects (on stills, no less,) we encounter a cageful of birds. From there we cut to our sleeping heroine, Anna (Diana Lorys) and zoom into her nightmare. With that we’re straight into the sex and murder (sexmurder, the pros call it) and from then on we’re kept blissfully bewildered.

Our heroine

I woke up like this

When she wakes up, we meet her lover Cynthia (Colette Giacobine), and then Paul the doctor (Jess Franco regular Paul Muller.) The whole middle of the movie is Anna telling Paul the history of her and Cynthia, but because that history jumps in time and includes her own earlier conversations with Paul, it makes the structure of the story seem more convoluted than it is. The long flashback begins with Anna’s past stripping in a nightclub in Zagreb, and the weirdly sterile (but inventive) striptease sequence lasts almost 10 of the movie’s 85 minutes–you do the math and tell us this isn’t art. Diana Lorys seems to have been told to slowly writhe and (occasionally) strip on a table while Jess masturbates and plays with the zoom lens.

Art?

She invents whole new fetishes out of boredom

We see the story through dreams, flashbacks, recountings—we see the actual events through mirrors, cage bars, gauzy veils. We also hear the dialogue through an atrocious English dub that only enhances the movie’s off-putting strangeness. In one scene in the long middle flashback, Anna and Cynthia have their first conversation, but Anna’s narration cuts in over every line as soon as it starts, overwriting the dialogue (even though it was clearly written and recorded) with a synopsis of that dialogue. It undermines our trust in Anna and increases the mystery around Cynthia and her purposes, while reminding us of the artifice of the movie we’re watching—everything Jess likes in his most intellectually ambitious mode, which, unlike with many directors, is arguably his best.

Fairly typical shot

Fairly typical shot

The nudity and sex in this movie has a kind of innocence to it—I mean like Garden-of-Eden innocence. The camera may seem to embody the male gaze, but the characters have never heard of it, and wear exactly as much clothing as seems natural and comfortable in what must be a very warm house. The body-loving camera doesn’t understand about objectification either, but just laps at their skin like an excited puppy.

The form of True Clothing emerges from the matter of cloth

Anna puts this sheet on sari-style, and Jess films the entire process and puts it in the movie, out of apparently pure fascination.

Right from the first, we could tell that this was a director who made exactly the kind of movie he liked, who knew what he was into and would put it on the screen. He likes nude women and sometimes men, he likes birds, he likes mirrors, and he likes incessantly zooming in and out in a way that’s been tactfully described as “improvisational.” Many people don’t like his movies, for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. There are plenty of reasons not to make a Jess Franco movie, and Jess’s defining characteristic is that he doesn’t listen to any of them. He works without moderation, without prudishness, without conscience, without taste or caution, without feminist qualms; sometimes without coherent vision. Without, without, without.

The result is that Jess Franco movies, like B-/cult/trash cinema in general, are an insanely mixed bag of absolute garbage and wonders you’d never otherwise see. I’d give up a fair amount to unsee his worst movies, but I wouldn’t give up his best ones. Nightmares Come at Night is one of them, and it’s one of the best places to start.