In a dilapidated castle, only the ticking of a grandfather clock breaks the silence. Suddenly, a creak emanates from it as the lower part opens and a young woman emerges. Pale complexion, eyes rimmed with red, the vampire has just emerged from her “timeless” coffin. Taken from the movie The thrill of vampires (1971), this striking image is just one of many once imagined by Jean Rollin. Surrounded by a cult aura, the French filmmaker was the subject of a documentary, Orchestrator of Storms: the Fantastic World of Jean Rollinco-directed by Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger and premiering at Fantasia this Saturday.
You should know that the work of Jean Rollin (1938-2010), which experienced its golden age during the 1970s, is often misunderstood. Between horror, eroticism and macabre poetry, her cinema is crossed by women vampires and other ghosts generally scantily clad. On the basis of photos seen in a book or a magazine, it is easy to conclude that Rollin was only a satyr thinking only of female nudity.
“There are so many misconceptions about Jean Rollin,” says Kat Ellinger, author, critic and editor-in-chief of the magazine. Diabolical.
Dima Ballin adds: “His first films are sometimes approximate, but we feel that he does not hesitate to try things, that he is not afraid of anything. It means a lot to me, as a director. »
No, Rollin was afraid of nothing, not even, judging by some of his actions, of death, which, moreover, he so often staged. Thus, around 1997, just after receiving a kidney transplant, he left the hospital before being discharged to continue filming his film. The two vampire orphansand more than once delayed his dialysis sessions.
Admiring, Dima Ballin notes: “He was a non-conformist who shot his films at all costs. »
From Battle to Cocteau
Anti-conformist, the word is weak. In Paris, the first films of Jean Rollin indeed attracted violent boos from an audience come to see a horror film in the spirit of those, very popular at the time, of the English company Hammer. Which films mixed horror, gothic imagery, gore and a hint of eroticism.
If gothism and eroticism were at the rendezvous in Rollin’s proposals, their deliberately surrealist nature was confusing.
However, far from being discouraged, Jean Rollin decided to follow the famous advice of Jean Cocteau: “What the public reproaches you for, cultivate it, it is you. Cocteau who, for the record, was a friend of his mother.
Speaking of the entourage of Rollin’s mother: the documentary turns out to be fascinating from the outset, because we come back from the start to the filmmaker’s childhood, when his mother rubbed shoulders with the surrealist and Dadaist fauna. She even had an affair with Georges Bataille, whose influence can be seen in some of Rollin’s films. As for his father, he was an actor and theater director, and Rollin spent a lot of time behind the scenes. Hence this omnipresent theatricality in his cinema.
“With him, everything comes from childhood,” says Kat Ellinger. Even as an adult, he remained a child. Her relationship with her mother, in particular, had a huge impact on her work. »
The director in this case heard of Jean Rollin long before she was able to see any of his films, which had long been unobtainable before British and American distributors restored them for the DVD and DVD market. blu ray.
“When I finally got to see the movies, I loved what I saw. I was a little worried that the films themselves wouldn’t live up to those images that I had seen, upstream, out of context, and which had captivated me. This was not the case, on the contrary. I found each shot evocative… Watching his films, I felt at home. »
For Dima Ballin, the first impressions were just as strong, although more diffuse: the atmosphere, the unusual dimension pleased him:
“The stories didn’t impress me. It happened on another level. These are images that haunted me for a long time — that still haunt me. »
The essence of fantasy
In fact, as we discover, the story in Rollin is often subordinated to a sequence of flashes of phantasmagoria. It was wanted, assumed and claimed, as evidenced by this passage taken from the memoirs of the filmmaker included in Orchestrator of Storms :
“The very essence of the fantastic is to be improbable, unrealistic, nonsensical, illogical. In a word, to practice true freedom, which is mad poetry. »
The documentary, in addition to being extremely rich in terms of historical context, fluidly alternates between words by Rollin, personal archives, film extracts and expert interventions (the author Virginie Sélavy speaks of a “taste for transgression” and a mixture of “innocence and perversity”). Testimonials from former collaborators, such as Françoise Pascal (star of The iron rose), and Brigitte Lahaie (star of several Rollin films, including Fascination, The night of the hunted and The living dead), turn out to be especially enlightening.
The latter confides that Jean Rollin, whom she describes as a “filmmaker at heart whose films we recognize after three images”, was “the first to give him confidence in front of the camera”. Met during one of the director’s asides in the porn cinema for dietary needs, Rollin perceived a real actress temperament in Brigitte Lahaie and convinced her to make the leap to the side of regular cinema (as long as the qualifier is applies to that of Rollin).
“It’s great what Brigitte Lahaie shares, and she also reminds us how powerful all the female characters in Jean Rollin were. It is not for nothing that so many fans of his films are women,” notes Kat Ellinger.
Imbued with reverence without being hagiographic (nanars like The lake of the living dead are designated as such), Orchestrator of Storms is candy for anyone interested in the creative process in cinema — whether or not one is seduced by the work of Jean Rollin. Although the documentary really makes you want to dive into it (or dive back into it, depending).
Moreover, Dima Ballin and she hope that their documentary will draw new hordes of cinephiles thirsty for strangeness into the macabre and fascinating universe of Jean Rollin.