Jean Rollin

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Jean Michel Rollin Le Gentil (born November 3, 1938 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine) is a French film director, actor, and novelist best known for his films in the fantastique genre. Rollin is credited as having made the first French vampire film (Le Viol du vampire, 1968) as well as the first French gore film (Les Raisins de la mort, 1978). He is also one of the early pioneers of French X-rated cinema.

Original poster for La Vampire nue, 1969. Artwork by Phillippe Druillet.

Life & Career

His father was an actor who had the stage name Claude Martin. Rollin's brother Olivier is also an actor and had appeared in a number of his films under the pseudonym "Olivier Martin". His mother Denise Rollin-Le Gentil was a lover of Georges Bataille.

Influenced by traditional French and German expressionist cinema, classic American horror, early serials, comics, fantastic literature and surrealist art, Rollin's fantastique films have been rightfully compared to a sort of visual poetry, juxtaposing the macabre with the sensual and the beautiful with the bizarre. His poetic images are often accompanied by minimal dialogue and simple but haunting musical scores, and the pacing is generally slow and deliberate. All of these qualities contribute to an atmosphere which is commonly described as surreal and dream-like.

Despite the limited budget of his productions, Rollin has been able to film in some spectacular locations: a rocky beach at Dieppe, Seine-Maritime, châteaux, rolling countrysides, and cemeteries thick with gothic atmosphere. Like F.W. Murnau before him, Rollin typically employs the conventions of the horror genre, especially vampires, as a framing device for his unusual images. As a result, plot, dialogue, and narrative tend to be secondary to the visual art for which his films are known.

In the beginning, Rollin's films were generally not well received by his audience or critics. His first feature, Le Viol du vampire, caused such a scandal that audiences booed, shouted, and threw trash at the screen. The reaction to the film was so hostile that Rollin considered quitting the film business. His next few films also failed to generate much praise. Harsh French film critics coined the derogatory term "Rollinade" (forged on Bérézinade) to describe his particular style of cinema, which they felt was cheap, amateurish, and nonsensical. Later on, fans would embrace the term and use it proudly.

While Rollin's peculiar combination of high-art and erotic horror camp failed to generate much financial or critical success, his ability to incorporate eroticism into his films earned him steady work as a director of adult films during the early years of French X-rated cinema. Rollin (under various pseudonyms such as "Michel Gentil", "Michel Gand", and "Robert Xavier") directed a number of adult features from 1973 to the late 1980s, ranging from light-hearted softcore/comedy hybrids to hardcore pornography. 1975's Phantasmes was Rollin's attempt at making an X-rated feature with a real story and decent actors, but the average viewer was not interested in such a thing. At the request of his producers, Rollin also made X-rated versions of some of his serious films (Lèvres de sang; La Nuit des traquées) to help fund the productions.

While making Vibrations sensuelles, Rollin saw acting potential in French adult star Brigitte Lahaie and wanted her to act in his next horror film, 1978's Les Raisins de la mort. Lahaie was perfect for the role and she began a working relationship with Rollin that continues to this day. Lahaie's leading role in 1979's Fascination helped the film garner widespread acclaim, even among critics who had ridiculed Rollin's earlier films.

Jean Rollin frequently collaborated with Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, editor-in-chief of the French magazines Fascination and Sex Stars System.

With most of his films now available on DVD worldwide, Rollin has gained a new generation of fans, as well as attracting further critical and academic attention. He currently resides in Paris and is working on his next film, La Nuit transfigurée.

In addition to his career in film, Rollin is also a published author having written, among other things, the 1967 sexy psychedelic science fiction comic Saga de Xam with artists Nicolas Devil and Philippe Druillet in which the eponymous young heroine traveled through Earth's past so that she could learn the history of violence and thus how to defend her peaceful planet from an invasion of space barbarians, the first full-length study of Gaston Leroux published in the final two issues of the magazine Midi-Minuit Fantastique, and the 1993 novel Les Deux Orphelines Vampires that dealt with the nocturnal adventures of two blind girls imprisoned in an orphanage who regained their sight and became vampires whenever night fell which he later turned into a movie of the same name.

Filmography

Further reading

• Virgins & Vampires: Jean Rollin. Contains essays by Jean Rollin, edited by Peter Blumenstock. Includes CD soundtrack from Les Deux orphelines vampires. Limited edition of 300 copies, autographed by Jean Rollin. (Crippled Publishing, 1997, ISBN 3-9805820-0-0).
• Video Watchdog #31. Peter Blumenstock interviews Rollin (1995).
• Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 (1994) by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs. Dedicates a chapter to Rollin.

External links

• Jean Rollin at the Internet Movie Database
• The Official Jean Rollin Fan Club
• The Official Jean Rollin website
• Biography and filmography of Rollin at NYTimes (registration required)
• J. Newman, "The Cinema of Jean Rollin" Images 9 (2000).
• Volume of the journal Kinoeye devoted to the films of Rollin