DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: Jean-Loup Philippe, Annie Bell (as Annie Brilland), Natalie Perrey, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel

PLOT: Sparked by a castle he sees on a poster, a man has visions of a long-forgotten girl he

fell in love with as a boy; mysterious forces try to stop him from finding the locale in the photograph, while a vampire coven helps him from afar.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Slow, atmospheric, with vampires in see-through nighties; Lips of Blood seems a little strange to the ordinary horror fan, but by the surreal standards Jean Rollin set for himself, it’s a bit blasé.

COMMENTS: For a movie about the living dead, Lips of Blood is lifeless. For a supposedly erotic movie, most of the time it just lies there. Only Rollin’s trademark dreamy cinematography and a few bold images save this action-and-suspense-free horror from being a complete bore. The scenario sets up a mystery that is not very mysterious, and posits a timeless romance in which we feel only a theoretical involvement. The movie is peppered with poorly scripted moments that don’t come across so much as absurd as simply awkward. For example, when protagonist Frédéric tracks down the photographer who snapped the photo of the castle he sees in his visions, she just happens to be photographing a nude woman masturbating (in a surprisingly explicit moment). When he asks the photographer, herself a beautiful woman, for the location of the mysterious château, she promises to tell him later at a midnight rendezvous, strips naked, and gives him a long wet kiss! Not only is this whole diversion a shameless device to shoehorn in two more nude scenes, it actually damages Frédéric’s character, since he’s supposed to be pining for the mysterious dream girl with whom he has a deep psychic connection, not fooling around with nude models. In a more exploitative movie this brand of brazen sleaze would be entertainingly incongruous, but in a film with serious ambitions as a moody psychological horror, it’s a misstep. The intended eroticism is somewhat better integrated when Frédéric accidentally awakens a coven of female vampires, who then walk around a Paris graveyard in sheer, gauzy babydoll burial shrouds from Victoria’s Secret. Among the sexy bloodsuckers he raises are sensual twins Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel (Rollin favorites, for obvious reasons). They shadow the doomed hero, saving his bacon from the shadowy forces trying to keep him from locating the mysterious castle. At one point they go undercover as nurses (sexy twin vampire nurses—now that’s mixing fetishes!), while at another juncture they save Frédéric from cinema’s longest stare down the barrel of a gun by turning on the fountains outside the aquarium. After a “twist” resolution that depends on the notion that the actors can’t distinguish an obvious prop from the real thing, it all ends with some torrid lovemaking on the beach and a coffin floating out to sea. I’ve hit the highlights here, which make the movie sound more entertaining and ludicrous than it actually is. In fact, Lips of Blood is mostly talking, walking, and a thug holding the hero at gunpoint for what seems like ten minutes, deciding whether he wants to pull the trigger or not.

With this review of Lips of Blood we’ve now covered all five of Redemption’s 2012 Rollin remastered releases; time for a rundown. Lips is the least interesting and essential of the bunch, essentially a standard softcore Eurohorror with a few unusual touches. For weird fans, Fascination (1979) is a step up; it’s a solid horror outing with a some memorable scenes (aristocratic ladies drinking ox blood, a topless Grim Reaper). The Iron Rose (1973) is the most challenging of the quintet; this graveyard tour shows Rollin’s at his most deliberately surrealist, but at times the film seems to mistake “slow and uneventful” for “poetic.” Shiver of the Vampires (1971), with its pair of scraping “bourgeois vampires” and a bisexual bloodsucker emerging from a grandfather clock, features the director’s most successful blend of dreamlike weirdness and solid Gothic filmmaking. Shiver would make a good entry point into Rollin’s erotically weird universe, but we have to say that our favorite of the five is the earliest entry, The Nude Vampire (1970). It’s raw filmmaking, especially in the acting department, but it’s the fastest moving of his minimalist stories, and features all the usual dreadful atmosphere while adding enough concentrated craziness for four Rollin romps. Of course, there are still several Rollin films of potential weird interest that weren’t included in this Redemption drop, including his first movie, the notorious Rape of the Vampire (1968).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… equal parts creepy, silly, and disturbing.”–Tom Becker, DVD Verdict (DVD)

“It is tempting, and not unjustified, to speculate that one reason for Marker’s growing visibility and popularity is that, as a culture, we have now finally caught up with works that once seemed like dispatches from another planet…”–Catherine Lupton, “Chris Marker: Memory’s Apostle” (2007 Criterion Collection essay)

DIRECTED BY: Chris Marker

FEATURING: Alexandra Stewart (narrator, English language version)

PLOT: Essentially plotless, Sans Soleil is structured as a series of letters sent from around the world by a fictional director addressed to the anonymous female narrator. The footage shown ranges from the banal to the incredible, and each image sparks a meditation from the letter writer. Among other sights, we view Japanese praying at a shrine to dead cats, the imaginary nightmares of sleeping subway riders, and the bloody slaughter of a giraffe by poachers.

BACKGROUND:

• Sandor Krasna, the cameraman whose letters the unnamed narrator is supposedly reading, is fictional, an alter-ego of reclusive director Chris Maker. The name “Chris Marker” is itself a pseudonym for Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve.
• Marker has said he was born in Mongolia, a claim some film historians dispute. He was a philosophy student before joining the French resistance during the Nazi occupation. After the war he became a journalist, then a documentary filmmaker.
• Sans Soleil was Marker’s first personal film after years spent making a series of Marxist political documentaries.
• The title comes from a song cycle by Modest Mussorgsky; some of the melodies are recreated in nearly unrecognizable electronic versions arranged by Isao Tomita.
• In one section of the film “Sandor Krasna” has traveled to San Francisco to visit locations from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Remembering the scene where Madeline points to the tree stump, the narrator says “he remembered another film in which this passage was quoted…” The other film, of course, is Marker’s own La Jetée.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: For many, Sans Soleil‘s unforgettable scene is the slice in time when a striking-looking young woman in Cape Verde, who knows the camera is pointed at her but demurely refuses to acknowledge it, briefly makes eye contact; Marker highlights the moment, remarking about “the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame.” (It’s an inversion of a famous bit from Marker’s La Jetée, where every shot is technically the length of a film frame except for a single glance at the camera). As unexpectedly powerful as this brief moment of eye contact is, it’s unfortunately not so weird. So, for our indelible image we instead turn to the video transformation of the ceramic cat idol into an abstract orange and blue blob, a moment where Marker brings two of the film’s diverse interests into a temporary harmony, illustrating how he weaves his seemingly random obsessions into a coherent tapestry.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Sans Soleil begins with an image of three Icelandic girls and

Clip from Sans Soleil

voiceover narration admitting that the photographer can find no other image to link it to, followed by a brief shot of American warplanes on an aircraft carrier, followed by scenes Japanese commuters napping on a ferry. This ADD documentary changes topics every minute or two, with each brief sequence accompanied by a spoken observation that could be read as profound, poetic, pretentious, or even all three at once. Sans Soleil visits cat shrines, the slaughter of a giraffe, and a monkey porn museum in its wanderings. If that’s not weird enough for you, the film takes time out of its busy schedule to recreate the imaginary nightmares of passengers dozing on a Tokyo subway. All of the scenes are accompanied by freaky synthetic electronic sounds percolating up through a video mix that’s often altered with then-avant-garde video transformation techniques. With their feet nailed to reality, documentaries have to strain hard to escape the bonds of gravity and sail to the heights of weirdness, but Sans Soleil is one experiment in nonfiction that manages to soar effortlessly.

COMMENTS: Essentially, Sans Soleil is an arthouse version of Mondo Cane. (For the record, I don’t pretend to be the first person to notice the congruity between these two films—though I did come to the judgment independently). For those not in the know, 1963′s Italian documentary Mondo Cane (“Dog’s World”), made by the filmmaking team of Prosperi and Jacopetti, was a ramshackle, random tour chronicling bizarre behavior around the world that included scenes of insect eating, a modern artist who used paint-splattered nude women as human brushes, and Polynesian cargo cults. Accurate but exploitative, Cane was a huge hit on the drive-in/ grindhouse circuit and inspired a slew of imitators senselessly using “Mondo” in their name in an attempt to cash in on Cane‘s cachet: Mondo Hollywood, Mondo Topless, Mondo Bizarro. This bizarre mini-genre flourished in the 1960s but reached a shameful “peak” with 1978′s smash video hit Faces of Death, a largely faked documentary purporting to show people actually dying on camera that spawned five sequels.

The superficial similarities between Marker’s highly intellectual, meditative film and Prosperi and Jacopetti’s exploitative Italian trash pictures are at times remarkable. Soleil shows members of the drunken Japanese underclass weaving through the streets of Tokyo directing traffic, just as Cane‘s camera focuses on drunken Germans stumbling through the streets of Hamburg during Octoberfest. Cane observes mourners at a pet cemetery, Soleil visits a Shinto shrine dedicated to dead cats. Africa Addio, Prosperi and Jacopetti’s even more disturbing followup to Cane, lingers over loathsome scenes of hunters killing zebras and elephants for sport. Without comment, Soleil presents us with gruesome footage of a giraffe shot through the neck, stumbling around squirting geysers of blood, until it finally collapses and a hunter mercifully fires a bullet into its head. The main differences between Marker and the Italians are that Marker does not focus solely on the bizarre, but provides plenty of scenes of pure beauty and ordinary humans quietly being themselves. He is erudite, citing T.S. Eliot, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss. He is witty and poetic, musing that “history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated”; suggesting of memories that “a moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector”; and quipping about an exhibit of Vatican treasures in Tokyo that “I imagine [the Japanese] bringing out within two years time a more efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism.” And where Prosperi and Jacopetti are merely cynical, parading their “dog’s world” before us and greedily charging admission to the freakshow, Marker is thoughtful and humanistic, finding meaning, context and connection in every image he presents, however shocking it may appear on the surface.

Despite Marker’s contention that “I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me,” Sans Soleil is packed with enough exceptionally odd imagery to satisfy the most discriminating devotee of the weird. There are the ceremonial rows of cloned ceramic cats with their paws raised in the black power salute. An African street parade of people dressed as horned beasts, with one passerby holding hands with a pet chimpanzee dressed in human overalls. A stunning montage of classic Japanese horror movies (introduced by an “incommunicable sentence” from Apocalypse Now‘s Colonel Kurtz–”you must make a friend of horror.”) A trip to a combination museum/temple/sex shop with phallic statues and sacred monkey porn. A robotic Asian version of JFK who sells the latest male fashions while a sickly-sweet forties-style vocal groups sings “Ask not what your country can do [ask not!]” on the soundtrack. Footage of student protests and kamikaze missions are fed through a “video synthesizer,” turning them into purple and orange abstract heat map images. And the weird pièce de résistance: Marker’s imaginary creation of the “ultimate film” by stringing together the dreams of subway commuters, which are once again illustrated by scenes from Japanese horror movies, including a wondrous clip where a demon with a snake’s body slowly peeks her starlet head around a translucent standing screen.

Certainly, one of the weirder aspects of Sans Soleil is its short attention span—the way it jumps around in space (moving from Iceland to Japan to Africa to San Francisco), time (contrasting tales of a reluctant World War II kamikaze pilot and a coup in Guinea Bissau with the latest news from Tokyo about the disfigured woman standing on street corners insisting people call her beautiful) and topic (covering everything from memory to colonialism to the power of images to Marker’s utter fascination with Japanese culture and the way ancient superstition coexists beside modern technology). The movie floats along on its own stream of free-associations. Someone with more time on their hands—say, a graduate film student—could doubtlessly fashion a consistent didactic argument out of Marker’s narration. But the film’s peripatetic travels from topic to topic are a large, if not the major, part of its charm. Although the movie is carefully composed—bland and boring ideas don’t make it in—it’s also a mirror of the way the mind works in that one topic, one memory, suggests another, and the film organically drifts towards whatever catches its eye. It’s surrealist in its fascination with juxtapositions and the mysterious meanings conjured by the subconscious at play. Connections pop up by synchronicity: the name of the cat whose lost spirit the bereaved couple is praying for is “Tora,” one third of the Japanese code name for the attack on Pearl Harbor. In his wanderings Marker mentions Sei Shōnagon, author of “The Pillow Book,” and her wonderfully miscellaneous lists, citing especially her list of “things that make the heart quicken.” Perhaps Sans Soleil is best considered as the final edit of things that quickened Marker’s heart as he assembled the film from footage he had gathered in his world travels.

Sans Soleil may be a controversial choice for a list of weird movies. Perhaps this odd, quiet, personal, and obtuse essay film sits uncomfortably alongside bombastic neosurrealist epics like Eraserhead and The Holy Mountain. This is a film that is known to, made for, and enjoyed almost solely by film geeks–not all of whom would appreciate the film being awarded the laurel of “weird.” Yet, Sans Soliel is a singular curiosity; although it’s inspired a few obscure imitators, you’ve really never seen anything quite like it. That alone makes it worthy of the honor of being called weird. It’s a movie you put on and watch in a trance. Even if Marker’s philosophical musings go over your head or don’t always appear to make sense, the same is true of a lot of great poetry. The language lulls and sings nevertheless. It is the most lyrical film imaginable. It’s worth watching multiple times; the ability to slip back into its pleasant, half-remembered dream is a gift to treasure. Sans Soleil rewards inattention: the spell it casts encourages your mind to drift, like a sleeper on a subway car, like the film itself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Marker’s impossible, beautiful film is as ultimately unknowable as another person’s heart. But to quote the nonexistent Sandor Krasna, ‘Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.’”–Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper (re-release)

“San Soleil also focuses on the weird and the titillating (taxidermied animals in sex poses, an animatronic JFK in a shopping mall) but while the Mondo films describe these customs with sensationalism and innuendo, Marker explains what he sees with the curiosity and empathy of an anthropologist.”–David Moats, The Quietus (DVD)

“[Marker] delivers an endless stream of grand, airily magisterial pronouncements on the Japanese character. The triteness of these pronouncements (which boil down to ‘boy, are these people weird!!’) is matched by the triteness of Marker’s juxtapositions: after a close-up of Pac-Man expiring on a video screen, we cut to a solemn funeral. Much of what ‘Marker’ says sounds good, but on further reflection makes little sense at all – as when we’re told that the Japanese are ‘perishable and immortal.’”–Neil Young, Neil Young’s Film Lounge (re-release)

OFFICIAL SITE: Sans Soleil (1983) – The Criterion Collection – The Criterion Collection’s Sans Soleil page contains a clip from the movie, a photo gallery, and essays by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Catherine Lupton

IMDB LINK: Sans Soleil (1983)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Voyage into the Unknown – Profile of Marker by The Guardian‘s David Thomson written to coincide with a re-release of Sans Soleil

DVD INFO: After years of inferior transfers, in 2007 the Criterion Collection finally put out Sans Soleil in a definitive widescreen version (buy), and the “bonus” feature—Marker’s fairly weird 30 minute short sci-fi experiment La Jetée—is of more interest to many than the “main’ feature. The disc offers no commentary tracks, but has two incredibly insightful and impassioned interviews with director and Marker contemporary Jean-Pierre Gorin. Also included is the 9-minute mini-documentary “Chris on Chris,” a profile of Marker, and two excerpts from the French cinema program “Court-circuit”: one, a curious interpretation of La Jetée that suggests the film is Marker’s attempt to “travel into” Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the other an analysis of the David Bowie video “Jump She Said” (directed by Mark Romanek), which is based on the imagery of La Jetée. There are options to watch each film either in English or in French with subtitles (though it’s worth pointing out that, unlike other foreign films, the English language narration in these two movies was overseen and approved by the director; these are not actors being dubbed). The set also includes a booklet with essays, notes and a rare interview with Marker.

In 2012 Criterion upgraded this set to Blu-ray (buy).

FEATURING: Jean-Marie Lemaire, Franca Maï, Brigitte Lahaie, Fanny Magier

PLOT: A highwayman burns his fellow brigands and holes up in a chateau, where he meets two

seductive women who are expecting mysterious guests at midnight.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s one of Rollin’s most polished and conventional horror movies; the surrealistic dalliances are kept to a minimum, and the rough edges of his earlier lesbian vampire films (like the crazy Nude Vampire) have been smoothed out. That makes it a good choice for fans atmospheric horror of with lots of sex—who will find it a fairly odd period terror–but lacks true fascination for the weird film fan.

COMMENTS: Fascination starts out fascinatingly enough, with a woman opening a tome on witchcraft and caressing the pages sensually with her lace-sleeved hands, followed by a credits sequence with two women waltzing on a stone bridge. After this prologue comes an eye-widening first scene where two women—one dressed in bridal white and the other in funereal black—stand in a slaughterhouse and drink ox’s blood as a doctor helpfully informs them, “today, in April 1905, we find it’s the best way to cure anemia.” Unfortunately for lovers of the bizarre, however, the ride smooths out after that opening and we get a familiar-feeling story about a desperate man who seeks refuge in a house inhabited by fairy tale femme fatales. This is a well made film: as per usual with Rollin, the cinematography, sexual choreography, locations (featuring another memorable château, this time isolated on an island with a stone bridge being the only approach) and music (ranging from medieval inspired chants to waltzes to heavy horror cues) are all top notch. But lovers of the bizarre will find this love triangle in a misty universe of sex and death only mildly titillating; devotees of erotic Eurohorror will get far more satisfaction from the ample female flesh on display (the stage blood, on the other hand, is both thin and rare for this type of production). Fascination does show remnants of Rollin’s slightly illogical, dreamlike signature style, with impassioned romances compressed into hours and a clueless protagonist who remains irrationally cocky even as evidence mounts that things are not as they seem. Characters say things like “beware, death sometimes takes the form of seduction” and “the love of blood may be more than that of the body in which it flows” and “it’s all very melodramatic…” Brigitte Lahaie supplies Fascination‘s highlight when she transforms into a buxom grim reaper; armed with a scythe, she goes on a killing spree wrapped only in a thin black cloak that reveals her bosom when the slightest breeze blows. The fatalistic (if predictable) final scene, set in what seems to be some sort of bizarre, cavernous aviary, is also a keeper. For the most part, however, Fascination is a polished product, containing little that the mainstream horror fan would find alienatingly weird. Predictably, this leads some to proclaim it Rollin’s best film. But the absence of surreal gambles doesn’t make it his best; it merely prevents it from being his worst.

Although she’s not the featured star, curvaceous and sensual Brigitte Lahaie steals the show, ruling the screen whenever she’s on it. Lahaie began her career in hardcore porn, in the era when adult films had scripts and the players actually acted in between sex scenes. Rollin, who also directed adult films to pay the bills, gave her her first role in a horror film in 1978′s The Raisins of Death, then gave her a larger part in Fascination. Although France’s top adult actress at the time, Lahaie always seemed too beautiful, elegant and talented for porn, and she indeed retired from hardcore in 1980. She appeared mainly in horror and softcore films afterwards, but landed a bit part in the NC-17 arthouse hit Henry and June (1990) and a small but memorable role in the very weird Calvaire (2004). She currently hosts a French radio talk show about sexuality. Fascination may well mark the high point of her acting career.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The sex scenes are more intense and explicit than Rollin’s previous horror outings but remain suffused with a heady surrealism that makes the encounters play like animated works of art… this DVD is a sight for sore eyes and should serve as a nice aid for introducing new viewers to Rollin’s strange, wonderful cinematic world.”–Mondo Digital (DVD)

FEATURING: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek

PLOT: Monsieur Hulot gets lost on his way to an appointment and wanders around a nearly

unrecognizable, technologically transformed Paris.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Play Time is about the alienating, isolating influence technology has on human beings. It’s not the standard elements of plot, narrative, character development or dialogue that pulls an equally alienated audience into this unfurling drama, but the careful choreography of hapless humans navigating a barely recognizable hypermodern Paris.  Play Time is sort of an anti-Brazil.

COMMENTS: Do you remember when watching “Tom and Jerry” on television, there would occasionally be a cartoon showing off a humorous version of cars or homes of the future? There would be no main character, just a narrator describing some startling innovation, and then there would be a sight-gag or funny noise to produce a laugh, and it would move on to the next futuristic comedic set-piece. Play Time is a feature film based on a very similar premise, with two differences:  there is a strong undertone of humanity and history struggling against technology, and there is no narrator to help guide you from one farcical gag to another.

The main characters are French everyman M. Hulot (Tati) and American tourist Barbara, who wander through the modern marvel that Paris has become and are continually obstructed by the technology that is supposed to make their lives easier. Hulot spends a long scene searching haplessly through a (then bizarre-looking but now surprisingly familiar) cube farm to find a businessman with whom he has an appointment. Barbara struggles to take a picture of something uniquely French, not just because pedestrians keep walking between her and the florist she fancies, but also because huge steel and glass buildings have almost completely obscured romantic Paris (the same city Cole Porter lovingly described in 1953, a mere six years before this film was released). With little meaningful dialogue and a tendency to abandon characters to their fates, it is difficult for the audience to make a coherent narrative out of the stark, gleaming, geometric scenes that linger slowly and deliberately on the screen. Particularly during Play Time‘s first half, the series of clever slapstick events that pepper the film supply the only human connection. They allow us to sympathize not only with Hulot and Barbara, but also with innocent cushions that blurt obscenely when sat upon and a broiled fish that is repeatedly heated, spiced, and basted, never to be served.

If discomfort and silly humor were the only features of Play Time, the result would be just like those “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, only bleaker and more disturbing. Fortunately, Tati allows humanity to win over technology, or at least stand on even footing. The citizens of super-Paris do eventually begin to connect with each other. Some of these connections are obvious: Hulot does eventually find his businessman, but he also bumps into several friends from the army, and he also meets Barbara. Some of the connections, though, are subtle, surprising, and hilarious, as when two families engrossed in programs showing on the television sets fixed to the wall dividing their apartments appear to be reacting to the events in the other family’s home. The movie culminates in a riotous party scene—possibly the best I’ve ever watched—at a restaurant slowly falling apart around the revelers due to shoddy construction. Here, technology does its absolute best to ruin the partygoers’ night, but they hardly notice; or if they do, they improvise on the destruction to the advantage of a good time. Meanwhile, a number of seemingly forgotten incidental characters from earlier in the movie—an obnoxious American, a portly sloven, a precise English businessman—come back and become much more alive and interesting amid the chaos. The movie’s weirdness never goes away, but it softens until it gently lands at the conclusion of 24 hours of hectic hypermodernity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hulot on the loose in a surreal, scarcely recognisable Paris… a hallucinatory comic vision on the verge of abstraction.”–Time Out Film Guide

FEATURING: Françoise Pascal, Hugues Quester (as Pierre Dupont)

PLOT: Young lovers go mad when they are trapped in a cemetery overnight.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Iron Rose‘s wonderfully funereal setting and muted weirdness isn’t powerful enough to overcome it’s lack of events. Its slow-paced visual poetry is hit-or-miss, resonating strongly with some viewers while boring others stiff. I’m in the latter camp, I’m afraid; I believe there are brisker, more agreeable vehicles to represent Jean Rollin on the List.

COMMENTS: To many fans, La Rose de Fer represents the distilled essence of Jean Rollin: trancelike atmosphere, poetic visuals, and quiet, dreamy symbolism. With it’s couple making love all over a graveyard, rolling around in passion amongst the skulls and femurs, it’s also the most blatant example of the director’s desire to play matchmaker between Eros and Thanatos. And, while it’s correct to say Rose is pure Rollin, the very integrity of vision shown here exposes the director’s flaws even more than his virtues: his seeming indifference to character and story, his stilted faux-Symbolist dialogue, and, especially, his tortoise-influenced method of pacing. Rose begins on Rollin’s famous beach that appears in almost all of his movies; Françoise Pascal, the stunning and exotic half-Mauritanian actress/model, finds the titular mineral flower washed up on shore. She then walks through a field and a deserted French town; six minutes later, the plot begins as a young poet toasts her at a wedding reception with a ditty about death. The two arrange for a date and, after hitting it off quickly, end up in a magnificent French cemetery for a picnic and a little lovemaking inside a tomb (despite the girl’s initial reticence). The boneyard is almost deserted except for a few odd visitors, including a clown in full makeup who places flowers on a grave. When they emerge from the crypt in post-coital bliss, they find that night has fallen early, the boy has lost his watch, and the path they came in on appears to be missing. Although the scenario sounds like an promising blend of Freud and the Twilight Zone, it takes thirty minutes of plodding setup to reach this point, and when we finally do, Rollin offers us too little payoff for our patience. The boy remains sane and logical, trying to figure a way out of the maze, while the girl goes off her rocker, undergoing several radical personality shifts that end with her succumbing to the allure of the grave. There’s a near-rape and a reconciliation when the two make love on top of the dried bones in an ossuary, but mostly the couple just wander around the Gothic grounds looking lost. Just when you think former Penthouse model Pascal was the first actress to ever successfully insert a “no nudity” clause into a contract for a Rollin movie, there’s a dream sequence where she returns to the beach for some tasteful full-frontal frolicking in the sand. The saving grace in this morbid noodling is the scenic cemetery itself, a monumental site which Rollin exploits with his usual above-par cinematography. It’s a verdant park setting with forests of gray gravestones, cobwebbed crosses, and wrought iron fences. The site features a remarkable variety of monuments, from tombstones bigger than a man to pauper’s graves marked with black iron crosses, with moss-covered cherubs and loose skulls lurking in every corner. It also looks legitimately labyrinthine; with every few steps the architecture and topography seems to change, so it’s easy to imagine yourself lost there if you were unfortunate enough to be locked in behind the iron gates after closing time. Tombstone tourists will want to check it out for the scenery alone (fans of Pascal’s generous dimensions might want to check it out for similar reasons). Caution is advised for other visitors. Watch The Nude Vampire or Shiver of the Vampires first, and ask yourself: would I prefer this movie if it had less plot, no lesbian vampires, and focused more on pure atmosphere? If the answer is “yes,” then by all means give The Iron Rose a spin in the DVD player.

Redemption Films remastered DVD contains the 1965 Rollin short “Le Pays Loins” (“The Far Country”) as a bonus feature. This black and white film about a couple lost in a dreamlike reverie in a nameless North African city is more straight surrealist than horror-surrealist, and shows Rollin’s obvious roots in art cinema. Due to its more digestible length I found it slightly preferable to The Iron Rose, although it ends unsatisfactorily with a sudden thirty second freeze frame (it’s such an arbitrary conclusion that I’m not sure if this was the intended ending or an error on the disc I received).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ”Wonderfully evocative in its cinematography, and downright sexy/weird with the conflicted performance of Francoise Pascal…  Just experience it, and groove on director Jean Rollin’s marvelously sensual tone poem of eroticism and death.”–Paul Mavas, DVD Talk (DVD)

FEATURING: Olivier Rollin (as Oliver Martin), Maurice Lemaître, Caroline Cartier, Ursule Pauly, Catherine Castel (as Cathy Tricot), Marie-Pierre Castel (as Pony Tricot), Michel Delahaye

PLOT: A young man discovers his father has kidnapped a vampire and is studying her in hopes

of learning the secret of immortality.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: As we explained in our review of Shiver of the Vampires, we’re expecting to add one of Jean Rollin’s surreal erotic vampire films to the List (though we’re open to the possibility of more than one making it). We want to consider all of the director’s major horror works first, however, before picking the best movie to represent Rollin’s arty and irrational vampire vision. 1973′s Shiver showed a notable improvement in Rollins’ technical filmmaking skills, but Nude, with its suicide cult and multi-dimensional twist ending, holds a slight edge as being the more delirious film. Compared to Shiver, Nude is amateur and raw, but this may be a case where worse is better—or at least, weirder.

COMMENTS: The Nude Vampire opens with a scene of a hooded woman stripped naked in a laboratory by other hooded figures; they take a sample of her blood. Next we find ourselves following a woman slinking through oddly deserted Paris streets in a sheer orange negligee. She’s carefully and quietly followed by men wearing animal masks: a chicken, a bull, some sort of cross between a frog and an insect, and a lavender stag with enormous, impractical horns rising from his head. She meets a strange man outside the Metro and touches his face; together they flee the masked cultists, until the stag-man catches up with her and shoots her on a bridge. Oh, and this entire 8 minute introductory sequence contains no dialogue, just atonal free jazz explorations, first from a wailing baritone sax and then from a screeching violin. If you’re not at least a little intrigued by that opening, well then, you may be browsing the wrong site. Nude tantalizingly rides the fine line between sense (the plot points do connect from one to the next) and nonsense (the entire premise of a suicide cult kidnapping a mutant transdimensional vampire is preposterous). Some scenes are exquisitely haunting: the stag-man standing on cobblestone streets, the slow torchlit march of the undead. Other scenes are staged with an embarrassing amateurism, as when a woman committing suicide fails to react on time to a badly dubbed gunshot to her own temple; or, when two miniskirted women are killed after a third waves a torch in their general direction, causing them to roll themselves down a flight of stairs (flashing their white panties as they work their way around a bend in the staircase) in a way that defies the physics of murder.  From moment to moment the movie could be categorized as either a pretentious student art film or a bad b-movie fever dream (scenes where topless dancers gyrate before businessmen wearing avant-garde pasties weave both strands into one variegated thread). The result of these competing elements is an ambiguous style that makes the distinction between “good” and “bad” irrelevant. Moments of brilliance and flubs are both subsumed into the atmosphere of general weirdness. There’s always something new popping up on screen to raise your eyebrows, like the sexy twin assistants whose favored uniforms are scale mail miniskirts with mobiles covering their breasts, a nude model who goes into a spontaneous interpretative dance, and a suddenly sci-fi ending that might remind you of Phantasm (1979). You’ll sympathize with the minor character who, near the end of the movie, asks the rhetorical question “do you understand any of this?” Rollin’s films failed financially in their day because they proved too pretentious for general horror fans and too exploitative for arthouse patrons, but today they hit the sweet spot for cult movie enthusiasts who crave utter unpredictability in their scare flicks.

Although it’s not chaste by any stretch, there is less sex and nudity in this production than would show up going forward in Rollin’s oeuvre. In the interest of truth in advertising, the movie should have been titled The Vampire in the See-through Nightie. (That is, if she is a vampire at all…)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange work of conspiracy, family rebellion, and innocence imprisoned, both a vampire film and a strange science fiction fantasy…”–Sean Axmaker, Parallax View (Rollin retrospective)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: Sandra Julien, Jean-Marie Durand, Dominique,  Marie-Pierre Castel (as Marie-Pierre Tricot), Kuelan Herce, Jacques Robiolles, Michel Delahaye

PLOT: A honeymooning couple stop at a creepy castle to visit the bride’s distant cousins, but

find their hosts have been turned into vampires.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The films of Jean Rollin come with a reputation/warning: their mix of artistry and exploitation isn’t for everyone, and they’re all variations on the same idea. The director’s formula is thick Gothic atmosphere, beautiful visuals, mild surrealism, nude female vampires, and an indifference to rational plot. In terms of making the List, what this suggests is that one Rollin movie might be appointed to represent the director’s entire canon; but, is Shiver the chosen one? We’ll have to see them all to decide for sure.

COMMENTS: Plotheads need not apply to a Jean Rollin movie. Shiver of the Vampires does have a story, but it’s thin and generic, full of the usual staples of the vampire genre: coffins, stakes through the heart, crumbling castles, crucifixes. Rollin approaches this film more like a painter than like a storyteller, and you have to engage with the film as if you’re looking at an art exhibit rather than listening to a ghost story. Certain startling imagery jumps out at you by design—the vampire emerging from the grandfather clock, the goldfish bowl containing a skull, the deadly spike bra—but the decadent backgrounds are just as appealing to the eye. It’s the kind of film where curvaceous maidens in diaphanous gowns walk through dusty corridors carrying candelabras, and there’s always mist wafting across the tombstones at night. There’s ample nudity—the women of Shivers doff their duds at the slightest excuse—but it’s often shot with an artist’s rather than a voyeur’s eye for the female form. Otherwise, however, the sexuality of vampirism isn’t presented very subtly; a female vamp is dispatched in a phallic staking ritual, and when nude vampires are exposed to sunlight they writhe in a torment that looks remarkably like orgasm. With liberal use of red gels, aquamarine backlights, and pigmented fogs, the color schemes are brilliantly unreal (proving the Eurohorror tradition of crazed chromatism well predates 1977′s Suspiria). A prog-rock guitar, drum and bass trio dither ecstatically over the action; the electrified score contrasts with the Gothic atmosphere, but it works well to ground the otherwise timeless tale in its contemporary era. There are also unidentifiable, animalistic howls that show up on the soundtrack at strategic points. A pair of nameless “bourgeois vampires” who bow and scrape, finish each others’ sentences, and lecture on the worship of Isis add further oddness to an already strange story. Shiver is partly a tribute to and partly a parody of bloodsucker conventions, but the film’s overall tone is hard to pin down, except to say that it’s detached and dreamlike. The human victims’ reactions to their predicament are dazed and out of sync with reality, as if they’re drugged or hypnotized. Isle appears not at all terrified when a strange woman emerges from a grandfather clock in her room (and her modest attempt to cover her bare bosom is woefully inadequate).  After the groom witnesses a vampiric ritual he returns to the conjugal chamber but, rather than rousing his bride to flee, strokes her naked sleeping body. Terror transforms into lust quickly inside Shivers‘ hermetic dream. For decades, Rollins’ slow-paced, arty, irrational musings on the vampire myth have frustrated horror fans looking for old-fashioned bloodletting, but they are subtly strange artifacts that reflect the unique preoccupations of their creator. These fetishistic documents are ultimately of more interest to fans of neosurrealism than of horror.

The French title, Le Frisson des Vampires, does literally translate as “Shiver of the Vampires,” but “frisson” has a secondary connotation of “thrill” (like the pleasant spine tingles provided a good horror movie shock). Rollins’ two previous features had more salacious titles: Le Viol du Vampire (Rape of the Vampire) (1968) and La Vampire Nue (The Nude Vampire) (1970).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… [a] vexing piece of psychedelic nonsense…”–Robert Firsching, Rovi

DIRECTED BY: Luis Buñuel

FEATURING: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Pierre Clémenti, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page

PLOT: Séverine is a wealthy young newlywed who proclaims she loves her husband, but refuses to sleep with him. Her erotic life consists of daydreams in which she is bound, whipped and humiliated. She decides to secretly work as a prostitute during the day, taking the stage name “Belle de Jour”; in the course of her adventures a macho young criminal becomes obsessed with Belle, and he sparks sexual passion in her, as well.

BACKGROUND:

• The movie was based on a scandalous (but moralizing) 1928 novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel.
• Belle de Jour marked Buñuel’s return to France after his “Mexican exile.”  It was the 67-year old director’s most expensive production to date, his first film in color, and his biggest financial success.
• The director did not get along with the star, and the feeling was mutual. Buñuel resented Deneuve because she was forced on him by the producers. For her part, the actress felt “used” by the director.  Whatever their differences, however, they made up enough to collaborate again three years later on Tristana.
• Séverine’s courtesan name, “Belle de Jour” (literally “day beauty”) is the French name for the daylily; it is also play on “belle de nuit,” slang for a prostitute.
• Too spicy for critics in 1967, Belle de Jour won only one major award at the time of its release: the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.  It now regularly appears on critics top 100 lists (Empire ranked it as the 56th greatest film of world cinema).
• Martin Scorsese was behind a 1995 theatrical re-release of the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The ecstatic look on Catherine Deneuve’s face as, tied up and dressed in virginal white, she’s insulted and spattered with shovelfuls of mud (or is it cow dung?).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although the movie weaves in and out of dreams and reality until we

Original trailer for Belle de Jour

don’t know which is which, by Buñuel standards Belle de Jour is a straightforward dramatic film.  Even the dream sequences are relatively rational, unthreatening, and easy to follow, making Belle the favorite “Surrealist” film of people who don’t like Surrealism.  But something about the dilemma of Séverine/Belle’s divided personality, and her uncertain denouement, sticks with you long after “Fin” appears.  The movie’s weirdness is subtle but persistent, like the scent of a woman’s perfume that lingers in the air long after she’s departed the room.

COMMENTS:  Cinematographer Gil Taylor famously said “I hate doing this to a beautiful woman” while filming Catherine Deneuve cracking up and dreaming about imaginary rapists in every corner of her deserted apartment in Repulsion.  I wonder how he would have felt about shooting this same beautiful woman being tied up, whipped and raped, whored-out, and spattered with mud in Belle de Jour.

Actually, he probably would have been fine with it if he wasn’t forced to use a wide-angle lens on her closeups—the source of his misread complaint in Polanski’s film—but stick with the accidental metaphor for a moment.  Appearing in these two movies in the space of three years, glacially blond Deneuve risked becoming typecast as a frigid Freudian pinup girl.  Unlike Repulsion, however, where a cruel irony emerged from the union of Deneuve’s unworldly beauty with her asexual disgust for men, Belle de Jour allows the actress to be a sexual creature, of a twisted sort. When the beautiful Séverine is abused and degraded in Belle de Jour, it is at her own insistence, in fulfillment of her hidden fantasies.

The unusual name Séverine is the feminine of Severin (meaning “severe”), which Joseph Kessel chose for the self-abusing heroine of his novel as a tribute to the masochistic protagonist of “Venus in Furs.” But besides “severe,” the name also connotes “sever” or “severed”: a woman divided. This secondary meaning is accidental, of course, but it must have pleased Buñuel, for whom the deepest and purest meanings are always a result of coincidence. Séverine is torn between her split desires for chaste love and sexual lust, between her husband Pierre and her lover Marcel, between the comfortable life of a bourgeois housewife and the sensual adventures of working girl, and most importantly between dreams and reality.

Séverine is a dreamy lady—inscrutable Deneuve often looks half asleep and detached from her surroundings even during her waking hours—and through Buñuel’s eyes her subconscious world, full of lucid masochistic fantasies, is every bit as significant as her pampered Parisian reality of ski trips, dinner engagements and tennis matches. Belle de Jour begins with a horse-drawn carriage and the sound of jingling bells, and these two elements (along with cats and lilies) recur throughout the film as a clue that Séverine is in a dream state—although, as we will see, Buñuel only sets up these rules so that he can violate them later.  Not counting the finale, there are four scenes that are clearly Séverine’s daydreams.  The opening scene features a romantic carriage ride with her husband that turns into a whipping; as Séverine is being beaten by footmen at her husband’s request, she begs him “don’t let the cats out!” (Like “pussy” in English, the French “chatte” has a vulgar connotation as a euphemism for female genitalia). The “mud” fantasy again features Denueve bound, and again begins with bells (this time cowbells instead of carriage bells); more feline references abound, as Pierre asks his rakish friend Husson (Piccoli), “do cows have names, like cats?” Husson features again in the third obvious fantasy, a short bit at a restaurant; being the most absurd of all, its impossible to mistake for reality and therefore needs no bells to announce it (there is talk of lilies, but no cats).  The carriage appears again for the fourth bondage-related daydream, which involves a duel and which marks a crucial change in Séverine’s attitude that sets up the final act.

So much for the obvious erotic reveries.  But there are two other sequences, both involving Belle’s kinky clients, and both highly unusual but apparently real, that incorporate imagery from Séverine’s fantasies; the appearance of these dream-motifs make us doubt whether the incidents really occur.  The first involves a Japanese businessman who visits Belle at the brothel.  He has a box which he shows to one of Belle’s co-courtesans.  The box buzzes when he opens it.  She shakes her head and refuses him, but Belle accepts his broken-French assurances that she should not be afraid of whatever secret is buzzing inside.  When he strips, he flexes his arms and shakes a cowbell, making a sound exactly like the jingling Séverine’s fantasies.  The second ambiguous liaison finds a carriage pulling up to a cafe where Séverine is sitting alone.  An aristocratic man pops out, walks to her table, introduces himself, and propositions her to come to his manor.  His fetish is particularly weird: he wants Séverine to dress in a black see-through nightie and lie in a coffin while he places lilies on her bosom and bemoans his dead love.  In the middle of the ritual his butler breaks in and asks, “Can I let the cats in?”

Belle de Jour‘s famously enigmatic ending is the apex of this technique of muddying the line between dream and reality. Buñuel is the master of the ambiguous ending (see also The Milky Way). He sets up scenarios where the audience doesn’t merely chose between equally plausible plot options A and B, but where the contradictions coexist; A and B merge and synthesize into something new and mysterious. Belle de Jour‘s last two minutes, announced by the tinkling of bells, the mewing of cats, and arrival of a horse-drawn carriage outside her her Parisian home, are obviously another of Séverine’s dreams. But, the last ten minutes, from the point she’s awakened by a gunshot, may also be a dream, and the final moments only a dream inside a dream.  And the resolution, which like a Möbius filmstrip ends where it began, suggests the possibility that the entire movie is a dream.  Perhaps the incident with the aristocrat and the carriage and the bells and the lilies and the strange dialogues about cats really happened, and Séverine incorporated all those elements into subsequent fantasies? Who knows? (Not Buñuel, who insisted he did not know what the ending he had written meant, just as Séverine repeatedly explains that she does not understand the reasons for her own compulsions). In the end, the entire plot is thrown into confusion, but Séverine’s character never changes: she began as a divided woman and she ends as a divided woman.  But, perhaps she finds a way to reconcile her conscious and subconscious conflicts in her dreams.

The only thing that is clear is that Buñuel views Séverine’s fantasies as a crucial part of her being; they are, in fact, more interesting to him—and to us—than her everyday reality. Her dirty dreams are as much a part of her character as is her bourgeois propriety. And Buñuel treats her dreams with as much respect as her waking moments—and with more love.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story is a kind of fantasy cryptogram, with countless clues—verbal puns about cats, nonsense syllables, bells, speech with motionless lips, time cues, and so on—as to when we are in a fantasy, and whose… The movie ends with a dark ambiguity about how we are to regard what has gone before, but every detail has been so carefully thought out that seeing it again is like seeing it in another key.”–Renata Adler, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…a radical work that reimagines some of the director’s earlier surrealist impulses and anticipates the work of David Lynch… Buñuel understood that dreams, the language of the subconscious, often tell us more about ourselves than our reality.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)

“…[a] surrealist masterpiece, a serio-comedy of manners which exposes the neurotic and artificial foundations beneath normal identity and behaviour.”–Rob Mackie, The Guardian (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Belle de Jour (1967)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Belle de Jour (1967) – The Criterion Collection – The Criterion Collection release page contains scholar Melissa Anderson’s essay, clips from the film, and links to other items of interest

Belle de Jour::Great Movies – Roger Ebert’s essay on the film for his “Great Movies” series

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Belle De Jour – Joseph Kessel’s 1929 (an erotic novel which is by all reports quite different from the movie)

Belle de Jour (BFI Film Classics) – Critic Michael Wood’s companion to the movie for the British Film Institute series

DVD INFO: Belle de Jour was an obvious candidate for the Criterion Collection, and in 2012 they finally landed the rights (buy).  The edition features a remastered print; a new audio commentary by Buñuel scholar Michael Wood; “That Obscure Source of Desire,” a featurette with sexologist Susie Bright and Surrealist expert Linda Williams discussing the film’s sexual politics; a interview with frequent Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, who worked with the director to adapt the screenplay from the novel; an excerpt from the French TV show “Cinéma” with Deneuve and Carrière as guests; trailers; and a booklet with an essay by Melissa Anderson and a Buñuel interview. The Blu-ray offering (buy) contains the same features.

The 2002 Miramax release is out of print but may still be available (buy). It has no extras but features a different commentary track, by film scholar Julie Jones.  Unlike the Criterion disc, it is not presented in anamorphic widescreeen format.

DIRECTED BY: Joann Sfar

FEATURING: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Anna Mouglalis, Doug Jones

PLOT: Recounts the life of French singer Serge Gainsbourg, from his formative days as a

young Jewish boy in occupied France through his relationships with Juliette Gréco, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Birkin—and also his relationship with his spindly, scary puppet alter-ego.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A brave biopic that’s true to Serge Gainsbourg’s rebel spirit, but in terms of weirdness, it only goes about halfway.

COMMENTS: Growing up as a precocious Jewish boy in Nazi occupied France, young Lucien Ginsburg (later to reinvent himself as Serge Gainsbourg) amuses himself by drawing a flipbook fable.  A pianist (like the boy’s father) is constantly rejected because of his “ugly mug.”  The despised musician perversely embraces his detractors’ insults and wills his head to swell larger and larger until it finally bursts and the suavely deformed “Professor Flipus” emerges.  The Flipus character (also referred to as “my mug”) shows up later in life as Gainsbourg’s artistic daemon, a spirit materialized as a puppet with glowing eyes and grotesque, oversized features (the sharp-nosed homunculus looks like a debonair version of the Brainiac).  Flipus’ parents would seem to be Gainsbourg’s Jewish identity—his puppet ancestor is a six-legged, moon-faced anti-Semitic propaganda poster who comes down off a wall to dance with Lucien in the alleyways of Paris—and his insecurity about his own “ugly mug.”  Flipus spurs the budding composer to switch from painting to songwriting by “accidentally” burning up Lucien’s canvases, prods him to seduce various glamorous actresses, and grows jealous and vengeful at the appearance of a healthier muse.  Surreal moments are scattered randomly throughout the movie (an inexplicable cat butler, four costumed men who trade breakfast for a song, and visual puns referencing Serge’s albums “Melody Nelson” and ” Tête de Chou”), but it’s Flipus who provides most of Gainsbourg‘s underlying weird texture, and lifts the proceedings above the ordinary.  As an introduction for those uninitiated in Gainsbourg’s discography and biography, the movie isn’t wholly successful.  If you don’t already know who Boris Vian, Django Reinhardt and France Gall are, you may become confused when they suddenly show up or are referenced.  Gainsbourg’s scandalous music, which begins as witty, ribald chanson and develops through the 1960s into lounge-rock psychedelia, is sampled in fast-moving snippets that make it hard to see the lines of development.  The movie also suffers from the usual drawback of biographical movies: real life produces great characters, but not necessarily great stories (which is why fiction supplanted biography, after all).  Life stories tend to turn into a series of vignettes; fortunately for us, Gainsbourg’s vignettes involve him bedding Juliette Gréco, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Birkin.  A trio of actresses—Anna Mouglalis, Laetitia Casta, and Lucy Gordon—simmer as Gainsbourg’s succession of sexy muses.  Gordon’s role is most important, but slinky Casta leaves the biggest impression as a spot-on Bardot, first seen walking a dog in thigh-high black leather boots and a leopardskin miniskirt, and later memorably dancing with a sheer bedsheet tantalizingly wrapped around her voluptuous frame.  Constantly shrouded in his own personal nicotine cloud (since the MPAA has started handing out “R” ratings for tobacco use, the chain-smoking Gainsbourg should probably earn a XXX rating), Eric Elmosnino holds his own against his eye-candy co-stars, conveying awkwardness and suavity at the same time.  Unfortunately, historical accuracy requires him to metamorphose from a charming rake into a drunken lout, so our sympathies for the protagonist sag at the end: not the take-home note you really want in a “heroic” portrait.  Still, given the limitations imposed by real life, Gainsbourg is as a successfully hallucinatory hagiography that will please fans, and make newcomers at least curious to sample Serge’s suave discography.

Director Joann Sfar adapted this, his first film, from his own graphic novel.  To his dismay, producers insisted that early versions of the trailer contain no shots of Professor Flipus (though variations have been released since that do show the creation, without hinting at his prominence).  One source reports that Serge’s daughter, weird favorite Charlotte Gainsbourg, was at one time considered for the role of her father.  On a sad note, model/actress Lucy Gordon, who played a convincing Jane Birkin, committed suicide in 2009 before the film’s release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a bold splash of the surreal in this inspired portrait of a man whose life really is too big for one film.”–Annette Basile, Film Ink (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Vigo

FEATURING: Delphin, Jean Dasté, Louis Lefebvre, Gilbert Pruchon, Coco Golstein,Gérard de Bédarieux

PLOT: Schoolboys stage a revolt at a French boarding school.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Zéro de conduite is an important historical film.  It founded the boarding school subgenre, creating a template used by Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and more weirdly by Lindsay Anderson (If…)  With its dwarf headmaster, disappearing balls and drawings that come to life, the film is as playful and experimental as a mock rebellion staged by schoolboys before Sunday dinner.  Its mildly surreal oddness nudges the needle on the weirdometer, but, despite its near-legendary status, it’s not thoroughly strange enough to make its way onto the List on the first ballot.

COMMENTS:  Jean Vigo’s extraordinary backstory is almost as fascinating as his films.  The son of an anarchist who died in prison, the auteur left a tiny (about three hours’ worth of film) but extremely impressive body of work before succumbing to tuberculosis, the age-old nemesis of romantic poets, at the age of 29.  Adding to his mythological stature is the possibility that he may have contributed to his own demise by laboring on his final film up until his last moments, instead of getting much needed bed rest; he may have actually worked himself to death, literally giving his life for his art.

By banning Zéro de conduite, the director’s film about an imaginary rebellion in a boys’ boarding school, for thirteen years, the French censors only augmented Vigo’s legend.  From the perspective of patrons who are used to seeing political leaders openly mocked and clitorises graphically snipped off in movie theaters as they munch on popcorn, the idea of a movie with only a single “merde!’ and no violence, fetal rape, human centipedes, or even an obvious political target would be banned for over a decade is almost unimaginable.  The film contains hardly audible whispers of schoolboy homosexuality, but it was suppressed not for these but for its “anti-French spirit” and “praise of indiscipline.”  Vigo’s anarchic, anti-authoritarian philosophy, which pervades the film’s 44 minute running time, was too hot and subversive for 1933 sensibilities.

Today, of course, the movie is notably tame.  In fact, if you’ve been exposed to any of the anti-authority movies made since Vigo’s film, you may go in expecting to see Nurse Ratchet-styled psychological abuse and sadistic cane lashings.  But there isn’t even one blow delivered in Zéro, much less 400.  The student’s major complaints are being awakened early in the morning and served beans meal after meal.  Their teachers aren’t madmen and dictators, but ineffectual buffoons.  The headmaster is a dwarf with a fake beard; far from being an imposing figure, he’s at eye level with the boys he lords over.  The lack of any real oppression and outrage here expresses Vigo’s libertarian philosophy far better than if he had overplayed his hand and identified authority with excessive cruelty.  What the school is guilty of imposing on the children isn’t tyranny, but a dreary, drab, linear conformity: the rows of beds, the marching in lines, the short-pants uniforms.  The boys don’t revolt against a corrupt social order; they rebel against the ridiculous notion of order itself.  It’s the purest ideal of anarchy.

Vigo wasn’t a card-carrying Surrealist, despite being a contemporary of the movement.  He nonetheless relied on a few of the same shocking, reality-busting techniques as the Un Chien Andalou crew.  His philosophical anarchism extends to the movie’s form; Zéro de conduite refuses to be restrained by logic or possibility.  There’s a scatterbrained teacher who breaks into a Charlie Chaplin impersonation during recess; a ball that magically disappears and reappears; and a cartoon sketch of a “Mr. Beanpole” who animates and morphs into Napoleon.  The children’s first revolt is a dreamlike pillow-fight with slow-motion and backwards sequences, scored to eerie music: a wordless anthem accompanied by a back-masked accordion.  (The music for this scene was actually written out first, then inverted and performed by musicians in reverse, then played backwards on the soundtrack to restore the original melody in a distorted form).  The ridiculous headmaster keeps his hat under a glass dome on a mantlepiece that’s too high for him to reach without standing on his tiptoes.  The weirdest touch of all may occur at the final ceremony that the boys disrupt as their climactic act of rebellion: the principal and his honored guests and associates sit in chairs in front of bleachers, watching soldiers performing on pommel horses.  The bourgeois dignitaries arrayed behind them are a row of life-sized dolls.

The seldom-seen Zéro de conduite is one of those films you once read about in musty old reference books (or, these days, on a cached blog entry buried deep in your bookmarks) that turns out to be somewhat underwhelming when you finally see it.  The pacing is creaky, the drama underdeveloped.  The grand revolution the film has been building towards consists of about thirty seconds of the boys throwing coconuts and pots down on the heads of the established order, who meekly depart, stage left, without putting up a fight.  It’s a noteworthy and original work, but had the French not banned the film, I doubt it would carry the legendary reputation it has today.  Censors are the best marketing department a movie can have.  Zéro is worthwhile to see for its historical importance, and it’s a work of art, to be sure; but to my mind, it falls just short of masterpiece status.

While its combination of weirdness and reputation make Zéro de conduite the most significant title for our purposes, it’s not the headliner of the Criterion Collection’s “The Complete Jean Vigo.”  That honor goes to L’Atalante, Vigo’s only full-length feature, a masterpiece of sentimental romance about a barge captain who takes his young wife to live on board his vessel.  While this tale of love and betrayal is a surprisingly conventional work from the anarchistic Vigo, there are two famous impressionistic sequences that have a weird-ish poetry to them.  In one, the captain (Dasté, the sympathetic teacher from Conduit) sees a vision of his wife floating in the muddy depths of the Seine; the other is a wispy, sadly erotic montage of the two lovers writhing in separate beds, connected only by a shadowed polka dot motif.  The Criterion disc also contains Vigo’s only two shorts.  Taris is a profile of a French swimming champion.  It features beautiful underwater photography, but shows little true passion, and feels like work done for hire.  Far more interesting is À propos de Nice, an experimental pseudo-documentary (some scenes are staged for comedic effects) on the vacation city of Nice, filmed partly during a street carnival.  Nice features lots of crazy Dutch angles and pans, strange faces, juxtapositions (a shot of a primping woman is followed by an ostrich), and a healthy interest in sex (dig that upskirt camerawork!)  There are a few sequences that qualify as lightly surrealist: tourists who turn into dolls and are raked along with the chips by a roulette croupier, a man with a politically incorrect case of sunburn, and a surprising nude scene.  Like the rest of the disc, Nice won’t be to most modern tastes; but it’s fascinating because it was made before the rules were laid down, by a director making up a visual language as he went along.  It’s novel and enthusiastic enough to catch the interest of anyone serious about cinema.  Vigo scholar Michael Temple provides commentary on each film in the set.  A second disc is full of interviews and documentaries about Vigo, and also contains a (very short) animated tribute by fellow filmmaker Michel Gondry.

Zéro de conduite is in the public domain and may be viewed or downloaded at the Internet Archive, among other venues.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a series of vignettes lampooning the faculty climaxed by a weird, dream-like rebellion of the entire student body. These amorphous scenes, strung together by a vague continuity may be art but they are also pretty chaotic.”–A.H. Weiler, The New York Times (1947 re-release)