My Impressions Regarding Jean Rollin

R. F. Lucchetti
EEdition: Marco Aurélio Lucchetti

For decades… To be more precise, for about thirty-seven years, I saw photos of films directed by the French filmmaker Jean Rollin published in French and other European magazines. I would see the photos and imagine what those films would be like. I had no idea what stories they told. But I knew they would be films I would enjoy, based on what the photos showed. And I wasn't wrong when, around 2010, I watched several of Rollin's films. And I was only able to see them thanks to my friend Valter Martins de Paula, who found them at… Internet (The filmmaker's main films are available at) Internet, and many of them are subtitled in Portuguese) and copied them into several DVDs. I take this opportunity to say that these DVDs They were some of the best gifts I've ever received in my life.

Jean Rollin was a unique director. For me, there has never been – nor will there ever be – another like him.
Many dislike his films, finding them meaningless. In reality, Rollin wasn't very concerned with telling a story in the traditional way. He was concerned with telling them in a surreal manner. He was, above all, a poet of the image. Each frame of his films is a painting. To verify what I'm saying, I recommend watching the film. La Rose de Fer (1973), inspired by Cheese and guava (the famous play by William Shakespeare) and set in a cemetery at night.

Speaking of cemeteries, Jean Rollin was one of the filmmakers who best knew how to explore ruins and cemeteries in cinema..
Pfor the French critic and essayist Roger Caillois (1913-1978), “"Everything fantastic is a rupture of the established order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the unalterable everyday legality."”. I would add that the fantastic (from which horror is derived) is when the surreal and the unreal erupt into the real.

And the image above, taken from the film The Thrill of Vampires (directed by Rollin in 1971), perfectly represents what Caillois stated. Why could there be anything more surreal and unreal than an exuberant bride (dressed in white) in a cemetery?
I believe that, like me, Jean Rollin didn't see much meaning in real life. That's why he created surreal plots. He also created surreal characters, like the vampire Isolde (played by Dominique), who, in one of the most memorable sequences of... The Thrill of Vampires, It emerges from within a carillon. Could there be a more surreal scene than that?

I cannot fail to mention here a remarkable character created by Jean Rollin: Élizabeth (played by Marie-Georges Pascal), the young woman who, in Les Raisins de la Mort (1978), spends all his time running away from a horde of zombies.
About Les Raisins de la Mort, Jean Rollin stated that it was her “"first traditional, almost conventional production"”. Regarding Marie-Georges Pascal's (1946-1985) performance in the film, he stated that it was very... “"moving"”.

One of my frustrations is not having met, or rather, not having worked with Jean Rollin, who was an aesthete, a visionary.
I wish I had written the screenplay for The Thrill of Vampires, which has some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen on film. Any single frame of The Thrill of Vampires It's worth more than most film and audiovisual courses that abound in every corner of the world. Every frame of this film is pure cinema (for me, cinema is the art of expression through images).

One of the defining characteristics of Rollin's films: their female characters, such as Ise (played by Sandra Julien) in The Thrill of Vampires, They resemble catwalk mannequins, due to their expressionless faces, which further enhances the surreal tone of the films.