Fascination: The Celluloid Dreams of Jean Rollin by David Hind

(pb; 2016: nonfiction)

From the back cover

“May 1968. Paris is awash with violence and public unrest. In a small cinema, where a surreal film is showing, another riot is taking place. Here, the enraged audience smashes up the auditorium, tear out the seats, and chase the film’s director out onto the street. This is the premiere of Jean Rollin’s feature debut, The Rape of the Vampire.

“As an outsider of French cinema, Rollin’s films are unique and dreamlike. They offer tales of mystery and nostalgia, obsolescence and seductive female vampires with a thirst for blood and sex. It is a cinema at once strange, evocative and deeply personal.

“Funding his own projects, Rollin defiantly made the films he wanted to make and in so doing created a fantastique genre unlike any other. The Nude Vampire, The Living Dead Girl and The Grapes of Death are among those films now celebrated as the work of an auteur, one who confounds preconceived notions of ‘Eurotrash’ cinema.

“This book is devoted to the director and all his work, across all genres, including a nascent French hardcore pornographic film industry. Written with full co-operation from Jean Rollin, shortly before his death in 2010, it contains exclusive interviews and archive material.”

Review

Fascination is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction reads about filmmakers. Hind concisely and honestly recounts─in a creativity-focused overview─the events and works of Rollin’s life, as well as cataloging Rollin’s mostly distinctive cinematic output.

By financial necessity, Rollin’s films had female nudity: his producers required it. That said, the writer/director and his faithful crew members imbued many of his better, not-quite-mainstream films with poetic, haunting, playful and often elegiac moods, mixing sex with simply-stated Gothic romanticism, as well as thought-provoking themes of science fiction, horror and other elements that stick in one’s mind long after seeing said films. 

Love or hate his non-hardcore and low-budget work, most of his non-pornographic films are distinctive, not easily dismissed as outright, brainless─if sometimes scene-meandering─Eurosleaze pieces. (To dismiss them as such suggests a lazy-minded, prudish stubbornness.)

This is a must-own book for any Rollin fan, or anybody who might be curious about him. Rollin is an underrated and worthwhile auteur (in the truest sense, as in: he wrote and co-produced most of his films).