Jean Rollin
Born 3 November 1938 in in Neuilly-sur-Seine (now Hauts-de-Seine), France – 15 December 2010)
Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil is a French cult film director that is known for his surrealistic films about sexy vampires. Although he uses the conventions typically found in the horror and vampire genres, they serve as a mere backdrop to his explorations and obsessions with sexual desire, lust, death and love. His films do away with the cold and calculating logic of the human mind and reaches out to the inner animal in all of us. Much like a surrealist painter, Rollin pays little to no attention to plot and uses splashes of colour with gothic elements to add a theatrical element to his films, often featuring the ending of his films on a beach in Dieppe. Rollin has sentimental attachments to the beach he visited as a young teenager, which reminds him of a Magritte painting. He would later film a sequence on the beach in Dieppe whenever possible. Despite his heavy use of nostalgia and romance, Rollins films were pushed on the hardcore circuit even though many of those audiences would be disappointed to find that Rollin would not trade in fantasy and poetry for profit.
" Jean Rollin is one of the most singular directors of horror and fantastic cinema. Over the course of forty years, ever since the turbulent premiere in May 1968 of Le Viol du Vampire/The Rape of the Vampire, Rollin's films have mystified and enraged mainstream horror fans, while enrapturing a small cadre of devout followers [...] With a combination of references drawn from silent movie serials and pulp novels, symbolist poetry and surrealist painting, Rollin's cinema is a perfect case study for an investigation of the interface between horror and fantasy cinema on the one hand, and art cinema and underground film on the other. Moreover, the particular exhibition history of Rollin's films illustrates the porosity of the borders between grindhouse and art house circuits." (Dapena, 226)
Dapena, Gerard. "Reveries of Blood and Sand: The Cinema of Jean Rollin." In Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins. Eds. Robert G. Weiner and John Cline. p.226-240
The Official Jean Rollin Website
Blog: Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience
Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil is a French cult film director that is known for his surrealistic films about sexy vampires. Although he uses the conventions typically found in the horror and vampire genres, they serve as a mere backdrop to his explorations and obsessions with sexual desire, lust, death and love. His films do away with the cold and calculating logic of the human mind and reaches out to the inner animal in all of us. Much like a surrealist painter, Rollin pays little to no attention to plot and uses splashes of colour with gothic elements to add a theatrical element to his films, often featuring the ending of his films on a beach in Dieppe. Rollin has sentimental attachments to the beach he visited as a young teenager, which reminds him of a Magritte painting. He would later film a sequence on the beach in Dieppe whenever possible. Despite his heavy use of nostalgia and romance, Rollins films were pushed on the hardcore circuit even though many of those audiences would be disappointed to find that Rollin would not trade in fantasy and poetry for profit.
" Jean Rollin is one of the most singular directors of horror and fantastic cinema. Over the course of forty years, ever since the turbulent premiere in May 1968 of Le Viol du Vampire/The Rape of the Vampire, Rollin's films have mystified and enraged mainstream horror fans, while enrapturing a small cadre of devout followers [...] With a combination of references drawn from silent movie serials and pulp novels, symbolist poetry and surrealist painting, Rollin's cinema is a perfect case study for an investigation of the interface between horror and fantasy cinema on the one hand, and art cinema and underground film on the other. Moreover, the particular exhibition history of Rollin's films illustrates the porosity of the borders between grindhouse and art house circuits." (Dapena, 226)
Dapena, Gerard. "Reveries of Blood and Sand: The Cinema of Jean Rollin." In Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins. Eds. Robert G. Weiner and John Cline. p.226-240
The Official Jean Rollin Website
Blog: Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience