The Twinkling Twilight of Mr. Rollin

It's hard to believe it, but he's gone.

He's no longer with us. For the first time in our lives, we live in a world without Jean.

He'd been sick for a long time, but he forged on despite the hardships.

That's how powerful his passion was. Like a priest's calling to God, his devotion to filmmaking was a vocation.

When I was a kid, he was someone I read about. His work was impossible to find, but there were stills in books like David Pirie's The Vampire Film that iced my nerve endings and ignited my sense of wonder. So THIS was cinema???!!!

In a dusty second hand bookshop I discovered a magazine called Midi Minuit Fantastique, an incredible labor of love that often devoted pages and pages to the work of Mr. Rollin.

The magazine would inspire the late Frederick S. Clarke to create the American Cinefantastique, another incredible tome, at least under Clark's watch.

Ironically, Rollin's often maligned (by many) and deeply loved (by a loyal few) work would inspire others to create and re-create and venture deeper into long buried genres in order to unearth treasures as precious as his.

Few, of course, were ever quite THAT precious.

Midi Minuit, to me, was like a shrine to the marginalized films of the imagination, and Jean was one of its gods. He existed in a twinkling twilight to me, a world where creation was not second guessed by a man in a suit or polluted by too much money. His work, finessed on the penny pinching planet of his unique imagination, always stood apart from the rest because its orbit was deliciously unconventional.

Rollin was not a consenting role model to me as a filmmaker, but he was a role model in so many ways. His eternal struggle to make films from his heart made my struggle (also eternal) a little bit easier. If Jean could keep pushing the barrow, so could I. If Jean could persevere, so could I. If Jean could dare to embark on a project driven only by personal faith, so could I.

My film Defenceless was certainly partly inspired by Jean's Living Dead Girl and fueled by a mutual love of the sea.

Already I sense the yawning hole he's left, a hole that can only be filled with sweet memories of first encounters and shared new encounters with his celluloid children.

Mr. Rollin, you came and went and bequeathed us a mint of wonders.

Thank you so much.

The Real Lesbians

A lesbian is a woman with big boobs who drinks another woman's blood. That's what I knew for sure when I was twelve years old.

More often than not, both women are naked, both women are pretty, and one woman ends up with blood on her boobs.

I didn't know much at the age of twelve, but I did know what a lesbian was.

I knew more than my mother at that age because I knew what a lesbian was and she didn't.

"What's a lesbian?" I asked her one night while I was drying dishes and she was washing.

She stopped scrubbing a pan and turned to me. "Where did you hear that word?"

"I don't know -- somewhere," I replied. "What is it?"

"What's what?"

"What's a lesbian?"

I wanted to hear her say it. I wanted to hear the words 'A woman with big boobs who drinks another woman's blood' coming from my mother's mouth.

My mother turned back to her dirty dishwater. "I don't know," she said. "And we don't need to know."

WE DON'T NEED TO KNOW?

Hey, mum, I already know, OK? It's just too bad that you don't know. Now I know more than you.

And that was that.

I never asked the question again.

Thanks to books like Rose London's Zombie - The Living Dead, David Pirie's The Vampire Cinema (from which these scans were taken) and Alan Frank's Horror Movies, my education in the culture that mattered was a little ahead of my peers, and my parents.

To be fair, I think my dad had some idea about lesbians because I did find an old porn mag under the seat of his car one Sunday morning before church. It was a homegrown, Aussie effort called Bawdy, and there were pictures of girls kissing girls inside it. No blood, though. Clearly, my dad's lesbians weren't as cool as my lesbians, although they still had that big boob thing going on.

Many years later, I would learn that lesbians come in different shapes and sizes. Many of those shapes and sizes were not to my liking. I don't know what happened to the real lesbians of my pre-teen years. Did they move to a lesbian island where they could drink blood and romp naked all night long? Did they all have stakes driven through their hearts.

Something else I knew for sure when I was ten was that lesbians only had one thing to fear -- that thing was a stake. For reasons I couldn't fathom, there were men out there who didn't like lesbians. These men didn't have normal jobs, or wives, or kids, and they didn't play sports. Nope, these men chased lesbians with stakes. When they cornered these poor girls, they hammered those stakes into their hearts -- often through their naked boobs. They needed to see boobs while hammering.

I knew this because I had pictures of it. Disturbing pictures. Bloody pictures. Pictures that, for some strange reason, made me want to see more pictures.

The new lesbians of my teen years, of the late 70's, sometimes appeared on the six o' clock news. They looked like my dad's friends, had short hair, wore wife-beater singlets, and lifted their arms to show something my lesbians wouldn't be caught undead with. They didn't appear to drink blood, they didn't have big boobs, and they enjoyed walking down the street in defiant groups carrying "GIrl Power" placards. I'm not sure what Jean Rollin, a man I associated with lesbians, thought of these new lesbians, but he must have been sad that OUR lesbians had been replaced.

I was exposed to Jean Rollin years before I saw a single, solitary frame of his films. Rollin was a name I associated with vampires and lesbians from the get-go. I didn't understand the titles of his films, but I sure understood the images.

The posters of Rollin's films were like relics from another world. It was world called France, and it was world where lesbians roamed the countryside in pursuit of blood, boobs, and necks.

I knew about France because I'd shown my mother some Rollin posters and asked her what they said. She never knew, even though she spoke some French, but she did tell me that the posters were from France.

"Can we go to France?" I asked her many times.

"Why do want to go there?!" she'd retort. A question was always answered with a question in my house.

"I want to meet Jean Rollin." (I pronounced his name 'Gene')

"Who's Jean Rollin?"

"Just someone."

"Can we go?"

"Go where?"

"To France."

"I asked you what for?"

Did I dare reveal my plan?

Aaahhh, why not, perhaps she'd be sympathetic.

"I want to meet the lesbians."

My mother didn't disguise her awkwardness with my use of the unspeakable "L" word.

"What are you talking about? You don't know any lesbians in France."

I smiled. "That's why I want to go. I need to meet them."

A shake of the head ended my plans. "You won't be meeting anybody anywhere, son."

I was devastated.

She yelled: "I thought you had homework to do?!"

Although my trip to France to meet lesbians was canceled before it even began, my pursuit of Mr. Jean Rollin didn't end. Decades later, I would become the proud owner of special DVD editions of his glorious films, and I'd finally get to see those real lesbians in action.

What Jean Rollin taught me about cinema is that anything is possible. That's why we like cinema so much. It's the way we dream awake.

Thanks, Mr. Rollin, and thanks to all you real lesbians, wherever you are these days.

Midi Minuit and the Jupiter Hunt

This still from Rene Cardona's La Terrificante Bestia Humana (Night of the Bloody Apes aka Sex Beast, '69) is but one of the many treasures residing in midi/minuit Fantastique No. 24.

A film I like very much, it was afforded great respect within these pages.

Before Cinefantastique and before L'Ecran Fantastique, there was midi/minuit Fantastique, the brainchild of Eric Losfeld.

Like me, it was born in '62, and its first subject for deep analysis was Terence Fisher.

In subsequent issues, it covered King Kong, Roger Corman, Jean Pierre Mocky (a wonderful, underrated figure), Jacques Torneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, Roman Polanski, Pierre Etaix (one of France's greatest comedians/filmmakers), and Koji Wakamatsu.

I can't understate how far ahead of its time this magazine was. In the 60's, nobody was taking fantasy, horror, and science fiction films as seriously as this.

In this 24th issue, for example, over forty pages were devoted to the life and work of Gaston Leroux, the French pulp writer behind Phantom of the Opera and a myriad of amazing tales that energized the genre for generations.

Jupiter (France, '71)

I was very young when I came across a large stash of these magazines. I've managed to unearth and experience many titles found within its covers, but the film from which this still was taken, Jupiter (Jean Pierre Prevost, 71), has eluded me.

Has anybody reading this seen Jupiter? Perhaps it's been retitled? Released in a dubbed version somewhere? If you know anything about it, please let me know. Then we'll all know.

Clearly, it focused on vampirism. This image shares visual similarities with Count Yorga, so I am extremely eager to see it. I've been fascinated with this film for decades, but my attempts to unearth a copy (in any format) have been fruitless so far.

If there are other films that you've obsessed about for decades, I'd like to know what they are. Please write.

Jupiter's director, Jean Pierre Provost, has 31 imdb credits, and appears to have moved into TV early on in his long career. He directed as recently as 2008.

I read about Jean Rollin, one of my favorite directors, in midi/minuit long before I saw an actual moving frame of his work. Although I understood no French in my pre- and early teen years, a helpful neighbor lady translated several articles for me in exchange for babysitting duties.

I still remember her reading this piece on Rollin to me. It was fascinating and magical, and I was buoyed by the fact that my lady translator was becoming passionate about these films also, even though she had not seen any of them.

Thus began my love for one of cinema's most idiosyncratic and individualistic filmmakers.

Mr. Eric Losfeld could not have dreamed that Mr. Rollin's work would one day be honored with editions such as this:



It's been a fascinating journey from mid/minuit Fantastique to the genre blogosphere.