In Search of Lost Time

In this third segment of Voluptuous Melancholia: A Critical Examination of the Films of Jean Rollin, we not only encounter some of Rollin’s very best work, but also reach the fullest exploration of his most important artistic theme.

Following his early vampire cycle, Rollin’s work took a new direction. His work became more intensely personal, as he struggled to express something profound about the human condition. Across three key films—The Iron Rose (1973), Lips of Blood (1975), and Night of the Hunted (1980)—we see characters experience an inarticulable sense of incompleteness and loss, a gap in their soul that leads them in search of a lost object to fill it.

But such completeness is elusive, and instead we see a turn toward oblivion, death, and the dissolution of fixed identity. In my view, these visions of darkly romantic fatalism embody the very essence of Jean Rollin’s work.

This segment also explores the more unseemly side of Rollin’s career, namely his detour through sexploitation film and eventual banishment to hardcore pornography in the late 1970s. As we’ll see, his most artistically pure films were always his biggest financial failures. The closer he came to saying what he wanted to say through film, the more he needed to debase himself as a filmmaker. This inextricable link between his proudest work and most humiliating failures is another of the most important things to understand about Rollin’s life and career.

Timestamps

0:00 - introduction

0:33 - The Iron Rose (1973)

8:23 - sexploitation features Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (1973) and Fly Me the French Way (1974)

9:37 - The Demoniacs (1974)

11:45 - Phantasmes (1975) and Rollin’s hardcore work

13:38 - Lips of Blood (1975)

20:13 - The Grapes of Death (1978)

21:47 - Night of the Hunted (1980)

Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe

GUTTER STUDIES

¿Donde puedes escuchar?

Episodios