TRAITEMENT DE CHOC (ALAIN JESSUA, 1973)

I first read about director Alain Jessua in FAB Press's Eyeball Compendium, in which he's described as the "Orson Welles of French cinema[...] he made a big splash, critically and commercially, with his first two features, but then seemed to lose his way and has never really fulfilled the promise he once showed." However, I of course derive much more pleasure out of Welle's later, less polished, less "canonical" films, so I made a mental note to check some Jessua films out.

Jessua is virtually forgotten in discussion of cinema today, and completely unknown in the US. His only film with a domestic DVD release is the 1984 horror-comedy Frankenstein 90, released by Anchor Bay around 2002, only to find itself once again quickly forgotten.

Traitement de Choc is most notorious (although, that's a relative word in this instance) for the fact that famed French actor Alain Delon appears in a rather extensive full frontal nude scene. That seems to be what it's initial selling point was, even being imported and released in the UK by Anthony Balch as Doctor in the Nude, which, in the context of the film itself, seems rather absurd, but hey, I'm sure it sold a few more tickets that way.

The film itself is a fairly conventional dramatic thriller, but it's moral positioning (done in a not-totally-heavy-handed sort of way) and genre elements make it stand out. The story follows Helene Massan's (Annie Giradot) visit at Dr. Deviler's (Delon) "rejuvenation" facility, a closed community which is three parts spa and one part mad-scientist laboratory. At the clinic, Helene encounters a group of vapid, rich men and women who convince her that after the treatment she will feel infinitely better, and that she will be "one of them." Being "one of them" seems to imply nothing more than lounging around a pool sunbathing, frolicking naked on the beach, and talking about how great it is to look and feel young. Nothing of substance constructs the group's relationship, but that's partly the point.

Eventually Helene begins to question some of the facility's techniques, especially as members of the Portuguese help she grows fond of repeatedly get sick and disappear. She later starts sleeping with Dr. Devilers and soon has access to some of the facility's secrets. However, nobody else seems to care about anything other than how they look.

Parts of the film found me thinking of Luigi Bazzoni's Footprints, as well as Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle, and occasionally Frans Zwartjes' Pentimento. The first two are evoked due to the first half of the film featuring the female protagonist wandering around by herself, interacting more with the architecture of the facility than the other patients. The latter comes from the interiors of the treatment facility: cold, unresponsive metal and international style white decorate the intensely modern buildings.

One of the more interesting elements of the film is Helene's fairly ambiguous moral stance. She's even asked, several times throughout the film, what is is exactly that she's after. She's obviously after some sort of answers, but she's not quite sure why. On one hand, she clearly feels bad that something is happening to the Portugeuse workmen--but on the other, she is insistent on recalling her physical and mental "youngness" (due only to the fact that she was recently dumped, for the first time ever, for a younger woman). The conflicting interests of Helene help to ease what appears to be Jessua's conviction of the bourgeoisie: he is not flat out condemning them in a heavy handed way (as many political genre films tend to do), rather, the protagonist (whom we inherently identify with as viewers) is placed in a position of confusion. By the end it becomes clear that the treatment is "questionable" (to say the least), but we also understand the desire for youth, a desire that undoubtedly exists in some shape or form in all human beings.

Helene's moral positioning is challenged even further as she takes a plane ride with Dr. Devilers, and he flat out tells her that he finds his patients ridiculous. He states that he would prefer to live with "the so-called savages," but his attempts to do just that have failed due to his outsider status: in this context, he is the other. And so he is now dependent on the wealth brought to him by his wealthy clients.

The climax of the film brings all of the sensational elements that one would hope for in a genre film, and Jessua's creativity doesn't disappoint. It's a fairly abrupt ending (in terms of narrativity), but a bizarre coda posits even the police as shallow, vanity obsessed individuals who place the self over the group, ending the film on a fairly depressing note.

Overall, the film isn't perfect, but is still a very worthwhile watch, if only for the fact to understand how you can make a subtle politically charged film that remains compulsively watchable and entertaining.

MAJOR UPDATES AT ESOTIKAFILM.COM

Major updates over at the Esotika website:

-Three new reviews (two by me and one by Eric Cotenas)
-My choice of the Top Ten DVD Releases of 2007
-The Library section is now up
-I've started to put up the People section; though the only entry there so far is on Alain Robbe-Grillet (including--I think--the most complete filmography and English-language bibliography on the internet, as well as poster images from ALL of his films except for N. Took the Dice

Also, I have a couple of questions for readers of this blog:

1.
Has anybody had a chance to see Rollin's latest, La Nuit des horloges yet? I know it's played at a couple festivals. If anybody has seen it and would like to write a review of it for the Esotika website, please let me know, as I'd love to have a review of it up there. Same goes for Robbe-Grillet's latest, Gradiva.

2.
Does anybody have a copy of Midi-Minuit Fantastique #13 (November, 1965)? There's a still in it from a "lost" Mario Mercier film that I'd love to include with the Mercier article that will be published soon at the site; if you have a copy and could scan that image for me I would be eternally grateful.

3.
If you have a film blog that talks about films that deal with Esotika themes, please leave a link for me here, as I'm going to update the blog links on the website (and on here) in the next few days.

And finally, an anonymous individual made an RSS feed of this blog for Livejournal. It is available here:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/esotika/profile
There is also an Atom XML feed available here:
http://esotika.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I will be linking these from the sidebar in the future as well.

LOFT (KIYOSHI KUROSAWA, 2005)

"I had to do something that was a horror films, but at the same time I wanted to destroy horror films."

-Kiyoshi Kurosawa, taken from a talk given after a screening of Loft at Yale University

Loft is a very peculiar movie. It maintains Kurosawa's trademark eye for atmosphere and horror, yet, as occasionally happens, it feels like a very disjointed film. I don't necessarily find this to be a bad thing, but when sitting down to write about a disjointed film, I find it more difficult to organize my thoughts into something coherent. And coherency, well, that's what one hopes to accomplish with a review. Coherency is also something the movie itself wants to accomplish, and surprisingly, it does.

At least, in a very indirect way. The movie is an odd hodgepodge of terror, atmosphere, melodrama, and subtle comedy. In some ways, the movie is a response to the current state of the Japanese horror film--at least, the Japanese horror film as viewed by the Westerner. A couple of weeks before watching Loft, I had the pleasure of viewing Sion Sono's Exte: Hair Extensions, which maintains a totally different tone from Kurosawa's film, but also subtly ridicules the array of omnipresent cliches that abound in contemporary J-Horror. While I think Sono's film succeeds more in calling attention to the sorry state of J-Horror while still delivering an intelligent and entertaining film, Kurosawa's film works better divorced from the satire. It's there, and it's done fairly well, but if the satire is the only thing the viewer fixates on in the film, he or she is missing out on a lot.

Before I segue away from the satire; it is worth discussing. Most of Kurosawa's satire in the film isn't so much straight up satire in the vein of Month Python or popular television, rather, it's more a subversion of the archetypes that permeate J-Horror, revealing why exactly it is that these cliches are lacking. The long haired ghost, which exists as the most present archetype known to Western audiences, is present in the film. But the "ghost" doesn't move jerkily, is rather just another character on screen, and Kurosawa allows the ghost to remain present uncomfortably long once she has been revealed. By allowing the (expected) source of terror to remain on screen, the terror is diffused and any emotional response the character/signifier would elicit is crushed.

As Jerry White points out in the chapter on Loft in The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Master of Fear, Kurosawa also subverts archetypes by allowing his female protagonist (his first since 1992's Guard from the Underground) to, through a lack of anchored identity, take on all the roles generally offered to females in J-Horror: the victim, the monster, and the hero. These roles are ostensibly established by three characters (Reiko: the hero, the mummy: the monster, and the ghost: the victim), but all there characters have overlapping personalities-they are essentially three parts of the same whole. By collapsing all of these archetypes into a single character (who, let's face it, in the scope of the movie is an empty shell, a simple signifier for Kurosawa's ideas) he reveals the lack in depending upon the archetypes.

But aside from the subversion of cliches, the film is also a narrative. The story finds Reiko struggling to churn out a pop-romance novel to satisfy her publisher. She moves into a house in the middle of the country to get some peace and quiet. She discovers her neighbor is a scientist working on a mummy. Her publisher goes nuts and tries to kill her. She falls in love. A dead girl pops up. All this implies, of course, is that there is a narrative in the film, the narrative is far from straight-forward.

As usual in a Kurosawa film, the progression relies on the creation and sustenance of atmosphere. Atmosphere, which Kurosawa is always wildly successful at building out of location, is what propels the film forward. There is no central conflict (well, we think there is at first, but that central conflict is utterly abandoned half-way through) to carry the narrative, so we have to give ourselves over to ideas and aesthetics. Also as usual in a Kurosawa movie, it is the atmosphere that makes the movie worth while: sound and image work together so well in the film that it's impossible to not be totally absorbed into the locations on display. Several abject "jump shock" scenes make perfect use of the natural light and old house that Reiko is living in, and the heavy atmosphere manages to approach a climax without plummeting immediately afterwards. The intense atmosphere is sustained throughout the entire first hour and a half of the film.

And that's when things change.

Out of nowhere, Reiko and Yoshioka begin speaking to each other as if they're living in a Douglas Sirk melodrama: music swells, and the two run to each others arms professing their love for one another. An empty grave lies in the background. It's jarring: in the same way "jump shocks" work within the realm of generic J-Horror, this change is constructed to be surprising. From this point on, Reiko is no longer the films center; she's thrown to the background and Kurosawa's camera starts to linger on Yoshioka instead. An attack mars their brief foray into the land of emotions, and soon everyone is back to their apathetic and empty selves.

But, it is the fact that these characters are completely empty and apathetic that allows this melodramatic interlude to occur without distorting the film into something incoherent: when you have nothing, the first chance to attach yourself, fill yourself, achieves a sense of epic proportions. The overly dramatic scene really fits perfectly with the rest of the subtle, understated, and almost silent film. Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis. Kurosawa's realization of that is wonderful, and the cinematic approach to his revelation is even more impressive.

If there's anything that needs to be said about the film it's this: in an interview Kurosawa mentioned the film being an "experiment in terror." And for that, I applaud. Loft doesn't get tied up trying to maintain itself in an overdone, unnecessary plot. One of the primary perks of making films is the ability to both establish emotions and inspire emotions in fairly straightforward way (when done well)--and that is what Kurosawa does here. It's an experiment in atmosphere, and experiment in applying theory to practice, and overall it's a stunning aestheticized experiment. A fulfilling one, at that.

I WAS A TEENAGE ZABBADOING (CARL ANDERSEN, 1988)

aka Vampiros Sexos

While the Cinema of Transgression movement had peaked in the mid-1980s with the work of Richard Kern and Beth B., across the Atlantic, director Carl Andersen began making films clearly in the same vein in the late 1980s. His debut film, I Was a Teenage Zabbadoing... (full title: "I Was A Teenage Zabbadoing And The Incredible Lusty Dust-Whip From Outer Space Conquers The Earth Versus The 3 Psychedelic Stooges Of Dr. Fun Helsing And Fighting Against Surf-Vampires And Sex-Nazis And Have Troubles With This Endless Titillation Title") is clearly situated within this movement, combining Vampire archetypes with hardcore sex all set to a soundtrack of post-punk and no-wave music.

In this hour long, starkly lit black and wide feature, plot takes a sidestep to the depiction of angsty counterculture, fights, obsessive sex, and lusty vampires. What little plot is found follows, apparently, "A female vampire from the planet Arus [who] tries to vampirize the descendants of Dr. Fun Helsing."¹ The vampire infects her first victim by way of "infected" olive oil (?!), and then the vampire virus spreads itself via sex and biting. This all takes place among 20 something kids clad in black and leather, who hang out at a bar (The Video Teque) and don't really do too much with their lives other than fuck.

For being what could be considered an ostensibly empty plot, the film moves at a rapidly entertaining pace, with occasional bouts of humor (as two characters are driving along the street on their hunt for the vampires, they keep passing couples fighting for no apparent reason). Parts of the film also are tailor made to fit the excellent music that's decorating the scenery, but the film plays these "music video" scenes in a way similar to the aforementioned Cinema of Transgression, never delving into something that seems out of place (in the way quite a few contemporary straight to video horror flicks do).

It's remarkably trashy but stylish; a perfect visual accompaniment to the no-wave music scene that prevailed in America (and to some extent, Europe)--far more fitting, in my opinion, than many of the films of Nick Zedd (who authored the Cinema of Transgression Manifesto).

There are, however, two particularly interesting elements of the film that merit mention. The first is a particularly potent twenty second scene where two of the main vampires get into a brief fight as one of their soon to be victims plays an acoustic song with lyrics about dancing in the background. It's bizarrely poetic in a very low-rent sort of way that totally fits the tone of the film. The second interesting element comes by way of what the vampires are weak against: instead of garlic and crucifix's, the vampires cannot cross the border of--wait for it-- Tarkovsky films! It's a bizarre jab that once again fits the punk spirit that pervades the rest of the film.

My main point of interest to the films of Carl Andersen, aside from the fact that they're delightfully entertaining and earnest in a way that most cinema has forgotten about, comes from the fact that ever since seeing Andersen's most notorious film, 1990's Mondo Weirdo, I've been a bit obsessed with the band that does the soundtracks for what appears to be his entire oeuvre, Model D'oo. There's a track that I absolutely love from Mondo Weirdo that also appears in this film, albeit in a stripped down version. Regardless, liking the music of the soundtrack significantly helps to enjoy the film.


¹The intertitles of the film are in German (I think), so the "details" provided in this sentence come via the Vampyres-Online website.

March Update: Another Entry Without Pictures

Once again I'm sitting in front of my computer posting yet another update about how it's been "a bit quiet" around here lately. I could blame this on the fact that I've been busy with schoolwork (which is ostensibly a truth), but in reality I've hardly watched any movies that would qualify as something that I'd want to write about for a while. The reason? It's a bit embarrassing, but I got sucked into prime-time TV show Lost.

I should clarify that while I obviously own a TV and make use of it regularly to watch flicks, we don't have cable at my house, and I don't even have an antenna on my TV so I get literally zero channels; hence, it's not a fallacy when I proclaim that "I don't have TV." This is for a number of reasons, the main being that it's very rare that I watch TV, so it would be utterly superfluous to pay for cable, despite the fact that a few of my roommates wouldn't mind being able to tune in and tune out ever so often.

But, I do occasionally "watch TV" via DVD rentals, streaming episodes, and online downloads. For some reason, at the beginning of February, something convinced me to start watching Lost. And then, since February 9th, I've watched the entire first three seasons, plus the five episodes of season four that have aired so far. This amounts to 76 45 minute episodes. That's about 3420 minutes. Which, presupposing that a majority of the movies I watch are around 90 minutes, comes out to be 38 movies. Which, in retrospect, is fairly depressing.

It's not a bad show, it's fairly entertaining, and, all things considered, it's relatively smart. But, while reading Raoul Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema this last week I encountered an explanation for why I was finding it so hard to do anything but what a relatively empty show. In the first chapter of Poetics of Cinema, Ruiz discusses Central Conflict Theory, and, in a round about way, his aversion to it. Central Conflict Theory ostensibly posits an A vs. B position, and generally manipulates the audience into siding with one side over the other. This central conflict is the only thing driving not only the show, but the audience's desire to see the show: the audience wants nothing more than to see how conflicts resolve. Here's what Ruiz says in his own words:

Let us return to films that are not boring. Films provoked by the noonday demon. Central conflict theory manufactures athletic fiction and offers to take us on a journey. Prisoner of the protagonist's will, we are subjected to the various stages making up a conflict of which he, the protagonist, is at once guardian and captive. In the end we are released and given back to ourselves, a little sadder than before. There is only one notion in our heads, which is to go [on] another journey as soon as we can.

(It's worth noting that Ruiz is using "films that are no boring" a bit ironically; he has a preference for what, viewed with the core idea of Central Conflict Theory, are boring; he quotes Ozu, Snow, et. al. as examples of "boring" film.)

This awareness frustrates me but is also fairly enlightening; and these emotions arise from the fact that it's an utterly accurate observation. I was never reflecting on events from the show (which has quite a vaguely interesting mythology built up around it to be honest), I was just voracious ready to devour solutions to my athlete's problems. It also made me more aware of the fact that most of the films I tend to prefer and applaud are (mostly) lacking Central Conflict, or at least feature a decentralized plot.

The perks of watching a Robbe-Grillet film are not cause and effect; it's not really important who you side with or even what happens to the characters--rather, it's the context that the plot is playing out in and the ideas that are coming forth via the character-signifiers. Etc., etc., I could probably elaborate with a long list of my favorite films and directors, but I wouldn't have any more work done that I did to begin with.

However, as I said, I'm now completely caught up. Despite my still naive desire/necessity to see whether team A or team B wins, there are no more episodes for me to satiate the empty hunger with, at least until next week. But, that means I can finally get things done!

As of tonight I am officially on my Spring Break, and I've already begun working on content for the Esotika website. I have a new review that will be up later tonight once I resize the screencaps, I've begun working on the Library section of the website (which is actually a much smaller undertaking than I anticipated), I have 80% of my "Best DVDs of 2007" list written, and I will be helping my friend/translator do the final edit on the Mario Mercier article on Wednesday. So, it's update time!

I've also finally gotten around to updating my monthly screening log (linked from the right panel), adding December, January, and February.

Also, I'd like to thank Jeremy from over at Moon in the Gutter for pointing out the
Wikio Top Film Blogs list which I was delighted to find my own humble blog at #37. I'm not sure how it works, but I just wanted to take the opportunity to once again thank all the readers of this blog!

JEANNE'S JOURNAL (MARIO MERCIER)

"My dear Éric,

Among the books that you have recently sent me, I thank you most particularly for the work of Mario Mercier. I don’t know who this author is, but his invention, in the fascinating world of the fantastique that is so dear to us, is a prodigious wealth. Pushed so far, with such a disposition towards unrealism, insanity becomes a simple value [...] Without waiting for Mario Mercier to become nationally recognized [...], I would like you to know that I admire him. "

-A letter to Eric Losfield from Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues¹

Tonight, lying on my bed in the hours after I returned from my banal part-time job in retail, I finished reading Mario Mercier's incomparable novel, Jeanne's Journal. To my knowledge (any digging reveals no further details), it is the only novel of Mercier's that has ever been translated into English, and at that the book is long out of print and often fetches prices of at least 100 USD on used book sites. I lucked out and managed to track a copy down through my university's interlibrary loan system, and I'm very grateful that I was able to.

The book is one of the most fanciful forays into the erotic realm of the fantastique that I've ever encountered--in any medium. At time the book reads like a bizarre sci-fi novel tainted with an optimistic idealism that was prominent during the mid-20th centuries; other times it hearkens Sadean excess, staying strongly full force until the readers imagination is so permeated with impossible excess that the reality of the physical space the reader undoubtedly exists in simply disappears.

The story exists solely within the realm of spectacle, nothing is too fanciful or far-fetched to escape Mercier's transcendent realm; erotically charged throughout, it's a world where dream and reality are equally leveled, neither is easier to swallow. The book tells the tale of the titular Jeanne, who eventually ends up on a quest to rescue her friend Louise from the grips of an evil Baron; Louise being held hostage due to the fact that she humiliated the Baron's wife at a party.

Among the many highlights of the book, I was particularly awed by Mercier's description of the Baron's metaphysical kingdom, which brought to my mind an amalgamation of Verner Panton colors and luminance, viscous fluids floating in the air via a Jordan Belson film, human debasement recalling and overwhelming everything from Andre Pieyre de Mandiargue's Portrait of an Englishman in His Chateau to Bernard Noel's Castle of Communion, all culminating in pseudo-scientific explanation that, bizarrely, have more in common with the magical elevator in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than anything formerly mentioned. An excerpt will help my point:

"We entered a large, circular room containing many pipes of various diameters and running in different directions. A ventilation whir came from a series of small grilles opening in the floor. I looked up and, to my surprise, I saw a number of vividly coloured condensations silhouetting the shape of pieces of furniture.

"Let's go up," the Baron said.

"But there are no stairs," I could not help pointing out.

He began to laugh and, pulling on my leash, proceeded up an imaginary staircase. With amazement, I felt myself rise into the air.

I then realised that this stair case, as well as the floor, was made of concentrated layers of stabilised air, spatially maintained by invisible field forces[...]"²

And from that point on, the spectacle continues, unabated, until the book ends on a remarkably sublime note that perfectly encapsulates the tone and fantasticism of the rest of the book, while allowing a cathartic sense of conclusion, and utter satisfaction.

I can't recommend the enough book, and hope that sometime in the future I am either fluent enough in French myself to read the rest of Mercier's oeuvre, or more of his work becomes available in English. Though I'm assuming I will have to rely on the former.


The book itself encountered trouble with the censors upon it's initial publication in 1969, but Eric Losfields staunch defense of the book meant that eventually it found publication for an unsuspecting public. Mercier went on to write several more books (La cuvée de singes, Le Necrophile) and eventually he directed two feature films.

Though still mostly unknown, Pete Tombs brought some slight attention to the man with his and Cathal Tohill's quintessential Immoral Tales, which had a dedicated review of Mercier's first feature film, La Goulve (which is frequently bootlegged with the English title Erotic Witchcraft). Mercier's second film, La Papesse, has fortunately been released on a rather lackluster DVD by Pathfinder entertainment. Unfortunately the subtitles on the DVD barely match any of the dialogue on screen, so the viewing experience is compromised.

With now having experienced one of Mercier's novel in addition to one of his films, I can firmly declare that the man is remarkably interesting, and I will continue to hope for the opportunity to experience more of his work in the future.


¹ Unless noted, all quotes and background information comes from an article on Mario Mercier written by Frederick Durand. A full translation of the article (which Frederick assures me has the most info on Mercier in any language) is forthcoming on the Esotika site, once the wonderful Mandy Hoff finishes the translation and I work with her to clean it up.


² English translation by Arlette Ryvers, 1972

Alain Robbe-Grillet: August 1922 - February 2008

Despite the turmoil of events that have occurred around me recently (as I've mentioned before, I attend Northern Illinois University which was recently the site of a school shooting on Valentines day) I find myself most affected (in a totally selfish way) by the death of filmmaker and author (among other things), Alain Robbe-Grillet.

I discovered Alain Robbe-Grillet on a whim after seeing Last Year at Marienbad six or seven years ago. After watching more Alain Resnais films I came to the realization that it wasn't Resnais' work that had hit me so hard about the film, but rather Robbe-Grillet's script. This eventually led to me seeking out his novels and films, which I devoured and loved.

I have a lot to say about the man, as his films and books have been a constant source of both awe and inspiration over the years, but I just wanted to drop a quick note expressing my, well, sadness (though that word doesn't contextually seem to be the best fit) over his death. He had recently completely a novel (A Sentimental Novel) that had been a source of controversy in France, and hasn't seen an English translation yet (which is no suprise, considering there are still large chunks of his oeuvre that have yet to see the light of day in English accessible options; namely, most of his filmography as director, 2/3s of his "autobiographical" written trilogy, his collaboration with Irina Ionesco [the text of which was admittedly worked into some of his intertextual novels], and more), but I look forward to reading it whenever I get the opportunity.

His work has forced me to think about narrative in a way that I undoubtedly would have taken a longer time to come across; and his visual-textual collaborations have been particularly pertinent to the development of my own work.

Though I suppose it sounds trite to say, maybe every cloud does have a silver lining, and the death of a great artist will bring enough attention that hopefully more of his work (his films especially) will become available for a larger audience so more people can understand what it is that I personally find so utterly amazing.

UPDATE

Okay, so obviously even with launching the website I've been pretty quiet over here. I just wanted to comment to say that I'm not abandoning this blog in favor of the website. I think (I haven't decided 100% yet) that what I'll be doing is still be posting my reviews as I write them here, and then I'll do weekly updates on the website.

But, aside from just films reviews as normal, I think I'll be expanding what I blog about on here- the Esotika website will be dedicated exclusively to film, but I will probably expand the blog to discussion of books, music, and art as well. All new articles will go exclusively to the website, as will content from contributors (reviews, articles, and etc.), so make sure you check that regularly as well.

Just wanted to pop in and say "Hi!" again-- didn't want to appear MIA!

VENUS IN FURS (JESS FRANCO, 1969)

The first time I saw Venus in Furs was four years ago; Blue Underground's stunning DVD presentation had yet to be released, and with only six Franco films under belt, I was still a Franco novice. I had been working through the few films of his that I could find, and before Venus in Furs the only one that had stood out to be was Virgin Among the Living Dead-- but Venus in Furs was different. Venus in Furs was the first Franco film that I got truly excited about. After my first viewing on a crummy VHS dub I immediately rewound the ending credits and watched Barbara McNair's wailing voice called out: "Venus in furs will be smiiiiiling-- when that moment arrives..."

Watching the film (for the fourth time) now is a totally different experience. The film has changed-- well, perhaps the film hasn't change, but the way I watch Franco films have. In fact, my entire method of watching films has changed. If there's anything that writing about film has taught me, it's the importance of being an active film viewer. And often with a Franco flick, being an active film viewer requires you to look at the film in context- specifically the context of the Franco canon.

But I'll touch on that later, as I'm also a staunch supporter of the idea that a piece of art, if it can be labeled "objectively good," should be able to stand on it's own--and Venus in Furs certainly does. Franco has--throughout his many taped interviews that delightfully complement DVD releases of his films--shown him self to be a jazz fanatic; the music inspires everything he does. In the case of Venus in Furs this inspiration is obvious--the story follows trumpet player Jimmy Logan (James Darren- whose character [and most of the plot of the film itself] was based off of musician Chet Baker) as he falls in love with Wanda Reed (Maria Rohm), a woman who he saw killed over a year ago. Jimmy is also in love with Rita (Barbara McNair), a crooning in the nightclub he plays trumpet in. Uptempo and almost psychedelic, courtesy of Manfred Mann decorates the film; there is more music on display here than dialogue, something that works to Franco's advantage.

Opening on a sunlit beach (featuring a fence that shares more than a passing resemblance to the infamous fence that populates a majority of the films in director Jean Rollin's oeuvre), the viewer is immediately introduced to a theme that pops up again and again in the "Franco canon"-- the idea of the sea, of water, as the beginning and the end. This is a motif that pops up, as I've said, in many of Franco's films: at the end of Female Vampire, as Countess Irina drowns in her bathtub, Sexual Story of O where Mario carries the murdered Odile into the eternally looming sea, in Vampyros Lesbos with Countess Nadine drowned face up in her swimming pool, Antonio at the end of Gemidos de Placer, the list is unending! And it was at this point, upon my fourth viewing of Venus in Furs, that I realized why it worked so well.

I think it works so well--and holds the highest priority among casual Franco fans-- because of the fact that it is both a microcosm of the Franco universe and an excellent example of European Genre Cinema (Euro-Cult, Eurotrash, whatever term you prefer). And there's a reason for this- the productions that Jess Franco made with Harry Alan Towers were international coproductions; and because of this, there were a lot of cinematic elements that Franco lost control over. But, Harry Alan Towers wasn't incompetent, so the combination between the two was fairly strong, and while they may not be "pure Franco" films, they are certainly good films.*

"Time is like the ocean-- you can't hold on to it..." musing Jimmy as he tries to take reign over the events in his life- the total chaos that is causing him such emotional distress. And this distortion of time is hyper-present in the film, in an early scene, introducing the murder of Wanda at the hands of three perverts, a party is filled to the brim with people, but nobody within the frame moves except our pivotal characters, the extras decorating the lavish room frozen still, echoing scenes from Alain Resnais' brilliantly elliptical Last Year At Marienbad-- except in a completely different context. Scenes cut back and forth between the past and the present, even occasionally jumping into what we can only assume is the future. Nothing is making sense to Jimmy as he wanders through the carnival in Rio, and the narrative structure of the film serves to hide the truth (at least, whatever truth there is to be told in a work of fiction) from the audience. We never know more than Jimmy.

The exploration of time and memory, played out via an occasionally melodramatic love story, calls to mind a quote from Jacques Derrida in Ken McMullen's 1983 film Ghost Dance:

"Ghosts don’t just appear, they come back. In French we talk of them ‘returning.’Now that presupposes a memory of the past, that has never taken the form of the present. [The] theory of ghosts is based on a theory of mourning. In normal mourning, Freud says, one internalizes the dead, one takes the dead into oneself, and assimilates them. This internalization is an idealization, it accepts the dead. Whereas in mourning, which doesn’t develop naturally–-that is to say, in mourning, that goes wrong–-there is no true internalization. There is [...] ‘incorporation,’ the dead are taken into us but don’t become a part of us. They just occupy a particular place in our bodies. They can speak for themselves. They can haunt our body and ventriloquise our speech, so the ghost is enclosed in a crypt, which is our body. We become a sort of graveyard for ghosts. A ghost can be not only our unconscious, but more precisely, someone else’s unconscious. The other’s unconscious speaks in our place. It is not our unconscious, it is the unconscious of the other which plays tricks on us. It can be terrifying, but that’s when things start to happen."

And things do indeed happen for Jimmy as he's haunted by the memory of the dead Wanda- a memory so strong with love and lust that he manages to somehow manifest her, and she becomes the catalyst for the events in the film. There is, of course, a delightfully handled revenge subplot that plays out amidst the romantic haunting, but it's hardly relevant. What it does serve to do, however, is necessary to the success of the film. It is within this subplot that a strong portrayal of European Genre Cinema tropes comes to the surface, it is this subplot which balances out the "non -Franco" elements of the film, creating the dichotomy of the personal film (Franco's general method-- at least when he has full control) and the public film (the idea of the "exploitation" film). But it's not just a generic subplot to pad the runtime and sell to international markets, rather, this subplot remains an oneiric exploration of revenge, still fitting into the idea of memory, ghosts, and regret. Wanda comes back to kill those who killed her, and it is no surprise when she discovers that all three of her soon-to-be-victims are still in love with her memory.

To further elaborate on the idea of the film as a microcosm of the Franco universe, one need look no further than the casting. Primary roles in the film are played by Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski, and Dennis Price, all actors who pop up again and again throughout the Franco filmography. Part of Franco's brilliant intertextuality involves not only the repeated use of his favorite actors (in the way that many directors; Fassbinder and Herzog for instance), but the repeated use of the same actors as the same (or similar) characters. This repeated use of the character/actor combination helps to point out that idea that to truly enjoy see on of Jess Franco's films, you need to see all of them. It is the intertextuality that highlights each and every film, poking and prodding them into a more coherent product.

But I digress-- as I mentioned before, this is one of the few films from Franco's filmography that doesn't hold a total reliance on context to be a great film. Aside from the literal content of the film, much of the greatness of the film comes from it's aesthetics; specifically it's visuals and it's soundtrack. As I've already mentioned, Franco uses Manfred Mann's music more than dialogue, his tight, trippy, psychedelic jazz stylings providing a route for the fractured narrative to follow-- this music is passion. And of course, what good would a European Genre Film be without striking visuals? It was 1969 and the peak of modern interiors are on display here, including a couple scenes shot inside Carlo Ponti's styled-up-to-the-minute house! Many of the party scenes wouldn't look particularly out of place in a Radley Metzger film, something rare for Franco seeing as his interiors are generally far more sparse.

There are a few bits of post-production that provide temporary "surrealistic" touches to the film in particularly pivotal moments of the film. In decided how potent these effects are, it's best to examine the film, once again, from both the personal and public points of view: If viewed strictly as a Franco film, these surrealistic events violate the fractured realism that seems to be driving the narrative (as Franco himself points out in an interview), however, viewing the film in the context of a "public" film (as an example of European Genre Cinema), it works fine, and is handled subtly even. The special effects are not heavy handed, serving only to highlight the intensity of the moments on display.

In conclusion, Venus in Furs remains a brilliant film, whether taken as a microcosmic view into the wild world of director Jess Franco or as a prime example of European Genre Cinema, exploding with creativity and style.

The Website is Up!

So, I have to head off to work shortly so I will add more details to this later, but for now all that needs to be said is:

To explain my month-long almost-absence:

THE ESOTIKA WEBSITE IS UP!