This Friday and Saturday at midnight, the Music Box Theatre will screen Lips of Blood (1975), the first in a three-film series devoted to French exploitation director Jean Rollin (1938-2010). Upcoming are The Iron Rose (1973) on March 9 and 10, and Fascination (1979) on March 30 and 31. All three films come highly recommended to purveyors of the macabre, sexploitation freaks, and fans of Jacques Rivette, another French director who specialized in opaque, dreamlike narratives. That’s to say that Rollin is not just an acquired taste, but a fusion of several different acquired tastes. At the same time, there’s something inherently admirable about his tenacity (he signed about 20 very personal films over five decades and directed dozens of others pseudonymously), which has made him an underground favorite for decades. The films in this series are obsessive works that hammer away at a mad personal vision. Not for nothing did Dave Kehr, writing about Rollin in the New York Times in 2012, describe him as an outsider artist.
That theme is presented nakedly in The Iron Rose, a nearly plotless film about two lovers who get lost in a cemetery. That movie begins with a documentary-style sequence in which the lovers first meet at a banquet hall in Normandy. Rollin’s depiction of the area is stark and forbidding, though his depiction of the lovers is natural and charming. The two meet later to go on a date; walking home through a cemetery, they stop to make love, then find after dark that they’ve forgotten the way out. Rollin makes the cemetery seem like an expansive maze, sequencing shots in such a way that one has no sense of the layout. (To quote Kehr again: “Moments like these . . . remind us of the close kinship of outsider art and the avant-garde. It is, after all, difficult to distinguish between rules broken out of innocence and rules broken with study and deliberation.”) The Iron Rose doesn’t tell a story so much as linger on a mood. It’s the most minimal and most rarified of the Rollin films I’ve seen.
