Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil (3 November 1938 – 15 December 2010) was a French film director, actor, and novelist best known for his work in the fantastique genre.
Rollin's career, spanning over fifty years, featured early short films and his achievements with his first four vampire classics Le viol du vampire (1968), La vampire nue (1970), Le frisson des vampires (1970), and Requiem pour un vampire (1971). Rollin's subsequent notable works include La rose de fer (1973), Lèvres de sang (1975), Les raisins de la mort (1978), Fascination (1979), and La morte vivante (1982).
His films are noted for their exquisite, if mostly static, cinematography, off-kilter plot progression, poetic dialogue, playful surrealism and recurrent use of well-constructed female lead characters. Outlandish dénouements and abstruse visual symbols were trademarks. Belied by high production values and precise craftsmanship, his films were made with little money, often against deadlines. In the mid-1970s, lack of regular work led the director to direct mostly pornographic films under various pseudonyms, an activity he continued until the early 1980s.
Early life Jean Rollin was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine (now Hauts-de-Seine), France, to Claude Louis René Rollin-Roth-Le Gentil, an actor and theatre director who went by the stage name Claude Martin, and his wife Denise (née Leffroi), an artists' model. His half-brother was actor Olivier Rollin.
Career Rollin had a passion for cinema from an early age. He saw his first film during the second World War. It was Capitaine Fracasse, a 1942 film directed by Abel Gance. Rollin decided he wanted to make films when he grew up; his father, a theatre actor, was a heavy influence on him. During his teens, he developed an obsession for American serials and read comic books.
When he was 16, he found a job at Les Films de Saturne, helping write invoices while earning some money though he wanted to be involved in cinema. They specialized in creating opening and closing credits and short cartoons, but real films were also shot such as industrial shorts and documentaries. Rollin was part of the crew in a short documentary about Snecma, a big factory in France which built motors and planes. He arranged the tracking shots, laid the tracks, checked the electricity, and helped the cameraman.
When Rollin did his military service for the French army, he worked as an editor in the cinema department alongside Claude Lelouch. They worked on army commercials with Lelouch directing and Rollin editing. They also made two films, Mechanographie, a documentary, and La Guerre de Silence (The War of Silence), a fiction film.
In 1958 after leaving the army, he directed his first short film Les Amours Jaunes (The Yellow Lovers). He shot it on a 35mm Maurigraphe camera, and used a beach in Dieppe as his location, the same beach used in his later films.
1960s In 1960, Rollin decided to direct his first feature film, but later abandoned the project as he had no money to finish it. His next short, Ciel de Cuivre (Sky of Copper), was directed in 1961, and was quite surreal though it told a sentimental story. He did not finish the film because he ran out of money and it was not very good. The footage is now lost.
In 1962, he was as an assistant director on the film Un Cheval pour Deux (A Horse for Two), which was not a great experience for him, and he decided to approach cinema in a different way. In the early sixties, Rollin became interested in politics and made a short documentary in 1964 called Vivre en Espagne (Life in Spain). It was about Generalissimo Francisco Franco, thirty minutes were filmed but he risked a lot to get it made. Rollin and the crew found themselves pursued by the police and just managed to make it back into France. Jean also directed a short film in 1965 called Les Pays Loins.
In 1968, Jean directed his first feature Le viol du vampire (The Rape of the Vampire). At the time he was still not known in the world of cinema, having only done a few short films and documentaries. The film was shot on a low budget, and consisted of two parts because it was originally intended to be another short film; the second part was later added so that it was released as a feature film. The release of Le Viol caused public scandal and outrage, his strong inspiration of American serials did not attract viewers. It was released during the events of May 1968, and due to the riots, it was a rare theatrical production at the time. Rollin himself was also threatened due to this scandal,Simon Strong (March 2004) because of this, he briefly decided to give up making films.
His second feature La vampire nue (The Nude Vampire) was his first film in colour. It was mostly inspired by the 1916 film Judex, and also surrealism in general. Rollin wanted to do something a little more temperate than Le Viol, a traditional mystery film. Anyway, as he himself stated, it came to be the same kind of film as his first feature, it also has the same spirit. La vampire nue also became notable in that it introduced Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel, twin sisters who frequently collaborated with Rollin during the early years of his career.
Following La vampire nue, Rollin found himself in a financial crisis and having suffered an accident during production which left him traumatized, the circumstances took a positive turn when he met with producer Monique Nathan, owner of the Films Moderns company. Nathan having put her faith and support in Rollin, turned down several a number of the most prominent French New Wave filmmakers for financing and instead entirely supported Rollin as both a producer and a co-screenwriter for his next project, Le Frisson des Vampires (Shiver of the Vampires) which was heavily influenced by the trappings of the hippie movement. It did however retain many of the themes one could expect from a Rollin film and one of the most iconic scenes ever to appear in a Rollin film: actress Dominique emerging from an old grandfather clock. Production for the film took place in an abandoned castle in Soissons, a commune in the Aisne department of Picardy.
1970s 1971, Rollin directed Requiem pour un vampire (Requiem for a Vampire), which became one of his most successful films, and it was another low budget production, which almost took no money to produce. There was no dialogue in the first forty minutes of the film, this was in Rollin's words to make the "ultimate naive film", simplifying the story, direction and cinematography. Initially, Rollin had Catherine Castel in mind to play one of the leading ladies in Requiem; however, Castel was unable to accept the role due to being pregnant, which forced Rolling to offer the role to Maire-Pierre. The second female lead was portrayed by Mireille D'argent whom Rollin chose after she was introduced to him by an agent. Rollin discovered that D'argent's agent was collecting her wages, which prompted him to contact a lawyer and have her wages returned to her. Requiem was filmed in the small village of Crêvecoeur. The graveyard was located outside the village on a knoll. The castle, a historical place entirely furnished with genuine antiques, all of which were worth a fortune, had been rented from the duchess of Roche-Guyon. It wasn't her castle that Rollin and the crew were interested in, but the ruins of the dungeon above, that overlooked the entire area.The Films of Jean Rollin: Volume Two, published in 2005, p.14/p.15. Following this, Rollin made a temporary departure to creating films associated with the erotic vampire genre.
Having risen to success during his early vampire era, Rollin embarked on a different approach to filmmaking. Rollin financed his 1973 film La rose de fer (The Iron Rose) himself and was convinced that it would become a failure, leading to financial ruin. Prior to production, he engaged in a deal with Impex films to direct a number of hardcore porn films in the near future in order to produce La rose de fer and ensure that it would not fail. The story follows two young lovers (Françoise Pascal and Hugues Quester) who meet at a wedding reception and agree to go on a date, for which they decide to take a walk in an enormous cemetery. As they make love in an underground tomb, strange and bizarre occurrences take place above ground. As night falls, they frantically try to escape from the cemetery, and with no luck, end up where they started. They are slowly overcome with hysteria and paranoia which brings about their mortality. The film was shot in the city of Amiens over a four-week period and premiered at the 2nd Annual Convention of the Fantastique in Paris in April 1973 and was initially met with a negative reception and as a result, Rollin was unable to find anyone to back his future personal projects.
Rollin directed the adult sex films Jeunes filles impudiques (Schoolgirl Hitchhikers), Le sourire vertical (The Vertical Smile), and Tout le monde il en a deux (Bacchanales sexuelles or Fly Me the French Way) under the pseudonym Michel Gentil as he was financially unable to come up with a budget for another mainstream feature film. However, in 1974 Rollin directed the horror adventure and self-proclaimed "Expressionist" film Les démoniaques which was inspired by the adventure classics he had enormous admiration for in his youth. The film includes Joëlle Cœur and Willy Braque whom Rollin worked with on Jeunes filles impudiques. The story follows two young women who have been involved in a shipwreck and are brutally raped and murdered by a group of rogue pirates, only to be resurrected after making love to the devil so that they can seek their revenge. Rollin had many disputes with the producers of the film during production of the project as they insisted on a low budget. He was hospitalized for two weeks following the work due to mental and physical exhaustion. Further problems would arise including the working title, Les diablesses, having to be changed as the copyright was not free of charge and with the Castel Twins being unavailable for the roles of the avenging ghosts, the parts where offered to inexperienced actresses Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier.
Rollin made a brief return to the erotic vampire genre in 1975 when he wrote and directed Lèvres de sang (Lips of Blood). The film includes all the surreal dreamlike aspects for which Rollin's films are known. The story follows a young man named Frederic who is on a quest to find a woman dressed in white following the discovery of a photo of a ruined château. The photo triggers a suppressed childhood memory, which may be a dream. Despite his mother trying to convince him that it was dream, Frederic becomes fixated and obsessed with location the castle and the woman that may be inside. Lèvres de sang features Jean-Loup Philippe, whom Rollin co-wrote the film with, Annie Belle, and Nathalie Perrey, whom Rollin had worked with frequently throughout his career as a credited actress, script writer and editor. The film also sees the return of the Castel Twins as part of a group of vampires.
Due to the commercial failures of both La rose de fer and Lèvres de sang, Rollin again had no choice but to direct another adult sex film for financial reasons as there was no possible way to produce a feature film for the foreseeable future. Phantasmes (Once Upon a Virgin) was written and directed by Rollin for release in 1975 and was the first and only pornographic film in which he was credited under his own name because he liked what he did in the film. Rollin mentioned that the film is his "first and final attempt at a serious" adult film, wanting to create a film that didn't just "poke fun at sex". The score for Phantasmes is considered one of the films best attributes, courtesy of composer Didier William Lepauw of Lèvres de sang.