Quatre Nuits d'un Rêveur

Director: Robert Bresson
Writer: Robert Bresson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (short story)
Cast: Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forets, Maurice Monnoyer, Lidia Biondi, Jerome Massart

IMDB

Consider a scene at the beginning of "Four Nights of a Dreamer" in which the young hero, Jacques (Guillaume des Forets), takes an outing in the country. All we see in Jacques thumbing a ride out from Paris, doing two straight-faced somersaults in a field of flowers, and, at night, stepping out of the car that has returned him to the city. The point is not that Jacques doesn't have a good time, but that the strict economy of gesture that conditions the Bresson universe requires no larger notation for this moment.

When a greater expansiveness is required, it will be supplied, but in recent Bresson films it has been carefully reserved for those fleeting indications of spiritual transcendence that have seemed his special interest in the cinema.

In "Four Nights of a Dreamer," it is more openly supplied, but it is no less special. The story, adapted from Dostoyevsky's "White Nights," concerns a solitary man, a romantic dreamer, who one night befriends a distraught young girl and for the next three nights meets her to tell about himself and listen to her story of what may be unrequited love.

On the last night the girl encounters her lost lover, and goes off with him — leaving the dreamer, who has fallen hopelessly in love, with only a memory for another dream.

Bresson has moved the story from Petersburg to Paris, from the 1840's to the 1970's. He has enlarged its scope, and—by making his hero an artist for whom dreams beget realities — he has provided something of a happy ending.

But although the dreams translate to art, their theme is love, and "Four Nights of a Dreamer" is very much a movie about the condition of being in love. The intense covert eroticism of the earlier Bresson (in all the films except "A Man Escaped", 1956, and "The Trial of Joan of Arc," 1961) is here overt and even lyrically sustained.

The effect on the film's quality is inescapable — not only in a superb purple passage in which the girl (Isabel Weingarten, another of Bresson's hauntingly beautiful heroines) examines her naked body, but in every private embrace and public encounter, in the sights and sounds that fill the city seemingly made for love.

Jacques becomes a slave to his passion. He carries next to his heart a tape recorder that in his own voice repeats the girl's name, Marthe, as if that were his heart's beating. But he has always been a slave to love, and even before Marthe, he has walked entranced through a Paris that is defined by its young girls' glances.

Jacques among the girls of Paris is a sequence that in its balletic purity directly recalls the great theft sequences of "Pickpocket," (1959), also set in Paris and also, in a sense, a study of an artist transformed by a woman's love.

But the new sequence is also very funny — not an achievement one usually associates with Bresson—and, in general, the theme of love has released not only the director's graciousness but also his wit, so that whole scenes together have an emotional complexity to match their deep, refreshing cinematic purity.

I doubt that "Four Nights of a Dreamer" is Bresson's greatest movie, but it may well be his loveliest. Time and again, it is shockingly beautiful, and I can think of nothing in recent films so ravishing as his strange romantic vision of the city, the river, the softly lighted tourist boats in the night.

Review by Roger Greenspun
The New York Times

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Crimes of the Future

Director & Writer: David Cronenberg
Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jon Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Jack Messinger, Paul Mulholland

IMDB

Instead of covering up the world's upheavals, cosmetics propel its devastation -- a great analytical joke by David Cronenberg, who has already the impeccable deadpan style to tell it. Virtually the entirety of the female populace has been decimated by "Rouge's Malady," hippiedom is next as some furry Renaissance Fest refugee is studied at the "House of Skin"; the subject expires in what looks like the court of the University of Toronto, trench-coated Dr. Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik) declares the secretion oozing from the body's mouth "sensually attractive," even, and takes off on a tour of wacky organizations (the Institute of Neo Venereal Diseases, the Oceanic Podiatry Group, the Gynecological Research Foundation, and so forth).

One man sprouts weird organs which are kept in multi-colored jars ("His body is a galaxy. These creatures are solar systems"), another removes his shoe to reveal webbed toes on their way to becoming fins, and is promptly chased and devoured by a turtle-necked passerby, who re-enters the frame to spit a chunk of meat at the scientist. Devolution and cannibalism are merely two of the crimes of the future, pedophilia and the elusiveness of equilibrium are others, above all is the evanescence of human flesh against the solidity of brick walls, marble columns, cavernous halls; Dr. Tripod contemplates all in HAL's flat tones, with help from the assuredly avant-garde soundtrack (boiling coffee pots, stuttering birds, sonar pings).

The handheld, 16mm filming allows itself a single instance of expressionism (the cabal's gathering in the darkened auditorium, recalled in Sleeper), yet for the most part remains a straightforward documentation of modernist Canada in 1970, the better to reveal the encroaching reality of the satirical sci-fi scenario (cf. Alphaville), along with the fecundity of themes to be mirrored by the rest of Cronenberg's work. With Jon Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Paul Mulholland, and Jack Messinger.

Review by Fernando F. Croce
Cinepassion

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Rabid

You can't trust your mother...your best friend...your neighbor next door...pray it doesn't happen to you

Director & writer: David Cronenberg
Cast: Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore, Joe Silver, Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman

IMDB

“A lot of the story of Rabid is the story of Marilyn Chambers,” David Cronenberg once stated. Chambers and Cronenberg had both began to escalate to fame at the same time, and in similarly reviled genres. Chambers had become notorious for her pornographic cross-over hits, Behind the Green Door (1972) and Resurrection of Eve (1973), while Cronenberg had achieved success in the confines of the horror genre with Shivers (1975) and his underground shorts. It was inevitable that the two outcasts, detested either by Ivory soap or Canadian critics, would come together for what would eventually materialize as Rabid. With Rabid, Cronenberg would continue his auteurist fascination with disease and medicine, while incorporating Chamber’s as his attempt at creating the revenge of the subjugated female.

The film begins with a shot of two unnamed and inconspicuous bikers heading out on a road trip. They board their motorcycle and head out over a wintry Canadian highway. Also on the road is a bickering family trying to find a vacationing farm house. The family miss a turn, and given the empty rural roads, decide to pull a u-turn. Their large van stalls and blocks the road, just as motorcycles come cruising down the hill. Without enough time to stop, the couple crash into the van, propelling them into a field where the bike eventually ignites. The man is able to dodge the fire, but the girl remains pinned beneath the bike, her skin badly burned.

Rose (Marilyn Chambers), as we eventually learn her name to be, is rescued by a nearby hospital that specializes in plastic surgery. Her skin has been burned beyond conventional repair, and only an experimental new technique could restore her skin to its original beauty. Skin grafting, as the procedure is called, involves removing skin layers from undamaged parts of the body in order to use them to repair the burned parts. Leg skin could thus become facial tissue, and vice versa. The procedure is untested, but the staff at the Keloid clinic decide to make Rose their first guinea pig.

The grafting works wonders, but when Rose is finally awoken from her coma, she realizes that her name takes on an ironic truth. Like a rose she is beautiful, but she also has grown a lethal thorn in her side. This penis-like protrusion is a side-effect of the experiment, and has turned her into a character driven by sexual lust. She has compulsive urges to thrust her phallic stinger into whatever male victim she comes across, infecting them with a rabid-like primality. Eventually, the city of Montreal becomes infected, as martial law takes over. Rose must realize her Carrier status, and address her tragic fate in a shocking conclusion.

Rabid is an effective horror film, and one that plays just as good today as it did back in 1977. Cronenberg’s prophetic ability to predict not only the outbreak of venereal diseases like AIDS but also mankind’s newfound obsession with altering one’s body in order to comply with social norms as to what looks “beautiful”. Virtually all pornographic stars today must augment their breasts to larger (and thus faker) proportions, and women in particular aim to mask the effects of aging with other surgical techniques. The fact that Cronenberg cast Marilyn Chambers hints at a society becoming obsessed with ethereal beauty, since before Chambers porn stars very much possessed a girl-next-door quality. After Chambers, there was a push for pornography (and indirectly society) to resort to plastic surgery in order to become more beautiful. Plastic surgery is the practice that underpins the whole film, and it is what is responsible for sending the world into chaos.



More interesting though, is Cronenberg’s use of the connotations within the casting of Marilyn Chambers. In response to an unethical use of science by the male, Chambers grows a phallus in her armpit, to signify that she, not the male, has power. Known almost entirely for her work in pornographic films like Behind the Green Door and Resurrection of Eve, Chambers has been a figure of domination and sexual gratification to the overpowering male. Pornography is almost all about the male, focusing on his orgasm as he instructs the woman what to do in order to get himself off. Green Door puts the women at an even lesser vantage point by having Chambers kidnapped and forced to engage in primitive sexual acts in front of an elite audience. Eve is similar in its subjugation of women in that the titular character gets married only when she is resurrected as the beautiful Marilyn Chambers, as if to suggest that women are good only for their physical attributes. Chambers’ penis-like extension in Rabid suddenly gives her a newfound power that she was unable to possess in her exploitative pornographic films. What she does with it is punish men, and only men (the one women she infects she does so against her will), stabbing her phallic protrusion sexually into them. Cronenberg’s film demonstrates a shifting in power, from the man to the women, in the realm of the physical and the sexual.

The viewer is led to believe that it is Chambers herself that is given this power in order to rectify the wrongs done to her in past pornographic characterizations, because she is given no exposition at the start of the film. Rabid begins immediately with the motorcycle accident, and it is learned only much later that her name is Rose (which is really just a metaphor anyway). Since her character is given no establishing background, one must identify with her from the only extra-textual information provided, and that is that Chambers herself is a porn star. “You don’t understand,” Chambers says in the film “I’m still me.” That is as good of indication as any that the Rose character is meant to be read as Chambers herself.

Rabid is in many ways like Carrie, a demonstration of a woman empowered by her newly discovered talents, punishing those who had done her wrong in the past. In fact, there is a scene where Chambers marches down the street, and in the background a theatrical poster for Carrie can be seen. Where in Carrie, Carrie White got back at all those that laughed at her in high school, while in Rabid Chambers responds against being the victim of male fantasy. Chambers uses her body to give herself power, but like in Carrie, she ultimately destroys herself in the end.

Rabid is a solid horror film from venereal auteur, David Cronenberg, from a time when he was still working out and establishing the motifs that would come to dominate his films. Only his second feature-length effort (Shivers being his first), Cronenberg is surprisingly very confident behind the camera, lacing the film with metaphors on sexuality, disease and experimentation. The pacing of Rabid is fast and arguably Cronenberg’s most quickly paced films.

That said, the film is also one of his more shallow, devoting more time to death scenes than to the typical medical exposition that we usually find in the oeuvre de Cronenberg. Where in movies like The Brood, Cronenberg fleshed out his story so all the blame could not irresponsibly be placed on the doctors, for it was the meltdown of the family unit that brought about the chaos. In Rabid, Cronenberg is less perceptive, easily just blaming science for the destruction of mankind. What Cronenberg does beneath the surface though, with his subtle wit in naming or his clever use of Marilyn Chambers, is construct a film of subversive complexity that more than rectifies his shallow plotting. Porn and horror are two genres always frowned upon by mainstream critics, and with Rabid, Cronenberg has melded the major themes of both into a fascinating and respectable film. Rabid penetrates, with a deep and lasting artistry.

Review by Rhett
Horror Digital


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Fascination

Director & writer: Jean Rollin
Cast: Franca Mai, Brigitte Lahaie, Jean-Marie Lemaire, Fanny Magier, Muriel Montosse, Sophie Noel, Evelyne Thomas, Agnes Bert

IMDB

If you're unfamiliar with the cinema of Jean Rollin, here's where to start. Whereas expressionistic and somnambulist acting styles are generally the rule for Rollin's movies (with the extreme styles serving as refuge for the bad actors he worked with), in Fascination (1979) he received the benefit of a strong core group of actors--led by Jean Marie Lemaire as a thief who stumbles upon the chateau where Franka Mai and Brigitte Lahaie are staying. He doesn't know why Mai and Lahai are all alone at the chateau, with the servants nowhere in sight. But we receive a good hint in the movie's opening scene: a group of upper-class women receive treatment for their anemia by visiting a slaughterhouse--where under the supervision of a doctor, they drink fresh blood. That evening, visitors--all upper-class women--start to arrive at the chateau. Lemaire doesn't know what's planned, but he has a good time until he starts to suspect the fate that awaits him.

Among the movie's striking visuals, Rollin gives us Lahai wielding a scythe and using it to dispatch a group of thieves that have followed Lemaire to the chateau. She stalks the thieves while only clad in a thin nightgown that tends to flap in the breeze. The band of thieves, unfortunately, is one of the movie's more risible elements. They're about as convincing as the shipwrecking crew in The Demoniacs. But they're the exception. Lemaire, in particular, takes a charismatic turn as the story's roguish hero. He underplays his character and avoids becoming cartoonish. Mai plays the entranced young woman who almost allows her love for Lemaire to overpower her bloodlust. And Lahai (a veteran of French pornographic productions) gives a captivating performance that relies upon much more than just her physical charms (although they are clearly on display).

Quite probably the most influential member of the film crew, however, other than Rollin, was the cinematographer, Georgie Fromentin. Fascination is possibly Rollin's best photographed movie. It attains a gothic intensity thanks to the stately images provided by Fromentin that are juxtaposed with reds and oranges. He creates a romantic, overripe world that has entered a stage of decadence and morbidity.

Review by James Newman
Images- a journal of film and popular culture

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Le Viol du Vampire

The time has come to seal the union of the imminent triumph of the immortal race. This wedding of blood opens up the doors to the world. The great mystery is about to take place. Another chosen one will sit among us. Many more will follow us and taste immortality. The world will become a feast of blood, and we will have the best seats - we the vampires of whom I am queen!

Director & writer: Jean Rollin
Cast: Solange Pradel, Bernard Letrou, Catherine Deville, Ursule Pauly, Marquis Polho

IMDB

While ultimately not as completely captivating or accomplished as Jean Rollin's later works, Le Viol Du Vampire (1968) can rightly claim to being one of the most daring and alive debut feature films of the sixties. It remains, forty years after its first scandalous showing, a remarkably potent and fresh work that clearly introduces Jean Rollin as one of the most maverick filmmakers of all time.

Le Viol Du Vampire is actually two films in one (with the second and longer part being entitled La Reine Des Vampires) and the clever placing of title cards to mark the individual films works as a clever tribute to the serials Jean Rollin grew up with, as well as separating it from almost anything else in French Cinema at the time.

Rollin, writing in the essential Virgins and Vampires book, recalled that “I was not quite sure that I would get a chance to make a second film” so “like most beginners I packed it with as many images and ideas as possible.” ‘Possible’ is indeed the key word there and it is the possibility of cinema itself that works its way throughout the whole of Le Viol Du Vampire. While it may contain some of the flaws inherent in many debut features, you can really feel how drunk everyone was on just the idea of making the film, and the effect is quite exhilarating.

Rollin admitted in Virgins and Vampires that he was in fact “ecstatic during the filming” but that indeed he did feel “stifled by (a) complete lack of experience.” Considering a nervous first-time feature length director made the film with basically a group of friends, Le Viol du Vampire is a remarkably confident piece that works with the refreshing notion of daring to leave some mistakes in. Indeed, a personal favorite moment in the film comes towards the end when we see a prop behind Jacqueline Sieger’s Queen fall over, and Rollin’s choosing to leave it in gives the film an almost childlike quality…refreshingly too wrapped up in the adventure of making the film itself to be bothered with an expected cinematic perfection.

Rollin fills his first film with many nods to works that influenced him, nods that would continue to separate him more and more from the French New Wave that had filled French theaters throughout the sixties. Remembering shooting the second part of the film in Virgins and Vampires, the novice director admitted that he felt more “confident” and that it was this confidence that allowed him to tip his hat to “a forgotten Italian film called Sul Ponte Dei Sospiri (1952)” during the remarkable torch lit duel scene which is quite unlike anything else seen in French cinema before or since. Rollin also mentions more obvious inspirations on Encore’s audio commentary for the film (an extraordinary talk where the director manages to make the rather freewheeling work feel more concise than anyone might have previously imagined) such as the legendary Fantomas and Judex serials. Franju’s Judex also clearly plays a role, as Rollin has stated his admiration for that iconic director as well.

Like the majority of Rollin’s greatest works, Le Viol du Vampire works best as a completely visual piece and at times it has an almost silent film quality to it. Rollin’s trademarks like the castle shots in the first section and the beach images of the second are here, but perhaps most unforgettable are the moments inside the legendary Grand Guignol Theater, as well as the deserted haunting final images shot on one of France’s most famous streets.

One gets the feeling watching Le Viol du Vampire today though that perhaps Rollin was a bit too ambitious for his first film…as though he hadn’t totally mastered the art of the low budget shoot the way he did in his later more minimal works. American producer Sam Selsky gave Rollin a very small shooting budget and at times the film feels compromised by it. Surprisingly Selsky’s biggest contribution to the production is that apparently it was his suggestion to include the film’s nude shots, which now seem so trademark Rollin that it is hard to imagine anyone else suggesting it to him.

Rollin approaches the subject of his first venture into eroticism in Encore’s booklet that accompanies their set of Le Viol du Vampire and it is worth noting. He writes, “I would like to explain the reason for that omnipresent eroticism in the two parts of the film, that I would often be reproached for. Someone even wrote that the fantasy films I was making were only pretexts, alibis, and that my true wish was to make ‘skinflicks’.” It’s been a complaint by many of Rollin’s biggest critics over the years but one glance at Ground Zero in Rollin’s feature film work will show this to be the furthest thing from the truth. While the film does contain the expected amount of nudity (that Selsky had demanded) it is the film’s wonderfully realized compositions and willingness to be distanced from everything expected that makes it work so well. This is not the work of a hack shooting nudie pics, Le Viol du Vampire signals Jean Rollin as a very serious filmmaker and it’s the beginning of one of the most accomplished auteur careers of the past fifty years.

Technically, considering the limited budget, the film is quite a wonder to behold. Photographed beautifully in black and white by Guy Leblond with some truly intriguing lighting set ups and featuring a cast of charismatic unknowns willing to go as far as Rollin asked them to, Le Viol du Vampire is a compulsively watchable film that fits in perfectly well with his more talked about later works.
Troubled by censorship issues, critical dismissals and a rather baffled public, Rollin’s first film would essentially disappear for many years after those initial showings that were posted on here previously. Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs would write in their Immoral Tales that the critical reaction to Le Viol du Vampire would “set a standard against which his future work (would be) judged” and that “people were either violently for or against him. There was no middle ground; he was either a charlatan or a genius.” Forty years after Le Viol du Vampire’s scandalous premiere, that middle ground has still yet to appear.

Le Viol du Vampire would act as Jean Rollin’s uncompromising introduction to an unsuspecting film world. It would introduce many of his often-repeated visual motives, his iconic and unforgettable way of using eroticism and would change the genre of Vampire Films forever. Talking to Peter Blumenstock on these creatures of the night (or in Rollin’s world, the day as well) that would haunt so many of his films, he had this to say, “A Vampire is like an animal, a predator-wild, emotional, naïve, primitive, sensual, not too concerned with logic, driven by emotions, but also very aesthetic and beautiful, and these are terms also often used when my films are being described.” Rollin, outside of being a wonderful filmmaker, is also someone who clearly understands his art and it is a wonderful thing to have quotes like these to savor when thinking about his work.

Le Viol du Vampire is available on a few different DVDS. The most readily available for Region 1 audiences is Redemption's disc, under the title The Rape of The Vampire. It is a bare bones release that offers an uncut print of the film in French with English subtitles with so-so print quality. The best version is undoubtedly Encore’s remarkable double-disc set which offers up a crisp print with a wealth of extras including the 32 page booklet, hundreds of stills, the audio commentary, interviews with Sieger, actor Alain-Yves Beaujour, composer Francois Tusques and a couple of deleted sequences that were victims of the censorship that plagued the film. It is, quite simply put, a stunning set for an important film.

For a director who seemed born to make color features, the striking black and white
Le Viol du Vampire feels like the perfect first feature for Jean Rollin. Poetic, mildly pretentious, daring, erotic and finally very haunting, Le Viol du Vampire is one of the most important (if under seen) works of the late sixties. It’s a startling and combative call to arms for people willing to follow an artist who has always stood very much alone.

Review by Jeremy Richey
Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience

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La Vampire Nue

Director & writer: Jean Rollin, S.H. Mosti
Cast: Olivier Martin, Maurice Lemaitre, Caroline Cartier, Ly Lestrong, Bernard Musson, Jean Aron

IMDB

With humility, Jean Rollin speaks of the final sequence of his second film, La vampire nue (1969): "Again, the screenings were punctuated by laughter and sarcastic remarks. For me the most painful laughter came during the scene on the beach; on the pebbled shore a vampire suddenly emerges from a box. This is one of the most unusual images of my cinema, and despite the whistling and heckling it remains dazzling for me. It's there that true strangeness lies." (quote taken from Jean Rollin's essay on La Vampire Nue included in Virgins and Vampires, Crippled Publications, Germany, 1997, edited by Peter Blumenstock)

Rollin's second film brought him the opportunity to make a "real film," (following his feature, Le Viol du Vampire, two shorter films shot to create one full-length film) with adequate time to write a script and prepare for the production. Unfortunately, Rollin admits he managed the film's budget poorly but being able to complete photography before editing. To compound matters, considerable debt was incurred for the sophomore film maker, and a bed stay during editing for its director, having been injured after being hit by a car. Nonetheless, Rollin does have fond memories of the production, including having "succeeded in including certain images that were important to me."

For me Rollin's images have always been important. Having first viewed his cinema and La vampire nue, well over twenty years ago now from Nth generation VHS dupes without a lick of knowledge of francais, his imagery was always striking. The images spoke in their own language and told traditional tales, often romantic, conveying a poetic sense that few artists would be brave enough to dare (in this Post-Modern era where irony is the norm).

The authors of Immoral Tales write, "La Vampire Nue (The Nude Vampire; 1969) was based around the idea of 'mystery.' Each sequence was to heighten the mystery and lead it forward to the next sequence. Any explanation that had to be given was to be held off until the very last possible moment." Rollin begins with a silent sequence, shrouded in mystery, as presumably scientists, donning brightly-colored cloth masked hoods, draw blood from a nude female, save a cloth hood masking her identity. Iron gates are opened with the following sequence, and a young woman wearing wrapped shear fabric peeks out of her fortress to wander the streets. The streets hold several lurkers, donning elaborate masks of animals, and among the night shadows, these figures give the young woman chase. Rollin introduces a signature motif: the male chance encounter with the beautiful young woman. The young man, later revealed as Pierre (Olivier Martin), senses the young woman (Caroline Cartier) is in trouble. He attempts to flee with her only to be trapped in an alleyway, where the woman is subdued and carried away back to the fortress. Pierre escapes, and with his new obsession, he is determined to gain entry into the fortress and discover the young woman's identity.

The sequential narrative of La vampire nue is at times intriguing and at times a would-be annoying contrivance, if the visuals weren't so amazingly fantastic and striking. (Rollin would wisely adopt looser and more traditional narratives for his subsequent two films (and two of his best) Requiem pour un vampire (1971) and Le frisson des vampires (1971) as canvases for his imagery.) Each sequence, instead of a puzzle piece for an escalating mystery, is rather a stanza of arresting poetic visuals. Pierre needs help and he calls his friend, Robert (Pascal Fardoulis). Robert is an artist, and preceding Pierre's phone call, Rollin introduces Robert behind his easel with brush in hand. The subject of his painting is a beautiful young nude woman. As Robert eyes his model, he observes her curves, watches the way the light reflects upon her skin, and instead of being inspired as to how to render her image, Robert becomes seduced by her beauty. Hearing no brush strokes and sensing Robert's longing looks, the model actively seduces her artist. It's an intimate scene without words and save Pierre's phone-call interruption of the subsequent lovemaking, the scene would have no narrative weight. Rollin's sequential mystery cannot compete with his imagery: all intrigue in La vampire nue comes not from some plot revelation but from an artist's imagination.

Another of Rollin's signature visual motifs would appear in La vampire nue: the image of a pair of young women. As a visual motif, often Rollin's use of the pair is affecting, as it is evocative of the Gemini twins. In La vampire nue, the pair is portrayed by "the two Castel twins, serious as popes, two little hairdressers thrilled to be realizing thier Hollywood-dream, coming of age just before the shoot." (Catherine Castel and Marie-Pierre Castel; Rollin would continue to work with both or either during the seventies.) In this passage, Rollin gives some anecdotes about working with the two but also reveals a little of his obsession with pairs or twins:

I wanted them by my side every day, until the production director Jean Lavie let me know that I was "vampiring" them, sapping them of their energy and wasting them away. They looked like two little celluloid dolls dressed up for some perverse game. Jio Berck's costumes resembled sadistic machines like the ones described by the Comptesse de Segur in "On ne prend pas les mouches avec du vinaigre." One of the twins knocked herself while falling down a flight of stairs. (The scene is in the film.) She was very proud of it and is still talking about it today.

Beyond their visual power, the image of the pair conjures the idea of "together." No journey will be taken alone. The Castel twins are a highlight of La vampire nue, and Rollin seemingly goes out of his way to focus his compostions upon the two. Their roles are important to the narrative, yet Rollin is having more fun using them in his "perverse game" than as characters advancing a plot.

La vampire nue is a haunting experience of images disorienting, fantastic, and surreal. Rollin's cinema is highly influenced by some of the earlier French cinema, like Louis Feuillade (Les vampires (1915), for example) and Georges Franju (Judex (1963), for example), but with La vampire nue, Rollin would make his own mark and begin to develop some of his more personal themes. Jean Rollin would eventually become a truly unique film maker whose work I greatly admire and love. La vampire nue is a striking early work.


Review by Hans A
Quite Cool

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Come Home Cathy

Director: Ken Loach
Writer: Jeremy Sandford (story), Ken Loach (screenplay)
Cast: Carol White, Ray Brooks, Winifred Dennis, Wally Patch, Adrienne Frame

IMDB

Moving, meaningful, insightful, and downright life altering, Ken Loach’s extraordinary 1966 British teleplay Cathy Come Home is one of the most essential works of the sixties and its current unavailability is frustrating to say the least.

Starring an absolutely devastating Carol White, Cathy Come Home is a socially outraged production that takes a searing look at Britain’s homeless and housing problems of the mid sixties. The fact that many of the themes and issues it looks at are still relevant in not just Britain but all over the world make it as necessary in 2008 as it was in 1966.

Cathy Come Home started out as a play written by Jeremy Sandford, a well to do Londoner who had moved to the struggling Battersea district in the late fifties with his wife (Up The Junction author Nell Dunn) to research the living conditions of the lower and working classes. Cathy Come Home is not an exploitative piece at all though, and Sandford should be applauded for creating one of the most sympathetic and honest portrayals ever written about several of the key social problems that have plagued modern urban society since the Industrial Revolution.

The BBC expressed interest fairly quickly in Sandford’s heartbreaking story of a young married couple and their children who lose everything after the husband loses his job. Sanford's work needed just the right treatment though, and 29 year old television director Ken Loach was called in to handle what was destined to be the intense and delicate directorial duties.

Loach had been working in British television since the early sixties and was a year away from his extraordinary big screen debut (1967’s Poor Cow) when Cathy Come Home made its shattering debut on British television. Loach’s work on Cathy Come Home would set in motion one of the most consistently brilliant careers in all of modern cinema, and his trademark character studies filmed in a documentary style can all be traced back to his work on this 75 minute teleplay.

Sometimes called the 'British Bardot', 25 year old Carol White was already an established star in Britain when Cathy Come Home premiered in 1966. Long undervalued as an actress, White gives a historic tour-de-force performance as the teleplay’s doomed title character. Loach recalls on the DVD’s terrific and informative audio commentary that White threw herself into the role with a wild abandon and that the part took its toll on her personally throughout the three week shoot. The brilliant White would work again with Loach on the unforgettable Poor Cow (co-starring with Terence Stamp) and she would continue to prove herself as one of Britain’s great actors throughout the late sixties and early seventies. She would tragically pass away in the early nineties, and she has still yet to receive her due as a great actress and major figure in film history.

Character actor Ray Brooks had already worked with Loach in the series Z Cars and he turns in a solid and knowing performance as Cathy’s out of work husband Reg. The rest of the cast is filled out with some familiar British character actors and many first timers cast because Loach knew that some unfamiliar faces would give the film the kind of authentic look he was hoping to capture.

One of the most striking things about Cathy Come Home is the way Loach manages to combine an obvious narrative with such a seemingly free form documentary style. Other lesser filmmakers could spend years and millions of dollars and not match the intimate details Loach achieves here with a small television budget in just three weeks. The film, shot on location in 16mm, is an absolute visual wonder to behold. Filled with many sometimes unforgiving close-ups of his cast and shot starkly in black and white, Cathy Come Home manages that rare feat of not feeling like a film about real life but instead seems to somehow actually capture it.

Expertly mixing Stanford’s dialogue with improvisation, Cathy Come Home is a bravely grueling experience that manages to expose the fatal flaws seemingly inherent in the Social Systems it is exploring. Loach points out in the commentary that it was important for him to communicate to the audience that Cathy is a victim here, and the frustrating obstacles that continue to come her way are the system’s fault. The film presents a catastrophic snowball effect that takes everything away from the young title character from her family to her humanity, and one would have to be pretty heartless to not feel for her during her plight at the hands of a bureaucracy unable and unwilling to care for those in need.

While it’s often remembered for those mesmerizing close ups of a damaged and destroyed Carol White, Loach’s film (like Charles Burnett’s later 1977 production Killer of Sheep) manages to capture bits of daily life that just aren’t often seen in cinema. From families putting out their wash on lines connecting their run down tenement homes, to the fury of an elderly man being forced from his nearly unlivable shack, to children playing in an eerie graveyard like car dump, Cathy Come Home is one of the most penetrating looks at the fragility of the lower and working classes ever captured on film.

Cathy Come Home stunned the 12 million plus viewers who tuned in on the night of November 16’th 1966 to watch it. Outraged letters from viewers who had never seen the plight of the poor expressed so strongly or eloquently on film began to pour into the offices of both the BBC and British politicians, and by December the charity organization Shelter was started in order to combat Britain’s growing homeless problem. Outside of being one of the most shocking masterpieces of the cycle of films known as The British Kitchen Sink Dramas, Cathy Come Home is one of the rare films in history that directly caused social change.

Cathy Come Home was named the second greatest British Television program in history in a 2000 BFI poll. It came out on DVD on a British Region 2 disc in 2003 but I have been told it has now slipped out of print. It has never to my knowledge been available in the United States. The film's current unavailability is a real tragedy considering that many of the problems facing Cathy in the film are a reality for a countless number of people all over the world. Speaking to the BBC during an interview on the film, Ken Loach said, "We were saying ‘this happens and it shouldn’t’.” It continues to happen and it still shouldn't. Cathy Come Home is a major masterpiece and one of the most heroic pieces of cinema I have ever seen.

Review by Jeremy Richey
Moon in the Gutter

Download links:

http://rapidshare.com/files/90914664/KLoach-CathyCH.part1.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/90928298/KLoach-CathyCH.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/90934842/KLoach-CathyCH.part4.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/90948427/KLoach-CathyCH.part6.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/90908272/KLoach-CathyCH.part8.rar
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