Page 12 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

FOREWORD

FOR AN ILLOGICAL AND NONSENSICAL EUROPEAN CINEMA

For me, the terms of popular cinema starkly oppose those of commercial cinema. Commercial cinema
attaches value only to the profitability of the product. Popular cinema, or B-series, on the contrary,
allows for the creation and development of a director's personality, even in realms of alternative or
genre cinema. I decided to become a B-series auteur on purpose, at a time when young cineastes
predominantly drew on the nouvelle vague, with its very fashionable pseudo-modern style. My spirit
was more influenced by surrealism: the films of Bunuel, Franju, the paintings by Magritte, Paul
Delvaux, and the collages of Max Ernst. The latter seemed to me to refer directly to Fantomas, to
Feuillade, to the episodic and to the famous serials. Every week, after coming out of school, we
would go to the Cineac Cinema (found in the former Montparnasse train station). Here, we would
watch strange and popular films and serials such as Tom Mix in The Miracle Rider, Mysterious Doctor
Satan, Zorro Fighting Legion or Nyoka and the Tiger Men. The projections of these films were often
interrupted by the public address system of the train station, announcing the arrival or departures of
trains. Travellers entered or exited the cinema theatre as if they were in a waiting lobby. If there was
ever such a thing as Dadaist cinema session, then the screenings at the Cineac were it!
My first film, Le viol du Vampire {Rape of the Vampire) carries that same spirit. The same goes for
the ones that followed, especially for Requiem for a Vampire, up until my last film La fiancee de Dracula
(Dracula's Fiancee), which pays homage to the great serial maker, Gaston Leroux. Rape of the Vampire
is nothing else than a film announcing the 1990s, an improvised serial, a surrealist collage, a dadaist
way of making cinema.
Ever since my debut film I have tried to add a certain emotion to my screenplays, a sense of
tragedy that mixes with humour, a voluntary lyricism. I have tried to acquire a sort of poetry that is
irrational through its realistic oratory, where the imagination turns the simple cobblestones of Paris
in the year 1913 into a strange and baroque environment, solely because they allow a connection to
Fantomas and Feuillade. The images and dialogues of my films, like the images and texts of my books,
attach themselves to the idea that they can become, or are, a cinema of the imaginary. A cinema which
permits the gaze to travel along a pair of glimming shoes, upwards along the body of a man dressed in
a tuxedo, his hand holding a gun, to settle upon a face fixed on the camera. Accompanied by ritualistic
music (Maurice Jarre), the man takes his gun along his masked guests, who startle at its passage. This
is of course, the cinema of Franju's Judex.