Page 178 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

candles, bizarre decorations, stuffed animals, even a flaming skull in a fishbowl. Spiral staircases
obtain a life of their own under Rollins camerawork and composition. Through his use of props he
balances the pulp aesthetic and the art aesthetic with striking results. There is very little in the way
of foreshadowing in Rollins work (his films have a languid stream-of-consciousness feel to them
that would make any such foreshadowing thematically incongruous) and thus attention to objects
is a matter for thematic or emotional coherence and not narrative coherence. The answers lie not
in the use of an object but the meaning of the object - the attachment with its environment and its
relationship to the characters, or simply its aesthetic appeal. Vampires are ancient and so are their
artefacts, their religions and rituals. Rollins interest in filming rituals also links in with underground
fetish writing and comics where the ritual itself is given as much (if not more) significance than the
sexual act. Ritual becomes sex.
Rollin also desecrates the Christian ethos with his treatment of marriage in Le frisson des vampires
(1970). Here the conceit of period pornography provides the springboard for the film's narrative
- in this case an unconsummated wedding. It gives Rollin the opportunity to fetishise bridal attire
as he depicts the disintegration of a marriage, in the sense that there is one as the bride Isa is drawn
into an older vampiric tradition, the pull of a natural urge that is connected to her through breeding.
The scenes where Isa is approached by the Vampire Errant, Isolde, provide the film with some of its
most arresting imagery as she emerges from a grandfather clock at the stroke of midnight or suddenly
reveals herself in all her naked splendour at the head of Isa's bed. These work like an eroticised version
of Max Shreck's emergence from the coffin in Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922).

FIGURE 35 Objects and cluttered mise en-scene indicate the archaic world of the Rollin vampire: Le frisson des vampires (1970)

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