Page 180 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

FIGURE 36 Startling compositions permeate the tableaux shots of Le frisson des vampires (1970)

couplings - both when Eva and Elisabeth make love and when Eva and Mark do. Both of these scenes
are filmed in an arresting and intimate handheld style that at once implicates the audience as a voyeur
and contrasts with the tableaux shots used elsewhere. These scenes act as rhythm in Rollins cinematic
poem. He often repeats themes in a similar way.
At the film's opening Elisabeth smears ox blood seductively over her lips. This is shown in extreme
close-up so that there can be no doubt of its sexual symbolism; make-up is sex and blood is her make-
up. When she kills the bandit's wife on the bridge the shot is briefly reprised beneath the shadow of
her deadly scythe. The meaning of the opening scene is now confirmed, her sexuality is death (the
scythe of course being death's chosen weapon), a point emphasised by the film's climactic revelations.
The film ends with the blood on Elisabeth's lips - it has come full circle visually and thematically
from the opening. As one of her companions points out: 'You're beautiful like that, with his blood
on your mouth.'

COMIC BOOK CONSTRUCTIONS

Tableaux shots can also be used to represent comic-book imagery and much of Rollins visual style
derives from the comic-book ethos of unusually-angled composition or use of symmetry. Indeed
Rollin was heavily involved with comics in the mid-1960s, creating Saga of Xam in 1967. The opening
credits of Fascination depicting two girls dancing on a pier to the sound of a wind-up gramophone
is composed diagonally across the screen, splitting it in two. This motif is repeated later with the lips

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