Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kat Ellinger, Dima Ballin
Like many cult movie fans of my generation, I discovered the films of
French filmmaker Jean Rollin via the Redemption video label
back in the 1990s. Known for their distinctive black and white covers,
usually depicting female models in a state of undress, Redemption
amassed a catalogue of European cult cinema of the 1960s to '80s and
marketed them to a hungry '90s audience. The filmmakers that found
their work on the Redemption label ranged from auteurs like Mario Bava
to trashmeisters like Jess Franco. Rollin was something of an anomaly
in this group. An out and out surrealist, his films may have been
heavy on sex and violence but they weren't designed to thrill or
titillate. Rollin's movies have a melancholy atmosphere like no other.
They often feature vampires, usually in the guise of nubile young
women, and Rollin shoots his beautiful stars against a backdrop of
physical and natural decay, in the crumbling castles and weed infested
cemeteries of rural France. The nation may be dying, but its vampires
live on. To paraphrase Dazed and Confused, France keeps getting older but the vampires stay the same
age.
Genre buffs Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger are of that
generation who likely discovered Rollin through Redemption and '90s
genre magazines like Flesh & Blood. Their documentary
Orchestrator of Storms takes an in-depth and loving look
at the life and work of a man who, like so many artists, never earned
the respect of his own countrymen. Various of the doc's talking heads
surmise that Rollin came along at the wrong time in French cinema. He
arrived in the post-New Wave 1960s and by the time of his feature
debut, 1968's Le viol du vampire (which caused a riot on
its Paris premiere), French cinema had become intensely political.
Though a politically active person himself, Rollin had no interest in
aligning his politics with his films. He had little interest in
narrative either, preferring to create an atmosphere through visuals
for his audience to bask in.
Ballin and Ellinger have opted for an academic approach, eschewing
the usual gimmicky graphics and wah-wah soundtrack you usually find in
appraisals of cult filmmakers. This is reflected in the choice of
interview subjects, a mixture of Rollin collaborators and critics.
It's a refreshing and respectful approach. The absence of filmmakers
is striking however, given how influential Rollin has proven in recent
decades (Off the top of my head I can think of the ghost rising from
the well in Ringu and the scythe-wielding killer in
Hostel 2 as two explicit Rollin references). The critics
and historians involved provide valuable theoretical insight, but it
would have been nice to hear from someone who put Rollin's philosophy
into practice.
Unlike some filmmaker overviews that focus on the hits and brush past
the inevitable late-career decline,
Orchestrator of Storms devotes as much time to Rollin's
heavily dismissed later works as to his celebrated early cult
classics. It charts how he was able to take advantage of France's new
liberalism of the 1970s, a time when he even indulged in outright
pornography, and how he struggled with the commercial sensibilities of
the 1980s. What's most surprising about Ballin and Ellinger's doc is
how much time it devotes to Rollin's physical decline and his ultimate
death from cancer, recalled emotionally by those who knew and loved
him. Orchestrator of Storms is a loving tribute but a
melancholy one. In the end we're left thinking of Rollin's body of
work as another vampire that continues to live on, bringing eternal
beauty to the landscape of French cinema from beyond the grave.
Orchestrator of Storms is on Arrow Player from February 14th.