Arrow Films have commissioned a new Jean Rollin documentary entitled Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin. For anyone familiar with Jean Rollin’s somewhat obscure horror film output, this is big news as his work has largely been ignored during his lifetime and in his native France. But fortunately for horror fans, Arrow TV are also celebrating his work with two retrospective collections - Jean Rollin: The Fantastique Collection Part I and Part II - which include many of his hard to find classics available to stream online.
Jean Rollin was a unique horror film maker whose work is often described as exploitative horror, but I would disagree and argue that his films are poetic, erotic and dreamlike when compared with someone like Jess Franco. Rollin’s films The Iron Rose, Fascination and Requiem For A Vampire fearlessly blended memorable imagery with melancholy, horror, sex and madness to address the human condition, while also having a hell of a lot of fun along the way. You can’t help but be drawn to his seductive, alluring and often beautifully doomed vampires and morbid characters until it’s too late to escape, and you ultimately pine to join them. Unlike most horror films, they are the protagonists of their own stories, and not the villains.
The new documentary, Orchestrator Of Storms, promises to feature interviews with relatives and regular collaborators Brigitte Lahaie, Madeleine Ledespencer, Francoise Pascal, Jeremy Richey, and David Hinds about the behind the scenes making of this true auteur’s unique films and world view.
Here is the press release from Arrow Films:
“Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin tells the story of one of Eurocult cinema's most singular voices. Deeply misunderstood and widely misrepresented, during his decades-long career as a film director (1958-2009), Rollin's work received absolutely no recognition in his native country of France, and was completely unknown anywhere else. In the nineties, because of home video, Rollin attained a marginal cult status in niche English speaking genre circles. Otherwise he has remained completely obscure.
Rollin was raised within the bosom of some of France's most influential and intellectual elites, thanks to his mother Denise's friendship with figures such as Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille, Jean Cocteau, as well as Jacques and Pierre Prévert.Similarly his father was a director in avant garde theatre, exposing Jean to some of France's most interesting aspects of culture. It is perhaps not surprising that when it came to making his films, Jean Rollin's were unlike anything else on the scene. Once you dig into the director's life and passions, what emerges is a strong connection to the French surrealists, to symbolist art, to the poetry of TristanCorbière, to the French anarchist scene in the sixties, and counterculture. Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin sets out to tell this story in an attempt to elevate the director's work by exploring it in depth alongside these major influences, as well as other key themes such as the tradition of the French Fantastique. The film also looks at his frustrations, the way in which he had to constantly grapple and scramble for funding as one of the only filmmakers predominantly working within the horror genre through the sixties and seventies. Most importantly, it examines his singular vision, one that ran completely counter to other western traditions in genre film.
The project began life on more modest terms, but after working very closely with Jean's family, including his surviving son Serge, and close family friend Véronique D-Travers, it became apparent there was a far deeper and richer story to tell. A story of struggle that led to the filmmaker falling into poverty and ill health in his later years, one in which he was never understood or given the credit he was due during his own lifetime, where he was forced to constantly battle to make the films he wanted to make. Filmmakers Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger hope to change that in presenting Jean's story as never seen before, with the help of some of his key collaborators, close friends, and experts in both film and cultural history, as well as those responsible for ensuring his work never completely fell out of sight.”
Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin is coming to Arrow Films and Arrow TV soon.
Watch the trailer below :
It’s a short teaser trailer so remind yourself of the director’s unique vision with a montage of his classic film, Fascination :