The Rape of the Vampire

Jean Rollin's first feature, The Rape of the Vampire, establishes virtually all of the templates for this trash auteur's distinctive approach to no-budget sexploitation horror. Surreally dreamlike and strange, with a plot that never makes a shred of sense, Rollin's film wanders dreamily from one set piece to another, the connections between them as ephemeral as the neural pathways linking one moment to another in a dream. This debut was shot in black-and-white, and though a bright, garish color sensibility is integral to the director's later work, the color is hardly missed here, as he crafts an equally potent, moody aesthetic in stark sun and shadow.

The film is actually split into two unequal parts, and though the story, such as it is, continues more or less seamlessly from one part to another, they're definitively split apart and there's even a second credits sequence that runs before the second part begins. The bridge between the two parts of the film is like crossing from the real world, where a rational explanation, however unlikely, is still possible, to the truly unhinged world of the surreal, the nightmarish, the supernatural, where rationality is utterly banished and the semblance of a plot is all but entirely erased.

In the first third of the film, the psychoanalyst Thomas (Bernard Letrou) and his friends visit a remote village supposedly haunted by four vampire sisters. Thomas doesn't believe the sisters are actually vampires, he thinks they've just been manipulated into thinking they are, and he seeks to cure them of their delusion. He even seems to be right: the sisters worship before a pagan altar and are given orders by their god, who turns out to be an old man from the village, hiding behind the altar, delivering instructions to the women for his own mysterious purposes. This segment ends with virtually everyone dead, climaxing at the bleak-looking beach, with wooden posts like prison bars, that Rollin would return to again and again in his oeuvre. That beach is a conduit into the unknown, and as the film transitions into the second segment that constitutes its final two-thirds, the rational explanations and pseudo-scientific jargon of the first part are jettisoned in favor of an enthusiastic embrace of the supernatural.


This shift is announced especially by the arrival of the Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger), a campy and outrageous figure who's constantly baring her fangs and laughing sinisterly, often without any context whatsoever: Rollin seems to love cutting to her in mid-cackle. The Queen's plans are typically hazy, but there's lots of grave-robbing, hypnotized girls hooked up to tanks of blood from which the vampires drink through long straws, sinister operations and rituals, a vampire priest holding an upside-down cross, and so on. The film's imagery is wild and weird, climaxing with a very chintzy vampire wedding that looks like the vampires are actually staging an amateur play: it's set on a stage with a huge and clumsily constructed bat in the background, its wings seemingly made from bedsheets.

There's a strong element of theatricality in Rollin, certainly, a sense that these vampires are performing for someone, maybe just for one another. The vampires even repeat the trick that the old man had pulled in the first part of the film, setting up an altar that seems to be speaking to some vampire supplicants, but actually houses a tape recorder playing back a loop of the Queen's voice. The supernatural is very ordinary in Rollin's world, the artifice paper-thin. There's little boundary between the real and the unreal, and the rough, clumsy low-budget aesthetic lays bare the artificiality of it all. There's a raw, one-take feel to much of the film: if a statue falls off a shelf and nearly hits the vampire queen in the head as she descends on a reclining victim, no matter, it's good enough, and Rollin leaves in this unscripted accident. The blood wedding, with its amateur drama club feel, is another good example; the vampires for some reason feel the need to stage their rituals with shoddy dramatics and awkwardly constructed props, performing for an audience of other vampires, who sit playing bongos in the theater seats and storm the stage for an impromptu celebration at the climax of this "play."

That's the essence of Rollin right there, the real and the unreal, the theatrical and the seemingly unstudied, the supernatural and the ordinary, colliding within his utterly idiosyncratic cinema. He presents a fractured and nonsensical dream world that leaps without warning from one thing to another at the speed of thought, giving the impression of a film edited according to the momentary whims of the dreamer. Action can jump suddenly from one location to another without warning or narrative justification, and the connections between scenes are often, let's say, mysterious. Even the seedy eroticism that always characterizes Rollin's work follows this (il)logic: women are rarely seen taking their clothes off in this film, instead leaping effortlessly from clothed to naked in between shots. All of this combines to make Rollin a true poet of trash, locating a strange kind of unsettling poetry and even beauty in his outrageous dream world.

The Draughtsman's Contract

The nature of power, as played out through a sexual and economic game of class, property and inheritance, is the somewhat obscured subject of Peter Greenaway's masterfully baffling, frequently hilarious 1982 film The Draughtsman's Contract. This is a film in which surface appearances are very much set off against the reality underneath, a reality that can never quite be seen directly, head on, but only glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye: truth, like the living statue that mysteriously moves around the grounds of a rural mansion, rude and naked but mostly unseen by the mannered aristocrats who inhabit this estate circa 1600s England, is so elusive that one is never quite sure if one has actually glimpsed the truth or merely a figment of the imagination. Right from the beginning, Greenaway is hinting at the disconnect between presentation and truth, as during the credits he cuts away to a high society party at which the bewigged, heavily made up guests tell charmingly scatalogical and urinary anecdotes that seem to be very much at odds with their elaborately sophisticated appearances and the bemused titters with which they relate these stories of bodily function. Rarely again in the film do they ever seem to have their guards down so thoroughly, do they ever acknowledge the workings of the body so directly, but even here, their language is so ornate, their refinement so complete, that they manage to make these bawdy tales of diarrhea and peeing vigorously in buckets sound like delightful chatter over tea.

Language is very important to this film, which boasts a marvelously clever script by Greenaway in which every word, every circumspect and torturously polite turn of phrase, disguises some secondary meaning, often a naughty bit of sexual double entendre — lots of appreciative banter about fruit, ripeness, fecundity, and "the maturing delights of her country garden" — or a sly insinuation about someone or other's reputation, or a threat so carefully hidden in banal chit-chat and freighted symbols that its more sinister meaning might utterly pass over the head of the one being threatened. There's a very complex game being played here, hidden away beneath all the ostentatious politeness. The artist Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) is invited by Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) to undertake twelve drawings of her husband's lovely country estate, which, she implies, her husband prizes as his property even over his own wife. After much persuasion, the two sign a contract that, in typically circumspect language, promises both sexual and economic remuneration for Mr. Neville's artistic services, and the arrogant young artist installs himself at the Herberts' estate, in Mr. Herbert's absence, for a period of twelve days to complete the drawings, earn his pay, and help himself to the sexual favors of the lady of the house.


Though Neville believes himself to be the one in control, the one benefiting the most from this arrangement, the reality proves to be quite different from the appearance. There is definitely an uneven balance of power here, but contrary to Neville's confidence in his own prowess, both artistic and sexual, he is not the one with the power. He is lower-class, despite his finery and his polite manners, and none of the aristocrats ever truly accept him into their class even as they welcome him into their homes. And it turns out that they are playing a game at a far higher level than he had imagined, a game that increasingly entangles him helplessly because, not being of their class, he is utterly unequipped to engage in these games involving property and parentage. Very suggestive in this regard is the scene where Mrs. Herbert's daughter, Mrs. Talmann (Anne-Louise Lambert) explains to Neville the identity of a young boy who wanders the grounds under the care of a tutor. He's an orphan, she says, whose father died and mother converted to Catholicism, so he needed to be cared for by relatives here. "An orphan, madame," Neville sputters, "because his mother became a Catholic?" Indeed, and Neville, with his Scottish sympathies and incomprehension of the aristocrats' religious bigotry, simply proves again and again that he does not belong here, that he is not truly a part of this milieu.

No, he is simply a tool to be used, and his drawings increasingly begin to seem like they are meant to play an important part in an elaborate plot being concocted, possibly by everyone except Neville, behind the scenes. There is considerable debate within the film, amongst the aristocrats who are privy to the drawings' contents, about precisely what kind of an "allegory" Mr. Neville is attempting to convey with these seemingly symbol-laden depictions, and one suspects that Greenaway is trying to excite the same debate regarding the film as a whole. Neville, for his part, continually insists that he simply draws what he sees, that he's merely an objective documentarian of reality, but Greenaway is undermining that artistic innocence, that naïve understanding of how art works. No drawing, no piece of art, can (or maybe should) passively document the world as it is, no matter how mechanical and purely visual Neville tries to make his art with his rigidly selected views, his viewing grid that breaks each scene into carefully composed rectangles, his totalitarian insistence that his views be uninterrupted, everything laid out exactly as he demands.


Like Mr. Herbert, who'd shaped his land into a structured, carefully manicured and maintained geometric layout in order to tame nature itself, Neville believes that he can control the world, that he can dictate what he sees and doesn't see, and thus what will appear or not appear in his drawings. But circumstances and the subtle interventions of various unknown conspirators shatter this illusion: his work is not merely innocent documentation, and his static, controlled views are increasingly disrupted by changes mysteriously wrought from one sitting to one another, clues planted, bits of evidence suggesting various covert conspiracies and activities, details pointing to murder or adultery. In other words, the carefully laid out gardens, so meticulously planned by Mr. Herbert and so thoroughly documented by Mr. Neville, are disordered and littered with evidence that the placid surface of things in only a thin, all too easily broken barrier separating polite society from all the messiness, dishonesty and ugliness of life, which keeps impolitely depositing obstructions into Neville's view, forcing him to make concessions to change and impermanence and imperfection rather than being able to craft, uninterrupted, a static, lifeless, unpopulated vision of the estate's grounds, blissfully undisturbed by any actual evidence of life or humanity.

The film is formally laid out in such a way as to both superficially confirm Neville's seeming mastery and subtly undermine it. Greenaway sticks almost entirely to static, carefully composed shots, often shot at least in part through the viewing grid that Neville uses to impose geometric order on what he sees so he can render it in his drawings. And yet Greenaway undercuts this rigidity at every turn, constantly having Neville's view obscured or interrupted by intrusive figures walking across his field of view, marring the unmoving beauty of the landscape. At one point, the director holds a shot of an unpopulated landscape long enough for the sun to be hidden by clouds and then break free, so that a long dark shadow passes across the green grass and then vanishes again, even the sky itself introducing movement and change into what Neville would like to freeze and order. When a thick gray fog rolls across the estate, Neville is unable to work, pacing impatiently back and forth while he waits for his view to clear again; if sinister aristocratic conspiracies don't undercut his dominion, then the elements conspire to remind him of his helplessness. Michael Nyman's enthralling score, appropriately enough, embodies the same dichotomy, combining courtly elegance with a propulsive, lively quality that suggests all the skullduggery and mystery lurking within the film's surface depiction of aristocratic refinement.

Greenaway's love of lists, as seen in his early avant-garde shorts and his exhaustive, exhausting first feature The Falls, persists here in the narration that meticulously describes the conditions for each of the twelve drawings. So perhaps, to some extent, Greenaway is poking fun at his own pretensions to artistic control, his own fussy obsessive-compulsiveness about naming things, about grouping objects and people, sights and sounds, into categories and descriptions, creating order through art. Key to the film is the question of the artist's responsibility to do more — as Greenaway, certainly, always has — than simply document and observe.

Persian Series 1-3/Chinese Series

Stan Brakhage's painted films are extraordinarily difficult to write about. These films, more even than Brakhage's films utilizing primarily photographic images, create their own purely visual and abstract language that can not be translated easily into words. The Persian Series, an 18-film series of hand-painted, optically printed works, represents Brakhage at his most resolutely abstract, dealing purely with color, rhythm and form(lessness). The first three films in the series capture different moods, different sensations, while each maintaining a similar palette of bright, thickly clumped paints. Persian #1 is stuttery and hesitant, interspersing bursts of colorful painted hysteria with black-leader pauses, and ending with a few glimpses of blurry color forms that reveal the abstracted photographic foundation that is elsewhere either absent or all but entirely obscured by the dense layers of paint laid atop it. Persian #2 is slow and sensuous, an elegant dance of colors swirling around. Persian #3 is fast and frenetic, introducing more deep blacks and sharp-edged fractal patterns within the rapidly boiling stew of images.

These films are intense and sensually satisfying, suggesting a surprising range of emotions and sensations with their abstract paint blots. Persian #2 opens with an extraordinary sequence that gives the impression of a series of zooms in or out, the "camera" seeming to move forward and then backward. This sequence (achieved via optical printing) creates the impression of entering a tunnel, hurtling down into a wormhole carved out of black space, every color of the spectrum stretched and speed-blurred as the viewer descends towards the center of the whirlpool, only to start pulling away, zooming backwards, rejected by the black hole and its intense swirl of colors. Later in this segment, the images slow down subtly and change to a steady rhythmic beat so that it looks like a rapidly edited montage of still photographs, each seemingly random spill of paint briefly frozen in time, captured in a flash, then flickering away to be replaced by another.


This steady pulsing is entirely unlike the frenzied montage of Persian #3, which starts fast and gradually accelerates to a mad pace that's dizzying and disorienting and utterly hypnotizing. The faster the images fly by, the deeper the viewer is encouraged to stare, the more trapped one feels by the overwhelming density of the montage. The mind nearly shuts down, short-circuited by the tremendous beauty and exhilaration of this sequence. Many of the strangely haunting fractal images embedded within this section subliminally suggest the shape of skulls, with circular forms as eye sockets and nostrils. Mortality is a common subject for Brakhage, who tends to view death as natural, part of a cycle that links birth (Window Water Baby Moving) and death (The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes). Here, these hints of death's head skulls are not integrated into the natural world, but provide a context-free evocation of what's hidden beneath the skin, and what is, here, hidden within the constantly shifting, unstable chaos of Brakhage's painted frames.

Such representational associations are perhaps unavoidable even with Brakhage's most abstract work: these meticulously painted frames are like Rorschach ink blots, evoking many concrete forms that may or may not have been intended as associations by Brakhage himself. But whatever can be seen within the chaos of these images is secondary to the visceral, emotional, sensual appeal of the images for their own sake.


It is impossible to watch Stan Brakhage's final film, the two-minute Chinese Series, without thinking about the circumstances in which it was made. As the title suggests, the film was to have been part of a lengthy series of the kind that Brakhage had made before with the Persian Series, the Arabic Series and other serials. He completed only two minutes of the projected series before his death. The film consists entirely of white scratches on a black field: Brakhage carved these marks directly into the emulsion of a filmstrip by wetting the film with his own saliva and scratching with his fingernail. It was perhaps the only method of creation still available to the ailing filmmaker, a process of production founded from the interaction of the filmmaker's own body with the filmstrip.

It is as direct and personal a film as Brakhage ever made, perhaps the ideal of total sympathetic alignment of film and maker that Brakhage had always worked towards. Personal engagement is one of the keystones of Brakhage's art, whether he was using a handheld camera as an extension of his body or foregoing photography altogether to experiment with pasting objects directly onto the filmstrip (as in works like Mothlight) or hand-painting on film. He also often scratched and clawed at the film, as he does here, but rarely so singlemindedly, rarely as the only means of expression through which he acted upon his chosen method. Here, constrained by physical limitations, but also enlivened by aesthetic impulse — he planned to make the entire Chinese Series, however long it would have been, using only these emulsion scratchings — he pares his art down to its bare essence, and it's startling how much of the unmistakeable beauty and mystery of Brakhage's art remains intact in this skeletal form.


The images resulting from this literally hands-on process are as minimal and stark as one would expect: abstract hieroglyphics stuttering across the frame, seeming to spell out words in some indecipherable language. It's calligraphic and graceful. This not-quite-language is a poignant metaphor for Brakhage in the last days of his life, painstakingly (and maybe painfully) scratching out his last communication to the world, the very last images he'd create. There's a simple beauty to these curved white lines, their edges slightly frayed, sometimes densely hatched, sometimes forming just a few scattered, delicate tears in the surface of the film emulsion.

M (1951)

Fritz Lang's M is such an enduring classic that it's hard to imagine a Hollywood remake of it, but that's exactly what director Joseph Losey did, twenty years after Lang's original film about the hunt for a child killer. Losey's remake of M, made under the aegis of the original film's producer Seymour Nebenzal, is extremely faithful to its source, following more or less the same script and at times even recreating scenes virtually shot for shot. It would be easy to dismiss the film as an inferior copy of a classic, and many have: the remake was a flop at release and doesn't have much of a reputation even now. But, though it unquestionably does not match the power of the Lang film, it's still a compelling noir in its own right, transplanting Lang's richly ambiguous social parable to 1950s Hollywood at the height of Red hysteria, which is clearly a prominent subtext here.

For Lang, the film was an anti-death-penalty treatise, a somber and timely warning of the dangers of widespread fear and paranoia, and, of course, a plea to watch out for one's children. For Losey, it's a psychosexual thriller and a parable for the McCarthyite anti-Communism that would soon drive the director out of the United States for the remainder of his career. At one point, in a scene that also appears in Lang's film, two witnesses are arguing over whether a kid's dress was red or blue. Losey adds a key detail: the witness who insists the dress was blue angrily asks the other, "what are you, a Communist?" That loaded question, which was already being casually tossed around at the least pretext in the US of this era, hangs over the film, with Losey subtly reinterpreting Lang's persecution parable, replacing 1930s Germany with 1950s Hollywood to suggest a link between the rise of the Nazi party and the rise of McCarthy. The change in context resonates throughout the early scenes, as random innocent people are persecuted in the streets by a public worked up into hysteria by the child killings.

Losey also subtly changes the film's meaning by making the motive for the child murders implicitly sexual; the film is loaded with sexually charged symbols in a way that Lang's original wasn't. The opening credits show the killer (David Wayne), seen only from behind, approaching little girls, luring one with a string toy that he suggestively pulls and teases with his hands, the framing often hiding the toy altogether so that it's not clear what he's doing, just that he's walking up to a little girl with his hands pumping around at his hips. Another shot shows him turning on a water fountain for a girl, who bends over to drink, her head obscured by the mysterious stranger standing in front of her. Already, Losey, dodging the censors, is suggesting a transgressive sexual component to the murders, a creepy subtext that distances Wayne's killer from the more famous portrayal by Peter Lorre.


Indeed, Wayne plays killer Martin Harrow with a bland-faced intensity and mommy-fixated sexual dysfunction that prefigures Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho more than it looks back to Lorre. Most chilling of all is the scene of the killer sitting in the dark, his face shrouded in shadow, tightly grasping the dangling cord of the lamp hanging above him, wrapping it around his fist, breathing heavily and pulling his hand further and further up the cord. It's such an obviously sexual scene that one wonders how Losey got away with it, especially when the killer "climaxes" by finally pulling the cord and putting out the light. (That the cord is later revealed to be a shoelace taken from the shoes he collects as fetish objects from his victims only confirms the sexual metaphor.) This is immediately followed by a scene where he goes over to his desk, still panting breathlessly, and begins molding a clay sculpture of a child, wrapping a cord around its neck and squeezing to pop its head off, while Losey prominently highlights the photograph of a matronly older women behind the sculpture, a mise en scène detail that suggests the killer is a sexually frustrated mama's boy.

Such scenes proliferate throughout Losey's remake, suggesting that the killer instinctively makes a connection between masturbation and strangulation; at one point, he finds a wounded bird and picks it up between his fists, its head popping out between his fingers as he squeezes it, before letting it go and sobbing with guilt. His final confessional speech is significantly different from Lorre's version of the scene, too, as he talks about a childhood dominated by his mother's tyrannical insistence that all men are evil and need to be punished — a speech comically punctuated by his aside that she's "a good woman."

In this way, Losey makes the material his own even while largely sticking to the template of the original film. He can't match the overwhelming formal beauty of Lang's film, but he has his own minimalist, low-budget aesthetic that gives his take on this material a rough, shot-on-the-streets realism very different from the shadowy expressionism of Lang's M. Losey shot a lot of footage on the streets of Los Angeles, and staged the climactic search for the killer in the instantly recognizable Bradbury Building, an iconic location for many movies, its angular staircases and multiple levels used well in the scenes of the city's criminal underworld tracking Harrow. Losey's austere aesthetic — only occasionally broken by diversions like the Hitchcockian cut from a mother worrying at home to a screaming, cackling clown — puts the emphasis on Wayne's increasingly unhinged performance and the slightly comic efforts of the police and criminals to catch him. Losey dared to remake a classic, and though the remake is not on the same level as Lang's masterpiece, it should be remembered as a noir classic in its own right, with its substantial differences from its source marking it as a worthy extension of Lang's themes.