La Morte vivante The Living Dead Girl
France, 1982, 35mm, 1.66, colour, 89′, French original version with Slovene subtitles
16.4. | 22:00 | Slovenian Cinematheque
Film print from the collection of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse..
directed by Jean Rollin written by Jean Rollin, Jacques Ralf cinematography Max Monteillet music Philippe D’Aram editing Janette Kronegger cast Marina Pierro, Françoise Blanchard, Mike Marshall, Carina Barone, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Jean Rollin Film print from the collection of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.
When a barrel of toxic waste spills in the Valmont family vault, it brings to life the prematurely deceased Catherine (Françoise Blanchard). Completely nude and catatonic, she is soon discovered by her friend Hélène (Marina Pierro), determined not to lose her childhood love once again. But the young beauty, resurrected from the coffin, is torn between an agonizing bloodthirst and a painful longing for eternal peace.
A unique mixture of blood and nudity, of bitter pain and stirring tenderness, of vague stories and dreamy aesthetics marks the films of Jean Rollin, the lone rider of French horrotica, the cult auteur of esoteric yarns, filled with lesbian vampires. The Living Dead Girl is a pure, bona fide Rollinade, even though it replaces the sandy beaches of Normandy for the shores of a lake.
“For me, the terms of popular cinema starkly oppose those of commercial cinema. Commercial cinema attaches value only to the profitability of the product. Popular cinema, or B-series, on the contrary, allows for the creation and development of a director’s personality, even in realms of alternative or genre cinema. I decided to become a B-series auteur on purpose, at a time when young cineastes predominantly drew on the nouvelle vague, with its very fashionable pseudo-modern style. My spirit was more influenced by surrealism: the films of Buñuel, Franju, the paintings by Magritte, Paul Delvaux, and the collages of Max Ernst. The latter seemed to me to refer directly to Fantomas, to Feuillade, to the episodic and to the famous serial. … Ever since my debut film I have tried to add a certain emotion to my screenplays, a sense of tragedy that mixes with humour, a voluntary lyricism. … The images and dialogues of my films, like the images and texts of my books, attach themselves to the idea that they can become, or are, a cinema of the imaginary. … In this cinema, nothing is more normal than a woman coming out of a clock at the last stroke of midnight; nothing more normal than a coffin on a bed; walking in a garden and hearing the cry of the female vampire; two clown-girls trying to escape across a field. What else?”
– Jean Rollin in Ernest Mathijs & Xavier Mendik, Alternative Europe
“…each thirst-quenching relief is followed by a painful sobering, an agonizing recovery of memory, a cruel realization in the face of which life, even dead life, is no longer possible. Rollin’s tragic individual, living in delusion and denial, refuses, but is forced to grasp the reality of her existence and her true nature. This existential angst propels Rollin’s fantastic forms from the very outset, from Le Viol du vampire (1968). … In this mixture of blood-soaked eroticism and romantic visions of death in the noble tradition of Rollin’s poignantly personal, intimate films of female vampires, the boundary between the figure of vampire and zombie blurs to oblivion. Within the author’s ethos, monsters occupy the most humane position. They are ambivalent, tragic, discarded individuals… complex ‘living’ beings, and as such they cannot populate rigorous, formulaic, and logically coherent mythologies.”
-Maša Peče, KINO!
“There are no beach scenes, certainly, but the theme – of memory regained and the impossibility of living with the knowledge – is very much a key one for Rollin. The Living Dead Girl needs blood. Her childhood friend, Helene, seeks out victims for her. Like Daughters of Darkness and Eyes Without a Face, it’s a film that combines savage bloodletting and dreamy lyricism.”
– Cathal Tohill & Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales
