Jean Rollin
| Jean Rollin | |
|---|---|
Jean Rollin
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| Born |
Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil 3 November 1938 Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France |
| Died | 15 December 2010 (aged 72) Paris, France |
| Cause of death | Cancer |
| Occupation | Director, actor, writer |
| Years active | 1957–2010 |
| Spouse(s) | Simone Rollin (?–2010) (his death) |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | Official site |
Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil (3 November 1938 – 15 December 2010) was a French film director, actor, and novelist best known for his work in the fantastique genre.
His career, spanning over fifty years, featured early short films and his achievements with his first four vampire classics Le viol du vampire (1968), La vampire nue (1969), Le frisson des vampires (1970), and Requiem pour un vampire (1971). Rollin's subsequent notable works include La rose de fer (1973), Lèvres de sang (1975), Les raisins de la mort (1978), Fascination (1979), and La morte vivante (1982).
His films are noted for their exquisite, if mostly static, cinematography, off-kilter plot progression and poetic dialogue, their playful surrealism and recurrent use of well-constructed female lead characters. Outlandish denouments and abstruse visual symbols were trademarks throughout his 'dark fantasy' career. Remarkably, in spite of their seeming high production values and precise craftsmanship, his films were made with very little money, and often under crushing deadlines. In the mid-1970s, lack of regular work led the director to direct mostly pornographic films under various pseudonyms, a process he kept on going up until the 1980s.
Jean Rollin was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine (now Hauts-de-Seine), France, to Claude Rollin, an actor and theatre director, who went by the stage name "Claude Martin", and Denise Rollin-Le Gentil, thus being born into an artistically inclined family. His half-brother was actor Olivier Rollin.
Rollin had a passion for cinema from an early age. He saw his first film during the second World War, it was Capitaine Fracasse, a 1942 film directed by Abel Gance. Jean decided he wanted to make films when he grew up; his father, being a theatre actor, was a heavy influence on him. During his teens, he developed an obsession for American serials and read comic books. These serials were an obvious influence on him as a teenager. When he was 16, he found a job at Les Films de Saturne, he was there to help write invoices, and earned himself some money, and of course wanted to be involved in cinema. They specialized in creating opening and closing credits and short cartoons, but real films were also shot, and industrial shorts and documentaries were also made. Jean was part of the crew in a short documentary about Snecma, a big factory in France which built motors and planes. He arranged the tracking shots, laid the tracks, checked the electricity, and helped the cameraman. When Jean did his military service for the French army, he worked as an editor in the cinema department alongside Claude Lelouch. They worked on army commercials, Lelouch directed, and Jean did the montage, and also did two films, Mechanographie, a documentary, and La Guerre de Silence (The War of Silence), a real film with actors and a story. In 1958, he directed his first short film Les Amours Jaunes (The Yellow Lovers), which he directed after he left the army. He shot it on a 35mm Maurigraphe camera, and used a beach in Dieppe as his location, the same beach that was used in his later films. In 1960, Jean decided to direct his first feature film, but later abandoned the project as he had no money to finish it. His next short, Ciel de Cuivre (Sky of Copper), was directed in 1961, and was quite surreal, it told a sentimental story. He did not finish the film because he ran out of money and because it was not very good. The footage is now lost. In 1962, he was as an assistant director on the film Un Cheval pour Deux (A Horse for Two), which was not a great experience for him, and he decided to approach cinema in a different way. In the early sixties, Jean became interested in politics, and made a short documentary in 1964 called Vivre en Espagne (Life in Spain), it was about Generalissimo Francisco Franco, thirty minutes were filmed and it was not very good, but he risked a lot to get it made. Jean and the crew found themselves pursued by the police and just managed to make it back into France. Jean also directed a short film in 1965 called Les Pays Loins.
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