Similar to what was the case with the Italian achievements we discussed in the previous issue Artand, European metapoetic horrors in the seventies arise in a strange, often indistinguishable, and even sublime zone between exploitation and authorof consistency.
Movies Jean Rollin often occur - Gothic flashes - in and around half-ruined castles and cemeteries: such an atmosphere is best profiled in his key work, Requiem for a Vampire (Requiem for a Vampire, 1971), primarily because the director managed to bring a sense of melancholy here, and thus a certain meditative reverie when it comes to the horror topos that he uses in his work. For this reason, Requiem for a Vampire is Rollin's most convincing cinematic delirium where the fantasy goes from initial sadism to the gradual realization that the vampire's power is weakening, that it can no longer turn people into undead bloodsuckers.
Like the castle in which the film takes place, vampirism is - embodied in The Last Vampire (Philippe Gasté) - dilapidated, a pale shadow of its former grandeur and the fear it once inspired. As is usually the case in similar situations, refreshment is sought in the blood of two virgins (Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille Dargent), but the strength has already turned into inertia, resignation, and the vampire himself eventually retreats, putting himself to rest, which gives the film the label of a genre allegory.
Harry Kümel is in Distracted (1971) turned a potential flaw into an advantage: the film is based on the novel of the same name Jean Raya which was very difficult and plot-complicated for the screen, so the director 'extended' these numerous plots into the entire ambience and atmosphere of the Gothic house in which the action takes place and whose numerous staircases and rooms form a labyrinth where the heroes move. This is just one of the indicators that Kümel is primarily focused on stylization as such, that he is dedicated to the composition of the frame and not to the desire for it to be as substantial, as pompously filled, as 'fantastic' as possible, but rather to its very character: he is much less intrigued by the possible implications of the story about the Greek gods who lost their power because people stopped believing in them.
The director's decision is justified in many ways, not only because the emphasis on the visual further directs the film towards an area where surrealist and fantastical impulses effectively mix, but also because this fascination with form corresponds to a fascination with the female form, which is underlined by the fact that Susan Hampshire plays three roles, three variations of the same 'symptom': the only goddess who survived is the Gorgon, the one in whom the deadly and attractive paradox of female sexuality is embodied, around which both layers of meaning in Distracted, so is the cyclic or mise-en-abîme a narrative profile that is certainly grounded in anxiety.
As in one of his previous films, Whirlpool (Vrtlog, 1970), and in Scream - and Die! (Scream - and Die, 1973) the story is partly set in the world of 'fashion' photography (before he devoted himself to film, José Larraz was a respected photographer), which additionally allows us to glimpse not so much the 'autobiographical' character of the director's films, but rather his self-conscious handling of the camera, which inevitably tends to glamorize or brutally exploit his own Model. (The representation of women in film is therefore fundamentally ambivalent, since the boundary between adoration and victimization is never transparently visually distinguished: cinematic representational excess is always dubious, what produces pleasure is never semantically unidirectional.)
Repeated photo sessions of the main character Valerie (Andrea Allan) which have almost no dramaturgical function, are the 'duplicate' settings of the film where Larraz realizes the conventions of psychological horror by focusing on his heroine: everything is an excuse just to have her at the center of surveillance. The director thus creates (suspenseful, erotic) tension, equally concentrated when Valerie is in the middle of danger, but also when she performs narratively insignificant actions: storytelling is replaced by visual absorption.
In the seventies, there was overproduction. Jesus Franca reached a feverish temperature, which in some cases produced truly hypnotic results. The Curse of Frankenstein (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1972) phantasmagorically combines the most commonly opposed horror imagery with a shifted, not to say innovative effect. The Perverse Countess (Perverted Countess, 1974) - thoughtful reworking The Most Dangerous Game (1932) - Franco's cynical worldview on the human condition, in which the unusual treatment of a house on an island, previously known from She killed in ecstasy (She killed in ecstasy..
A similar sense of the almost psychedelic use of modernist architecture determines the menacing, 'possessed' intonation in Lorna, the Exorcist (Lorna, the exorcist, 1974), in one respect a key element of the author's metapoetic achievement. Within the visual structures that define narrative cinematography, even when it is at the very borderline hard core pornography, Franco's frequent camera focus on the female genital organ is excessive, when opting for close up which topographically does not follow the center of sexual 'action'.
Considering the etiology of fetishistic rhetoric - the covering up of a 'lack' on the female body - it is interesting how the director's mise-en-scène nevertheless features a nightmarish staging of castration anxiety, which seems to be a reaction of the very structure of the cinematic apparatus to an explicit setting: namely, in Lorna, the Exorcist is found - narratively elaborated as a demonic attack, symbolically realized as the return of a repressed signifier - the most disturbing shots not only in Franco's oeuvre, but also for him, those in which small, black crabs emerge from the vagina of the protagonist's mother.
Herzogovo masterpiece, Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night, 1979) is a tribute Murnauu and his classic Nosferatu, the Symphonie des Grauens (1921) and then, most closely related to it, a melancholic meditation on the genre itself. Herzog's subtle technical approach reminded us that evil and horror do not have to be directly elaborated in order to represent their perniciousness: he creates a necrophilic, threatening atmosphere that builds around the supernatural phenomenon through visual emphasis. Klaus Kinski - with the inevitable impact of performance Maxa Schrecka - in the role of Count Dracula.
In this way, the director delves deeper into the darkness that surrounds humanity, confirming and modifying the conclusions that Murnau also reached. However, although Herzog tried to recreate Murnau's style as closely as possible - some scenes are almost completely copied from the original - Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht yet it also offers a whole range of confirmed themes of the author. Also, some superbly orchestrated scenes, such as the one with rats flooding the town square, introduce a strong mythical-phantasmagoric intonation into the film that takes us back to the beginning of the vampire myth when it was a terrifying symbol for plague, disease and madness.
Contrary to the general tendency to modernize bloodsuckers as much as possible, as unfortunately most disastrously demonstrated in Eggers a 'remake' from last year that misguidedly abandons the Murnau paradigm in order to opt for the most problematic part Coppola visions from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Herzog tends to strip the vampire of its poster 'modernity', and thus return him to the archetypal and archaic narratives where his resonance of horror is greatest: Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht is both a dignified reconstruction and upgrade of the original, and an elaboration of the author's essential motifs of curse and doom, as well as a reflective essay on the fundamental structure of horror.
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