After so many films I think I can finally summarize just what it is that Rollin is doing in these movies that I find so enthralling - and it's that he's creating a cinema that's one of the purest distillations of a classical aesthetic of death and decay I know of. So many of the images he composes are drawn from a deep tradition, a kind of collective unconscious that he feeds on to inspire feelings of the sublime, to…
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Empire of Passion 1978
Empire of Passion was Oshima's next film after his still controversial and transgressive masterpiece In The Realm of the Senses and it continues some of the central threads of that work, especially with regards to sexual repression and forbidden love vs a societal framework that cannot tolerate untrammeled sexuality. In particular the latter takes centre stage where Realm was just as if not more focused on a more abstract idea of amour fou and all consuming passion as a disguised…
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The Red Queen Kills Seven Times 1972
Silly but entertaining giallo with some Gothic aspects. Barbara Bouchet shines as ever and I'm weak for fashion house gialli in general even if this is no Blood & Black Lace and even if I feel like more could have been done with the villain characterization (and the twist stretches credulity even by the standards of the genre). Looks pretty fantastic as you'd expect and I was very happy to see it's part of the bottle of J&B cinematic universe
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The Children's Hour 1961
Mary Tilford vs Veda Pierce deathmatch for the title of most loathable child in cinema
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Duelle 1976
Kinda knew I was going to love this as soon as I realized how many Fran-core attributes it checks off - noir-esque lighting and shadow, glamorous femme fatales, plentiful sapphic and vampiric subtext/text-text, seedy and stylish nightclubs, fatal desires, intricate conspiracies. Really it just came down to how well Rivette would be able to pull off this particular concoction, and the answer is spectacularly as ever; Duelle is a pulp art masterpiece that feels impossibly convoluted and steeped in mythology…