FRANCO IN FRENCH

It is not an understatement to say that the legendary filmmaker, Jesus "Jess" Franco made some of the strangest horror/sex films ever. With a seemingly insane mix of flesh, vampires and psychedelia, Franco's artistic vision is strangely unique.

These pages from the French periodical, STAR CINE VIDEO (#4, 1983) show examples of Franco's work. Pierre Charles was the publisher of several magazines that featured fantasy and horror films with a focus on the lovely women that starred in them. Following are two articles that discuss Franco's career.

THE STRANGE CASE OF JESS FRANCO

Austin Film Society

Jesús Franco Manera (1930-2013), better known to most of us as Jess Franco (and also by dozens of other pseudonyms), was perhaps the most prolific filmmaker of modern times. By IMDB’s count he made 195 feature films. During his peak period he averaged 9 films per year.

But his volume of output is only part of the story. Franco’s films have a large and growing following because of Franco’s unique cinematic vision. Many see nothing in Franco’s films beyond a tangle of horror film paraphernalia, naked bodies, snap zooms, jazz music and art film in-jokes, but the value of Franco’s films lies in his unique eye, which finds photographic beauty and musical reverie in these elements.

Fritz Lang called Franco’s SUCCUBUS “the first erotic film I’ve seen all the way through because it’s a beautiful piece of cinema”. Orson Welles chose Franco to be his Spanish assistant director on the strength of one of Franco’s surreal, pulpy crime thrillers – much to the horror of the Madrid establishment who scorned Franco.

Two of Franco’s best films, VAMPYROS LESBOS and SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY (both 1971) have been restored by Severin Films. AFS will present the new versions in screenings this month. They are also available on gorgeous, crystal-clear Blu-Ray transfers.

Both VAMPYROS LESBOS and SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY are from his period of working for producer Karl Heinz Mannchen (Franco periods are defined by his money men). Both star Franco’s muse Soledad Miranda. Miranda had been kicking around the film industry for ten years, mainly in decorative roles but Franco saw in her a goddess of psychedelic perversity. To compare a Soledad Miranda appearance in a non-Franco film with her work in these two films is to understand some of Franco’s particular genius. It’s not just that she has beauty, it’s that the enhancement of that beauty with mystical power, creates a kind of beauty that becomes art, even if viewed in a tatty skid row adult theater.

VAMPYROS LESBOS and SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY also benefit from their legendary soundtracks, created by Manfred Hübler, Siegfried Schwab and Franco himself, a pretty fair composer and pianist. The score is brimming with wah-wah guitar, boogaloo basslines, bright horns and misterioso vocals. It’s the perfect accompaniment to Franco’s almost avant-garde visuals.

Jesús ‘Jess’ Franco, 1930-2013

An extraordinary 180-film career took the Spanish director from assisting Orson Welles to churning out horror and pornography.

By Stephen Thrower | 20 February 2015 | British Film Institute (BFI)

Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco Manera, aka Jess Franco, who died in Málaga on 2 April at the age of 82, leaves behind an astonishingly vast body of work comprising more than 180 movies. Tirelessly addicted to the creation of his own voyeuristically charged screen universe, Franco quite literally lived to shoot. Even after the death of his beloved muse and longterm partner Lina Romay in February 2012, he fought back and mounted one more production, Al Pereira vs the Alligator Ladies, which premiered at the Sitges Film Festival just a fortnight before his death.

Franco’s early mentor in the industry was Juan Antonio Bardem, for whom he worked frequently as assistant director in the 1950s. He directed his first feature, Tenemos 18 años, in 1959, but international success came with 1962’s Gritos en la noche (sold abroad as The Awful Dr. Orlof), a ghoulish tale mixing Gothic horror with echoes of Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960).

A chance encounter with Orson Welles in 1965 led to Franco being invited to shoot second unit on Chimes at Midnight that year. A jealous rival tried to scupper the assignment by whispering to Welles that he should watch a recent ‘abomination’ by Franco, Rififi en la ciudad (1963). But Welles saw the film and loved it (not least for its obvious Wellesian touches), and the two became friends, with Franco assisting on the American’s unfinished Don Quixote.

The pivotal Franco film of the 1960s is Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (aka Succubus, 1967), about a nightclub dominatrix manipulated into murder by a mysterious Svengali: its languid, oneiric texture would provide a template for much of his best work. Fritz Lang was a fan, declaring it “the first erotic film I’ve seen all the way through because it’s a beautiful piece of cinema”.

However, its explicitness brought Franco into conflict with the Spanish censors, and he was forced to look further afield for financing. Between 1968 and 1970 he made nine comparatively well-budgeted films for British producer Harry Alan Towers, including Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1968) with Klaus Kinski and Count Dracula (1970) starring Christopher Lee, although the best was Venus in Furs (1969), a sui-generis poetic fantasy heavily influenced by Franco’s love of jazz.

In the 1970s he accelerated production, completing six films in 1971, seven in 1972, and eleven in 1973; at one point in 1974 he found himself working on five simultaneously. Highlights of the period include a string of mesmeric sex-and-horror hybrids: Vampyros Lesbos (1970), Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), Countess Perverse (1974), Lorna the Exorcist (1974).

Elsewhere he turned out tangential adaptations of Edgar Wallace, Jules Verne, Octave Mirbeau and Edgar Allan Poe, but the literary source for whom he demonstrated the fiercest passion was the Marquis de Sade: Eugenie (1970), Plaisir à trois (1973) and Gemidos de placer (1981) embody the libertarian spirit if not the precise letter of Sade’s text.

Franco’s shoddiest films (including forays into hardcore pornography) can often astound with their breathtaking lack of finesse; his signature works, however, occupy a liminal terrain between exploitation cinema and the avant garde, playing with time and space, the porous structure of dream and nightmare, indeed the nature of reality itself. A voracious cineaste, an aesthete working with little or no money at the fringes of commercial genre cinema, he pursued a boundless love of film, on his own recalcitrant terms, to the very end.