“I feel
that cinema should be like a box of surprises, like a magic box. And in that
world, anything is allowed to enter, as long as it's always treated with a
spirit of "Pop!". Not in the spirit of "Now you understand the problems
of society in 1947". No, I don't give a shit about that. I think cinema
should be like magic, a surprise, that's all. That's why, to conclude, I love
movies . . . and stories.” – Jess Franco
The movie ‘Sexy Sisters’ opens as usual with one of Franco’s patented
night club acts, which is more than just an auteur flourish, because it
immediately sucks the viewer into the typical Jess Franco universe. Like Alice
who went down the rabbit hole, Franco’s movies have a way of presenting
themselves as some sort of alternate universe, away from the mundane daily
life, where all things progress along different lines. It’s what film theorist
Peter Wollen, in reference to the movies of Josef von Sternberg, called ‘iconic
filmmaking’, which he situated between the extremes of the realistic school of
filmmaking as favored by Andre Bazin and the symbolic films of Sergei
Eisenstein. In contrast to both the realistic and symbolic traditions,
everything within an iconic film refers only to itself and to nothing from the
outside world. In sharp contrast to Sternberg though, who made a whole career
out of deliberate artificiality, Franco set out to transform the real world. It
surely helped he hardly ever built any film sets at all, especially from the
seventies onwards, and always used only existing locations without this in any
way making the movies any more realistic. He took the world as he found it and
turned it into something entirely different, a completely closed off parallel
universe with its own rules and logic, just like dreams. In ‘Eugenie... the Story of Her Journey
Into Perversion’ there’s a marvelous scene where two people make love on a bed
with another person senselessly and monotonously opening and drawing the blinds
over and over again. Franco is not interested in this action in any dramaturgic
way, but instead merely uses it to establish a certain mood that’s ever so
slightly removed from everyday life.
Keeping in step with this dreamlike quality of his movies, Franco always
provides us with the most transparent, enigmatic characters possible. This
really isn’t because of laziness, but because Franco always uses characters in
an archetypal way: it virtually doesn’t matter what their name is or where
they’re from, because Franco couldn’t care less about psychological
development; he’s only interested in characters as some sort of cipher which is
also why he never uses traditional character introduction. It’s already his
second method to keep the viewer unanchored, because next to Franco’s incessant
manipulation of illusion, he denies us any traditional dramatic relationship
with his characters. We can try to get our hooks into them, trying to find some
sort of solid ground, but find nothing but deliberate slipperiness, because
Franco emphatically denies us any easy foundation – it’s the change and
uncertainty he’s always striving for.
This is why Franco returns again and again to these nightclub acts, and
often at the very beginning of his movies, because the layering of alternate
worlds immediately situate his movies not as a mirror to life, but as a mirror
to illusion. It also immediately sets up a play of fixing and dislocation that
quite literally permeates the whole Franco universe because it can be observed
in all aspects of his film making: when a film, like 'Sexy Sisters', opens with
a nightclub act, Franco immediately fixes the viewer’s gaze by hypnotizing him:
you don't have a clue what's it all about, but at the same time you can't look
away from the spectacle and become totally immersed into this strange and
mesmerizing world. But just when the viewer is tricked into believing the
performance in the nightclub will be the diegetic ‘reality’ of the film story,
which often will last for quite a long stretch, Franco will pull the rug from
underneath him by revealing the act has been an illusion. First stability, then
uncertainty.
So it is in ‘Sexy Sisters’ too and as always, there is no character
introduction whatsoever and the viewer is plunged directly into the deep. After
the nightclub act, some guy with sunglasses is taken home by a woman, who looks
eerily like Julianne Moore with a bad wig, and they proceed to have sex. After
a while, the guy is taken to another girl who, for some reason, lies handcuffed
in a golden cage and the guy makes love to her too. Then suddenly, the same guy
wakes up somewhere in his car and wonders aloud if what happened has been just
a dream or not. Sometime later, Jack Taylor walks in the room with the cage and
gives the blond woman a shot, after which she is told she can take a short swim
in the sea. She does this together with another woman and when back on the
beach they start to have sex – only to be harshly interrupted, because as it
turns out the woman is a schizophrenic and what we were just witnessing was
apparently some sort of dream of hers. It’s typical of Franco to present his
narrative on shifting sand like this, constantly pulling the rug underneath the
viewer and forcing him to reevaluate what’s going on.
With all this talk about constant reevaluation, I may be giving the
impression Franco's movies are usually quite complexly written, with
complicated plot turns and Christopher Nolan-like surprises everywhere, which
is obviously untrue – as anyone who has ever seen one of his pictures can
attest to. In reality, they are quite the opposite, as they are the type of
pictures that most mainstream audiences would describe almost as without any
story at all. The people who complain about the lack of story in Franco are the
same kind of people who need melody in their music, but as Betty Carter once
sang, “it’s not about the melody”. Indeed in Franco there is a general tendency
toward very skeletal stories, stripped down to their bare essentials, which
gives the movies a mood all their own. If we should express the general feeling
of Franco's films in classical musical terms, the large, sweeping statements of
orchestral music are mostly absent as he constantly favors what might be
described as the intimacy of chamber music. Clearly, this is closely related to
the limited budgets of virtually all his movies, but it’s done with such force
and conviction it becomes a structuring principle. The filmic equivalent of
chamber music is the German Kammerspiel film, which flourished briefly in
Weimar Germany in the early twenties as a counterpart to the more famous
Expressionist films. Interestingly, Franco’s movies seem to be an almost
deliberate combination of these two genres, especially if you look at Bordwell
& Thompson’s definition from their ‘Film History’:
“In many ways these films contrasted sharply with Expressionist drama. A
Kammerspiel film concentrated on a few characters and explored a crisis in
their lives in detail. The emphasis was on slow, evocative acting and telling
details, rather than extreme expressions of emotion. The chamber-drama
atmosphere came from the use of a small number of settings and a concentration
on character psychology rather than spectacle. Some Expressionist-style
distortion might appear in the sets, but it typically suggested dreary
surroundings rather than the fantasy or subjectivity of Expressionist films.
Indeed, the Kammerspiel film avoided the fantasy and legendary elements so
common in Expressionism; these were films set in everyday, contemporary
surroundings, and they often covered a short span of time.”
The resemblance of this description to Franco’s oeuvre is uncanny. What
is interesting to note, is that Franco's oeuvre seems an almost deliberate
mixture of Kammerspiel and Expressionist cinema as it combines the slow acting,
limited time span and few sets of the former but jettisons the character
psychology, replacing it with the fantasy and subjectivity of the latter. It's
basically Kammerspiel cinema with the spectacle of tits and ass. His reliance
on sex is so strong as to overwhelm the story lines almost completely sometimes,
and indeed he more often than not discards virtually all things that have to do
with the story in order to focus entirely on the sex scenes. All the stripping
away of unnecessary/story-related material has Franco walking a very thin line,
as the difference between archetypal abstractness and just plain undeveloped
indifference is often hard to tell. Indeed, if Franco’s films suffer (and quite
a few of them do) it is arguably always because he crossed the line into
indifference. At the same time, it is also what gives them their great power
and the fact he had the guts to continually walk this fine line is precisely
where his genius lies. He is the cinematic equivalent of a tightrope walker.
Godard famously declared that all you need for a movie are a girl and a
gun, but Franco goes him one better by basically saying all you need is a girl.
'A girl' may in itself not exactly be a story, but if we amplify this to
'female sexuality' we are already somewhat closer to a basic story line. Because
what Franco returns to time and again is the lure of female sexuality, a theme
that has been handed down to us of course from the very first story of Adam and
Eve and similar myths. The evocation of this mythical aspect is quite
deliberate on Franco's part, which also helps to explain why he never felt the
need for fully fleshed-out characters and settled for archetypes instead. The
invocation of the magic of storytelling was his way of trying to understand the
world around him and the women in it. Even though the mood of his movies could
range all the way from completely hypnotizing to utterly sleazy, these
different kinds of movies ultimately represent little more than different
approaches to the same question, different ways of looking at the same Ur-question
of female sexuality. The constant returning to the same basic, almost mythical
content should also suggest that Franco’s cinema has very little to do with the
literary storytelling which forms the basis of most narrative cinema, with all
its complex plot lines and psychological motivation. Instead he harks back all
the way to the oral traditions of storytelling which even survives in the pace of his movies as it is
often very similar to the rhythmic metric speech of oral delivery. Usually, the oral tradition survives only in those stock moments in
horror movies where someone tells a story around a campfire and everybody is so
captivated by the story they forget where they are until they are scared back
into reality by some lame guy who creeps up from behind. But the magic and
mythical aspects of this kind of storytelling, where the listener is
transported to a different place where time seems frozen is exactly what Franco
strives for in so many of his movies. So you could perhaps say he is not so
much interested in the story as he is
in the telling and all the magic that
entails. He wants to put a rapturous spell on the viewer.
The most
brilliant crystallization of this aesthetic is very probably his ‘Nightmares
Come At Night’, which is for Franco what 'Shanghai Express' was for Sternberg,
'Vertigo' for Hitchcock or ‘Juliet of the Spirits' for Fellini. I deliberately
use these three examples, not only because they are the prime expression of a
major artist working at the height of his powers, but also because they all
exhibit a similar tension between reality and fantasy. 'Nightmares Come At
Night' functions also as something of a blueprint to which Franco kept
returning all through his career and it was the film in which he came closest
to explaining his own vision. There’s a moment where Jack Taylor explains to a
woman that movies are like life except they are more intriguing and entrancing,
which of course brings us again to the magical, hypnotizing aspect of
storytelling. The telling of a story within the story is one
of the methods Franco uses to create this spell; it's a technique he returns to
again and again and serves as yet another doubling of narrative and adds to the
hall of mirrors effect his movies so strongly exhibit. For instance, in 'Oasis
of the Zombies', the son of Blabert starts reading the story of his father,
which is then told in one long continuous flashback. These flashbacks function
in exactly the same way as the nightclub acts, as some parallel, strangely
familiar yet somewhat different world into which the viewer is invited to lose
himself completely – it somehow seems to exists outside of time and place and
everything in it seems to be some distance removed from everything that
preceded it, infused with the languorous, drawn-out pace Franco is so notorious
for. When this protracted flashback ends, we find ourselves suddenly with the
young boy reading the story again, a realization which doesn't come without
some shock as if we have rudely been awakened from some dream inside a dream.
It is yet another variation on his familiar ploy of inviting the viewer into
some different world only to puncture that spell later on. The dialogue that
follows seems utterly banal and disjointing, the kind of thing Franco has often
been criticized for but which only serves to heighten the difference between
flashback and present tense as it comes after such a long sequence which felt
like a self-contained world. It is quite similar to the ending of the singing
and dancing sequences in musicals, which can never end on a completely satisfying
note; the beginning of these moments is quite easy and often without friction –
a few foot taps on the ground are usually enough to send someone off into dance
– but the return to normal business is quite impossible to accomplish,
especially after so much ebullience. The stock way of doing this is to freeze
all the actors in some awkward position, mostly looking straight at the camera,
before starting to laugh. By this, they break the fourth wall that's usually
forbidden in Hollywood, and acknowledge their positions as performers,
implicitly creating a tension between the scenes that make up the narrative and
the musical sequences, which aqua-musical star Esther Williams called “the
little improbable stuff that has nothing to do with the plot”. Along similar lines,
Franco wants us to feel the difference.
The same kind of friction also translates to Franco’s visual techniques,
especially in his use of the zoom lens. His use can be compared to that of
Italian horror maestro Mario Bava, who also uses the zoom quite often in his
films from a certain period. Bava's zoom technique has sometimes been likened
to that of a knife hacking away at a painting, as Bava will often set up one of
his beautiful painterly compositions, only to cut them apart later with one of
his zooms. Unlike Bava however, who has seldom been attacked for his use of the
zoom, Franco has taken an awful lot of slack for this. The accusation of his
being a lazy filmmaker is often connected with what is described as his overuse
of the zoom and the general disdain that people seem to feel for the technique.
Zooms can be seen as something like the frowned upon bastard brother of a
closely related technique, that of camera movement. The actual moving of the
camera is often seen as one of the greatest achievements of cinema and the
films of Max Ophuls, Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick have been praised to the heavens
because of it. This is probably because camera movement is something of a
marriage between elegance and very hard work: the fluidity of the moving camera
has often been compared with the seemingly effortless grace of dance, but at
the same time it also involves an awful lot of work, with the laying of camera
tracks and the complex choreography of both the camera itself and the movement
of the actors. In sharp contrast, the zoom can be handled with a mere push of a
button, which makes it not only far easier to accomplish than actual camera
movement but also gives the impression of crudeness instead of elegance. But
here also lies its strength, as a zoom is a rather paradoxical thing: it can
make the camera seem to move, without actually moving it and with this it’s
really the visual analogy of Franco’s style of stasis versus change. Zooms give
the illusion of movement, which certainly must have attracted Franco.
But his insistent use of the zoom wouldn't nearly have been as effective
as it usually is without the aid of a second, often overlooked, aspect of his
aesthetic: the long held shot. The long held shot is in some ways the opposite
of the zoom, as it does give the spectator the solid ground the zoom denies him,
but this is also Franco’s purpose. They set up little oases of rest and quiet
in an otherwise restless universe and make sure all the zooms have something to
get anchored to. Often in fact, does Franco use a combination of the zoom and
long held shot, when he zooms in on the face of an actor, only to hold this
shot for a long time after, thus setting up a direct relation between the two. Franco
in this respect is like a boxer who uses different moves to break through the
defense of his opponent, which is here analogous to the viewer. So he uses his
twofold attack: a combination of long held shots, mostly of close-ups, and wild
zooms with the first serving as anchors to be cut adrift by the latter. Another
strong adherent of the zoom style, besides Franco, is his contemporary Robert
Altman. But where Altman uses the zoom to destroy clarity, Franco uses it to
dislodge the viewer from any comfortable physical relationship to space and
thus, like his narrative techniques, it also functions to deny the viewer any
comfortable foundation. Next to their shared love of the zoom lens, there’s another
strong bond between Franco and Altman, who could've been describing Franco's
movies when he said around the time he made '3 Women':
“I don’t
think we’ve found a format for movies yet. I think we’re still imitating
literature and theater. Film can be more abstract, impressionistic, less
linear. Music changes form all the time. I think if you just establish a mood
with a film, it might have more impact than anything we’ve done, just a mood”.
While
the setting of a certain mood is certainly essential for Franco, this doesn’t
mean they’re nothing but the visual equivalent of ambient music, because these
moods do in fact serve a purpose. To get at the bottom of this purpose, it’s
very tempting to compare Franco’s movies to the effects of LSD and not just
because of some cheap psychedelic filters, as it goes much deeper than that.
LSD has often been described as a mind-expanding drug, but recent scientific
research has shown there is not more but in fact less brain activity under the
influence of hallucinogens. So, contrary to what most people believed for
years, the brain actually starts closing itself off to outside influences, thus
forcing the taker of the drug to depend not on outside stimuli but on his inner
beauty. This clearly relates directly to the iconic mode of filmmaking
discussed at the beginning, in which a director tries to create a different
world closed-off from outside influences. To make any sense of this hermetic
parallel universe, the viewer is forced to give himself over completely to the
experience. And this is where things get tricky, because unfortunately very few
people seem to be able to give themselves over entirely to any experience. And
I’m not talking about some hedonistic ‘live only for today, don’t care about
tomorrow’ principle that seems to dictate modern Western society, but about
something that’s much closer to the Eastern spiritual idea of completely living
inside the moment. It’s the moment where rational contemplation and emotional
experiencing have become so perfectly aligned there’s really no difference
between the two anymore. It’s very similar to the state of being brought on by
intense meditation, where irrelevant worries and thoughts have been conquered
and don’t impede on the direct experience at hand – the result is rapt attention
where only images and sounds remain.
There’s
a famous sequence in ‘Succubus’ during which Janine Reynaud and Howard Vernon
play some kind of word association game, with names as diverse as Charles
Mingus, Alfred Hitchcock, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Karlheinz Stockhausen or Marquis
de Sade getting mentioned. It’s one of his most explicit acknowledgments of the
extremely diverse cocktail of influences Franco uses in his films. I realize
it’s not exactly common to refer to all these things I have been talking about
in relation to Franco, but that’s just the problem: it should really be normal,
because only by opening ourselves up to the most diverse areas of life and by
annihilating this absurd gap between supposedly high and low art can we hope to
truly understand the world we live in. Just look at the way Franco uses tits
and ass: he puts a staggering amount of it on the screen, to be sure, but it
somehow never feels quite easy to take in. It’s titillation, but without a
quick pay-off, because everything surrounding the nudity seems entirely foreign
to it, like they are two different world colliding. With this, Franco seems to
put the lie to the very concept of exploitation filmmaker, even though he’s
habitually called just that. Because if we follow the generally accepted idea
that exploitation always exploit lurid or sensational material in simple and
easy ways to make some quick bucks, it’s kind of hard to fit Franco into this
category. To be sure, he uses the sensational material associated with these
movies in abundance, but viewers expecting an easy roller-coaster ride filled
with some cheap thrills are very likely to be disappointed, which may very well
explain his rather problematic reputation with a lot of genre aficionados.
Instead of offering sensations in an accessible manner, he mostly seems to
tease the audience only to pull the rug from under the viewer and continually
frustrating his desires without ever giving them the expected. A woman being
tied to a wall in a gilded cage like in ‘Sexy Sisters’ for instance, sounds
very much like camp and clearly there are traces of it, but people looking for
some easy camp ride will be sorely disappointed in the end by its relative lack
of outrageous material. Because Franco doesn’t settle for some quick and
disinterested glances, but demands the complete immersion and attention usually
reserved for more ‘respectable’ offerings. Supposedly, the gap between ‘exploitation’
and ‘avant-garde’ is as wide as the Grand Canyon, but Franco is the reminder these
categories are much more fluid than that. Clearly he is not the only director
who makes challenging films, but it is especially revealing he has always
worked within the confines of the so-called exploitation market where people
expect works that are easily consumed. One of the last things
Lou Reed wrote before his death was a review of a Kanye West album:
“He
obviously can hear that all styles are the same, somewhere deep in their heart,
there's a connection. It's all the same shit, it's all music
— that's what makes him great. If you like sound, listen to
what he's giving you. Majestic and inspiring.”
If you like sound – it’s such a wonderful phrase and it
expresses the essence of the general mood Franco always tried to capture. Although with almost 200 movies spanning six decades there's
obviously bound to be quite a lot of difference between all of them, it's hard
not to be struck by all the same elements and themes to which Franco keeps
turning obsessively: the same actors, the same basic plots, the same locations
and the same kinds of music all reinforce the idea that despite all their
outwardly differences Franco took Fellini's adage that "every director
basically makes only one movie which he keeps remaking” to the breaking point.
The beauty of it all is that every movie, every image almost is unmistakably
and definitely Franco’s and it’s hard to shake the feeling that every image he
throws at the screen comes straight from his brain. He reputedly made several
movies at the same time (something he himself has denied), virtually insuring
spillage to seep over from one movie to the next and inviting to see his whole
oeuvre as a maddeningly and beautifully dense jungle where everything is
connected, a microcosm of its own. It has often been said
that had Franco made one movie a year instead of several, he would’ve made one
good or perfect film instead of so many mediocre ones. But this would miss the
point of Franco completely as it is not laziness or disinterest from his part
these movies exhibit. He always seems to have worked in a manner very
reminiscent of stream of consciousness, as if Franco quite literally throws the
first thing that pops in his mind at the screen. There seems to have been very
little in the way of self-censorship, which is probably considered one of the
crucial aspects of most art, as it would otherwise be hard to distinguish
between sketches or working material and the finished product. But this is more
or less exactly the effect of the staggering volume of filmed material Franco
has unleashed on the world and becomes interesting because of it. It reminds
one somewhat of those complete sessions of Miles Davis albums that have been
released after his death, with the regular albums supplemented with demo
material and alternate versions that give a fascinating insight into the
creative process. Franco’s cinema often produces a similar effect, as it feels
like some raw, unprocessed material.
The movies of Ingmar Bergman have been described as a filmmaker who
vomits up the same material again and again and who often blurred the
distinctions between dramatic and autobiographical material, making some of the
films almost painful to watch. Franco’s case is even more pronounced,
especially from the moment he started making films with his long time muse Lina Romay, which can be so intimate you sometimes feel like an unwanted fly
on the wall. It was also the moment when repetition became even more
overbearing than before and which is yet another link between Franco and the oral
tradition of storytelling. If you’ve ever read, say, Homer, you can’t help but
noticing the relative simplicity of the story itself and all the repetitions in
both the situations and the phrasing. This repeating of material was of course
very much necessary because it made the oral delivery much easier for the
storytellers, but it also gives these stories quite a distinct character,
something that clearly also survives in Franco; he recycles actors,
locations, plots, music, characters, names and even the same pieces of clothing
pop up several times, all of which gives Franco’s oeuvre the distinct
impression of continuation and interconnectedness. All these
repetitions may have originated simply as lack of budget and shooting time, but
Franco uses them to get at an altered state of consciousness. As with Rome,
several ways can lead to altered states, and all that’s really important is for
the ego to be yanked out if its complacency and to be opened up to influences
it’s normally closed to. So it really doesn’t matter whether it’s sleep, food
or sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic drugs, yoga, meditation or ritualistic
chanting or drumming – everything can get the job done. With Franco, besides
the already mentioned repetition, he mainly uses naked tits to try to make the
spectator receptive. When showing nudity in movies, there’s almost immediately
the accusation of it being ‘gratuitous’ but that’s not only a term I’ve never
understood, it also misses the point in Franco. Because the sheer volume of
nudity in his films would in itself already be enough to get the mind out of
its everyday routine. It functions very much in the same way as the noise music
of Merzbow or some minimal music concert. Years ago one of the most forming
experiences of my life was attending a Charlemagne Palestine concert, where for
the first five minutes nothing but the same single tone was heard. After five
minutes, a second was added and somewhere after that a third. At that point I
realized for the first time in my life it was in fact possible to change the
way you perceive things by sheer repetition and duration: when you are forced
to hear the same three notes for something like fifteen minutes, you notice you
stop hearing things the way you normally do and your whole perception starts to
change. In a single flash you realize there’s not one fixed or static way to
perceive the world around you, but there are many different ones – none of them
better than the others but just different. I’ve heard people condemn Franco’s
movies as 90 minutes of Lina Romay fingerfucking herself, but the repetition of
it is exactly the point. Especially if it’s not just one single movie, but the
repetition is carried over from movie to movie.
This meditative state also shines through in Franco’s manipulation of
narrative time, which ironically puts him in the same category as wildly
divergent filmmakers like, say, Andy Warhol, Andrei Tarkovsky or Bela Tarr. In
‘Nightmare Come At Night’ for instance, the camera lingers on a woman doing a very
slow striptease and Franco almost doesn’t cut at all, emphasizing the
hypnotizing aspect of the dance which clearly is what the whole scene is about.
Yet again, Franco wants to enthrall the viewer, yank him out of his everyday
experience and seduce him into a different world, a world which defies rationality
and can instead only be truly measured by sensuality. It’s perhaps illuminating
to give the definition of the word ‘sensual’ here:
1. Relating to or affecting any of the
senses or a sense organ; sensory.
2. Of, relating to, given to, or
providing gratification of the physical and especially the sexual appetites.
3. Suggesting sexuality; voluptuous.
4. Physical rather than spiritual or
intellectual.
5. Lacking in moral or spiritual
interests; worldly.
It’s interesting to note that quite literally all the parts of the
definition are directly applicable to Franco’s movies. It should also already
suggest why his movies have so frequently been misunderstood, not only by
mainstream or academic film criticism, but also by many genre buffs: criticism
has almost no room at all for anything but the intellectual approach and really
living through your senses seems to make most genre lovers real uneasy. Thus,
it’s a shame so few people are able to recognize the fact Franco’s movies are
really so closely related to actual meditation, giving them an amazing
opportunity to change the way they perceive the world and truly trust their
senses. Kenneth Anger once said around the time he made ‘Invocation of a Demon
Brother’ he was dissatisfied with the indirectness of the camera and wanted to
make a movie he could project directly into the brain of the viewer. This
direct link between filmmaker and audience is exactly what Franco sought time
and again, because he uses all these various techniques to create a meditative
state where the mind is opened up to start receiving everything that’s thrown
at it, without the usual filtering of the ego. If terms like Brahman or Nirwana
may seem somewhat to pretentious when talking about Franco, let’s settle for a
compromise, because he really does want to suck the viewer into something of an
utopian world, where everything is just perceived as is, without borders or
prejudice. Like so many other avant-garde filmmakers, Franco obliterates the
usual boundaries between documentary and fiction, which is yet another way of
saying his movies are only situated in a world of their own, some solipsistic
universe which can almost be impossible to penetrate. This is probably the
biggest challenge Franco’s movies present: their absolute refusal to meet the
viewer halfway. It can make the films feel impenetrable, which is very probably
one of the things that scares so many people off, but also will be so insanely
rewarding when you do try to get access to them. For me, it took almost ten
years to ‘get’ Franco, to find the key necessary to unlock his mysteries; some
of the movies I loved immediately, some of them I liked and a whole lot of them
left me simply befuddled. But I just kept on trying until somewhere last year
my boyfriend and I started noticing a distinct change in perception of these
movies and we felt something had been altered even though I still can’t explain
what it exactly was. Trying to understand Franco can be compared to trying to
find the right channel on a radio: as you twist the knob trying to lock unto
the right frequency, sometimes you don’t hear any music at all, sometimes
faintly, but only when you find the exact right wavelength will you be able to
experience the music in all its glory.
If you truly open yourself up to his movies, you will notice a distinct
change in how you experience them. People always complain how these movies feel
so much longer than they really are, and I have had the same experience in the
past with certain films of his. But now, the exact opposite is true, because
they don’t even feel like 90 minutes any more, but only like half that length
which is obviously only possible if you let yourself be guided into the
meditative trance these movies encourage. Surrender yourself to their peculiar
rhythms, let these rhythms become your own for a while and feel yourself be
changed by it. Block out everything else and focus only on the experience the
movies offer, and they not only open up as aesthetically, but sometimes even
become poignant on a dramatic level. Like at the end of ‘Sexy Sisters’ there is
an incredibly intimate sex scene with lush romantic music, slightly
Spanish-sounding. It’s where the pay-off comes, because it is in some strange
way dramatically satisfying even though no apparent effort has been made to
create any dramatic effect. It is only possible when you project enough of
yourself into it – as our own experiences always form the starting point of our
own creativity. But once you have opened yourself up completely to Franco’s
art, there’s really no limit especially because he taps into this whole
archetypal mythic thing. They are quite literally strangely universal.
After the movie is over, you find yourself awakened as if from some
strange dream. You feel as if you’ve seen a movie in a theatre during daytime:
as you walk into the street, still slightly dazed, you suddenly realize it’s
still daylight, which comes as quite a shock after the darkness of the movie
theatre and it takes a while for you the find your ‘normal’ rhythm again. After
plunging down the rabbit hole that is called a Jess Franco movie for god knows
how many times, you emerge again from the rabbit hole and you feel yourself
somehow… changed. The world outside
may be the same, but feels somehow richer, because the experience you’ve just
gone through was in a way really profound. Of course, a statement like this
will send Franco haters into a frenzy, because they will rabidly maintain every
Franco movie is completely empty. But that’s basically just the same as calling
meditation empty, which is obviously nonsense. Because meditation can only be
empty when the person who is meditating is empty. A meditation experience can
only begin to mean something if the experience is completed by the person, if
access is gained to the richness of his inner domain. So it is with a Franco
movie: in a sense they are nothing more than a tabula rasa dressed up as a sex
movie and have to be completed by the imagination of the viewer. Every
discussion of Franco boils down to what a particular viewer is able to bring to
the movie. This is
something Franco’s films take to their most extreme, because they only start to
mean anything if they are completed by the viewer’s own feelings, senses and
thought. Obviously, this is true of all art in at least some way, but it seems
the extreme sensual and sensorial nature of Franco’s films demand even more of
such a completion than most other works of art and which is arguably why he’s
run into so much trouble with so many baffled spectators. This complex
relationship between the sensuality of the films and the required spirituality
of the viewer and the perfect symbiosis these two can form together, seems very
much related to what psychologist Bill Plotkin calls the 3-D Ego, which he
describes as the perfect alignment between Ego and Soul:
“The
genius and beauty of the mature 3-D Ego is that it possesses the ability and
creativity to make real the Soul’s passions. Indeed, the 3-D Ego is the only
means by which the Soul’s desires can be consciously manifested in our world.
This is why so many mystical traditions speak of a love affair between Ego and
Soul, the Lover and the Beloved: Each possesses something the other entirely
lacks and longs for. Ego possesses the heart, hands, senses, imagination and
intelligence to manifest, but doesn’t know what’s worth manifesting; it years
to know the deeply authentic purpose of the Soul. Soul possesses the song
that’s worth singing, the dance that wants to be danced, but it has no way to
manifest this in the world; the Soul years to be made real by the Ego. Ego is
long on know-how and short on know-why; the opposite is true of the Soul.”
With no
more than a little bit creativity, one could say Franco’s films do everything
they can not only to fulfill the role played by the Ego in Plotkin’s vision,
but also in some sense take over the role of the Ego in the viewer. Just as the
pragmatic Ego yearns to be completed by the spiritual Soul and vice versa, so
Franco’s exceedingly physical universe screams out to be made whole by the
spirituality of the viewer. This has little to do with reading something into
these movies that’s not there, as some people are apt to accuse me of, but only
with following the lead Franco so clearly gives, of which I’ve tried to convey the
general feeling in this essay. This is in any case exactly the way I experience
a film like ‘Nightmares Come At Night’: it’s like these films take over my
regular Ego functions and start to function as something of an extension of my
own thought processes and which refers back to Anger’s notion of projecting
images directly into the viewer’s brain. And if you let yourself be invaded by
these movies and succumb completely to their hypnotic power, which seems an
almost foreign concept within Western culture, you’ll notice they will allow
you to access your innermost core self, your Soul. So, that for at least 90
minutes you have experienced your own mature 3-D Ego Plotkin speaks of so
evocatively.
Available
on blu-ray from Ascot Elite
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