Jean Rollin Poster Designs: Lips of Blood

Here are three versions of the stunning Philippe Druillet designed poster for Lips of Blood.

Jean Rollin Home Video Designs: Lips of Blood

Here are four different home video designs for Lips of Blood. I am aware that there are a few more and I will post them if I can locate better quality scans.

Jean Rollin Wallpapers: Lips of Blood

The first batch of my Lips of Blood wallpapers have been uploaded and they can be accessed here or by clicking the wallpaper thumbnail at the right. The rest will be uploaded in the next day or so at these links.

Jean Rollin: The Collaborators (Jean-Loup Philippe)

Writer, actor, director and artist Jean-Loup Philippe has had quite a wild career that has taken him from the stage to the screen and back again. The male star and dialogue writer of Levres de Sang, one of Jean Rollin’s most poetic films, Philippe probably could have had a more substantial film career had other interests not pulled him away.
Born in France after World War Two, Philippe recalled on the excellent interview on Encore’s Lips of Blood set that he fell into acting essentially because he felt he, “wasn’t good for anything else.” A massive understatement at best, Philippe already had a strong literary backbone thanks to his childhood surrounded by some of France’s top post-war authors. Still, acting became an essential part of his life and by the mid sixties he was forging a successful stage career for himself, with his most popular role being opposite none other than Ingrid Bergman in Tea and Sympathy.
Philippe met Rollin in the early sixties and he recalled to Encore that the two initially came together because of their mutual love of literature. Fitting then that it is the lyrical Lips of Blood that remains their major collaboration together.
Rollin’s film marked the first major screen role for Philippe, although he had already appeared in small roles in half a dozen French films, and he is quite good in the part. Projecting a fragile vulnerability and working incredibly well with the exquisite Annie Belle (acting as Annie Briand in her first major role), Philippe is one of the most memorable male stars in a Jean Rollin work.
A few film appearances followed Lips of Blood, including the infamous Le Sexe qui parle (1975) opposite Lips of Blood co-star Sylvia Bourdon but Rollin’s film marks his first and last truly important role in front of the cameras. After the film Philippe would return to the stage, now as a director, and it continues to be his passion to this day. Philippe has maintained a close relation to Rollin though and he worked with him on both Les Paumées du petit matin (1981) and an unfinished project based on a Duras story that he details in Encore’s interview.

Jean Rollin Wallpapers: Lips of Blood

The rest of my Lips of Blood wallpapers are now available at the link to the right for those interested. My posts on the film will continue throughout the next few days.

Jean Rollin: The Collaborators (Jean-Francois Robin)

Born in France during World War Two, Cinematographer Jean-Francois Robin has had a fascinating four decade career behind and in front of the camera. The Cesar nominated Robin got his start in French film in the early seventies on a couple of horror shorts. He made his feature film debut as cinematographer on the legendary Jean Rollin’s haunting and influential Lips Of Blood. Robin’s excellent work for Rollin would mark him as one of the most talented, if lesser known, photographers that came out of French cinema in the seventies and his work has only improved since.
Like most of Rollin’s greatest works, Lips Of Blood didn’t make much of a splash at the time, so Robin wasn’t able to immediately capitalize on his excellent work. He spent the rest of the seventies and early eighties shooting a variety of relatively minor French films for directors like Alain Cavalier and Patrice Leconte before landing a huge assignment for famed Polish director Andrzej Zulawski with
1985’s L’Amour Braque in which he was able to photograph Sophie Marceau.
The demanding Zulawski got the best out of Robin and his work on L’Amour Braque received a lot of attention from critics and other directors. One director who was most impressed by it was Jean-Jacques Beineix who was prepping his follow up film to Moon In The Gutter, 1986’s Betty Blue. Robin was hired for Beineix’s iconic and popular film and immediately became one of the most sought after French cinematographers due to his work on it.
Robin would continue to work with Beineix on his next couple of films and also struck up a partnership with the great Claude Sautet. This collaboration would prove to be a fruitful one and it produced the career best work of both men, the glorious 1995 film Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud. Robin continues to be a successful cinematographer and has even acted in a couple of films for some of his directors.

***A version of this article originally appeared at my blog dedicated to the career of Nastassja Kinski, Nostalgia Kinky.***

Annie Belle on Lips of Blood

My apologies for the delay in quality posts here recently. Moon in the Gutter is having a big month and I have been just swamped otherwise. I hope to finish up my look at Lips of Blood this week. I am also going to be posting a tribute to the star of Lips of Blood, Annie Belle (Annie Brilland) and in the meantime I thought I would share these thoughts Annie had on the film and Jean from an early nineties interview she did for the Italian Book 99 Donne. Enjoy.

"I had done one in France with Jean Rollin, it was called Levres De Sang. It was a horror, a vampire movie. I was the lead, the vampire girl...I remember being put in a casket-it gave me shudders, I was seventeen...
I didn't know this (that Rollin had a worldwide reputation) but I'm glad about it because Jean, who's passed away lately (this statement seems to be a mis-translation), was a good director, very talented in my opinion. He was continuously urged by the producers-they always wanted him to put at least one or two hardcore scenes in his films. So, after the shooting, they put hardcore inserts without the co-stars' knowledge. Luckily Levres De Sang wasn't made for the porno circuits...it was straight horror film that was also shown at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, where it won some prizes...For me, being in front of the camera was very natural, I;ve never had any problem. Actually, it's all been so easy...I mean, all those stories I heard about having to go to bed with the producer to have a part, they were just gossip...at least in my case."

Jean Rollin: The Collaborators (Annie Belle)

With porcelin white skin, hair cut close to the scalp, volutptous body and undeniable charisma, Annie Belle was quite unlike any other figure in seventies exploitation cinema. Born in France in 1956 as Annie Brilland, Belle proved herself to be one of the most memorable, if often overlooked, screen goddesses of the seventies with a series of varied roles in both French and Italian cinema.
Interviewed in the nineties for the Italian book 99 Donne, Belle recalled that her career began to take shape when she attended the Rue Blanche Acting School in Paris under master Virilo, whom she described as being, “a great cinema and theater actor.” Coming from a family of engineers, acting might have seemed an odd career choice for the young Brilland but she was quite a natural at it, and her manager led her to her first role before she had even turned eighteen, in Jean Rollin’s Bacchanales Sexuelles (Fly Me The French Way) in 1974, where she had a small but memorable role that would endear her to the director who would cast her in her first starring role just a year later.



Billed as Annie Briand in Rollin’s hypnotic and poetic Lips of Blood in
1975, Belle showed herself to be quite a mesmerizing presence and one wonders in hindsight how her career might have gone had she stay in France making movies. Belle relocated to Italy shortly after Lips of Blood though, and within a year she was on her way to becoming for a brief time one of the most in demand actresses in Italian exploitation cinema, with three major films occurring in 1976 alone.



Of the three Italian films Belle appeared in ’76, the erotic Laure is probably the best known thanks to Severin’s recent special edition DVD of it. The film would mark one of a handful Belle shot with actor Al Cliver, the man she would become involved with off screen for several years in the mid to late seventies. Remembering Laure as being, “not very good”, Belle seemed to have better feelings towards Massimo Dallamano’s End of Innocence, a film in which she was granted a co-writing credit on.



Calling Dallamano, “a great professional and talented man”, Belle's great work in End of Innocence is unfortunately hard to see in an English language friendly version, although it is one of the key works of her career.



One of Belle’s most controversial and enduring pictures finished out 1976, and thankfully Brunello Rondi’s audacious Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle (a film that teamed Belle with lovely Laura Gemser) is readily available now in a beautiful uncut print also courtesy of Severin. It would be the first of a few films Belle would shoot with Gemser and in the 99 Donne interview she remembers the iconic beauty very fondly.



Annie Belle continued to work steadily throughout the seventies in both erotic and comedic pictures. In 1980 she appeared in one of the most notorious Italian productions of the period, Ruggero Deodato’s House on The Edge of the Park, a brutal but unforgettable film that Belle remembered as being very, “cruel”, but also very, “interesting.”



Belle would also work a couple of times with legendary Joe D’Amato in the early eighties, a director Belle absolutely adored. Calling him a great director with actors, and going so far to say that he could have indeed been, “one of the greatest filmmakers ever”, had he the right sized budgets and support, it’s a shame Belle and D’Amato weren’t teamed for better films, although there is much to admire in both Absurd (1981) and The Alcove (1984).
Personal problems slowed Annie Belle’s career down in the eighties and by the end of the decade she retired from the screen for good. Returning to France, Belle is now reportedly doing well after going to school to get her degree in Psychology. She currently works in Social Work helping others who have had to battle with personal demons in their lives.
Although she is not often considered one of Jean Rollin’s premiere actresses, this is really because they only worked together twice. Annie Belle is an unforgettable figure and as more of her films become more readily available, the cult around her will only grow.

Rare Lips of Blood Article Scan

I recently came across this short article from Necronomicon Issue #1 and I wanted to share it here for those who hadn't seen it.

Jean Rollin: Rare Home Video Designs

Over at eBay France I found these four very different and rather rare VHS covers for a handful of Rollin films. My apologies that the quality of the scans aren't better but they seemed worth preserving here.






And for good measure, here is a rare one for Lips of Blood that I found on eBay Spain:

Jean Rollin Home Video Designs: Rare High Quality Scans of Lips of Blood and Fascination

A very kind reader from France recently alerted me to this wonderful database he is involved with dedicated to preserving rare VHS box art from around the world. They have a huge Jean Rollin selection here and this reader has offered to supply me with some large scans to share with fellow Rollin fans. Here is the next batch featuring some various scans. Thanks so much to this very kind fan who, like me, is really wanting to preserve Rollin's legacy and I hope this and the upcoming posts of these prove pleasing!

Jean Rollin meets The Kramford Look

I recently came across this great YouTube mash-up and I wanted to share it here. It's great to see young artists from so many various mediums finding inspiration in Rollin's work.

The Cinema of Jean Rollin: Levres de Sang (Lips of Blood) 1975

Had a key financial backer not dropped out just a week before shooting commenced, Levres de Sang (Lips of Blood) might have turned out to be Jean Rollin’s greatest film. Forced to eliminate sections of the script, as well as losing an entire week of shooting time, Rollin still managed to deliver one of his most haunting works and it stands today as one of his key films.









The seeds of Lips of Blood came in 1975 when Rollin met a supportive producer named Jean-Marc Ghanassia. Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs recalled in Immoral Tales that Ghanassia had, “seen and admired several of Rollin’s earlier films”, and that he wanted to finance the director’s next picture and give him much needed complete artistic control. It was just the kind of vote of confidence Rollin needed, and he set out to write a script that would act simultaneously as a summing up of his career so far, as well as a bold new chapter.










Rollin himself called Lips of Blood his, “best story”, in Virgins and Vampires and even in its compromised form this is still the case. Telling the tale of a man haunted by a meeting with a mysterious young woman as a youth, Lips of Blood is a remarkable work that delicately weaves memory, regret and loss in the way that only Jean Rollin in his prime could have.




The production was a troubled one from the get-go. Rollin wrote that after one of the producer’s dropped out that, “entire scenes were axed”, and that, “three scenes were replaced with a long off-screen explanation by the (character of) mother”. Hit with torrents of rain while shooting, the filming was hard on Rollin, his crew and his cast and at one point the director remembered that even his assistant admitted that the film would turn out to be, “an incoherent mess.”




Lips of Blood remarkably isn’t a mess though. It’s a flawed work that could have been much more but there is so much to admire that its mistakes are easy to forgive. Featuring one of the best casts he ever worked with (including a mixture of new and old players from Rollin’s canon) and the beautiful photography of future Cinema du Look icon, Jean-Francoise Robin, Lips of Blood is a disarming little film that captures the aura of childhood memories quite unlike any other.




Key to the casting are the solid two lead players, Jean-Loup Philippe and Annie Belle (billed here as Annie Briand) but the supporting players handle themselves nicely as well. This is especially true of frequent Rollin collaborator Nathalie Perrey, who delivers a haunting turn as the Philippe’s mother with a secret to hold onto. Rollin favorites The Castel Twins are thankfully on hand as well, and their death scene proves to be one of the most memorable moments in Rollin’s entire filmography. Lips of Blood also features several actresses who would become stars of France’s adult cinema shortly after, including Martine Grimaud, Claudine Beccarie and Sylvia Bourdon.




Despite the hardships of shooting the film (Rollin himself was nearly drowned at the beach of Dieppe but was thankfully saved by Philippe) Jean Rollin remembered that the locations were some of his favorites he had ever used. He wrote in Virgins and Vampires that the locations, “were breathtaking”, with specific favorites being, “the ruins of the Chateau Gaillard…the decimated old Belleville with its empty streets and boarded up house”, and especially, “the aquarium at the Trocadero”, a location Rollin remembered as being a, “childhood favorite.”




Featuring images that for Rollin meant his, “ideal vision of cinema”, Lips of Blood manages to recall both the vampirism that was so important to his older films as well as the eerie poetic feel of a work like The Iron Rose. In doing so, it operates as one of the ultimate Jean Rollin films and it’s hard to imagine any fans of the director’s oeuvre not being sucked completely in.




Much of Lips of Blood's power can be attributed to the young Jean-Francoise Robin whom Rollin said of in Encore’s Lips of Blood booklet was, “very efficient in crisis.” Robin’s commanding lighting and photography give the film a fittingly magical and stately look. The scenes especially of Philippe’s childhood memory between Annie Belle and himself (played by Rollin’s own son, Serge) are extremely compelling and one can see the beginnings of the look Robin would perfect less than a decade later on Jean-Jacques Beineix’s stunning Diva.




Lips of Blood does slip occasionally during its running time due mostly to the financial pressures Rollin was facing. A few scenes play out too long and the work as a whole has a slightly unbalanced feel about it. Wheras Rollin’s most masterful films are deliberately slow and hypnotic, Lips of Blood is at times slow and plodding. The score, credited to relative novice Didier William Lepauw, is also not as strong as what Rollin fans are used to, although it is serviceable.




The film was released in Paris in the early summer of 1975 and, despite getting some critical kudos, was a real commercial disaster. French film fans were turning out in droves for the soft and hard erotic films that were populating theaters, and they had little time for such a subtle and haunting work based on childhood nostalgia and memory.




A financially strapped Jean-Marc Ghanassia asked if Rollin could make any commercial concessions to help the film turn a profit and Rollin shot, “two long X scenes” in, “acknowledgement of the confidence”, the young producer had shown him. The later release of this version, known as Suck Me Vampire, was a sad end for such a daring and genuine art film. Rollin himself would call it, “the end of Rollinian vampires…”




Lips of Blood has been released several times on DVD, most recently on a very nice special edition from Redemption. Encore’s beautiful box set is the most controversial of all their releases as it is slightly overly cropped. However the extras are just splendid and they include the beautiful booklet, a partial commentary from Rollin, the short film Les Amours Jaunes, a slideshow, and best of all interviews with Philippe, Perrey, Cathy Castel, Serge and Jean Rollin. It’s a beautiful three-disc set that, minor framing issues aside, is a real winner.




Lips of Blood is one of Jean Rollin’s most beautiful works and, even though it is finally a bit compromised, it contains some of the greatest moments in his iconic canon. It would sadly mark the end of an era for Rollin though, and it would take him another three years before delivering his next proper film, the bloody and quite audacious fan favorite Grapes of Death.