The Talesman on Poverty Row

Should we judge the tale while considering the circumstances of its telling?

The Spanish Schlockmeister

Over the past year or so I’ve been watching films directed by Jesús Franco. Franco, born in 1930, fell in love with movies in his native Spain in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He went on to a long career as director which began in the 1950s and continues today — he has directed hundreds of movies (under what seems like hundreds of pseudonyms). Here is his entry under the international movie database:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001238/

And here is his wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Franco

Franco’s movies appeal to shock, horror, sadism, and violence, with liberal doses of sex (as much as he dared and international censors would allow). He is probably most famous for a series of low-budget European gore- and sex-fests from the 1970s, though he also directed some lurid exploitation films in the 1960s and 1970s with British producer-writer Harry Alan Towers:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0869935/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Alan_Towers

After working with Towers, Franco went on to write most of his scripts, and he favored a subjective, fragmented approach to the tales. This was an approach Franco had used already in Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden or Succubus in 1967, the film that impressed Towers enough to propose working with Franco for their collaborations.

In this typical Franco film, the subject is a beautiful young woman possessed (maybe) by the demonic forces of her desires into a sexual predator. Often she will make her living, and find her victims, through live-sex cabaret or strip shows. She is bisexual, perhaps supernatural or possessed of supernatural forces, and certainly mad. Much of the film is told with pure cinema, without dialogue, and would make no more sense than a nightmare without recourse to extensive voiceover representing the heroine’s thoughts, demonic possessor, dreams, fantasies, or perhaps memories.

Criticism

The Franco film is typically tedious and slow-paced, though the set-piece scenes, orgies of sex and sadism, are jaggedly and quickly cut. Franco, a jazz aficionado and musician, probably approaches the pacing of his films with a jazz sensibility. But I find them hard to watch. The acting by the beautiful starlets is wooden, the acting by the famous guest stars (when Franco has them) tends to be histrionic, and with several actors speaking different languages to be dubbed into whatever the importing or co-producing country desires, I find a lack of drama, of real connection, and a lack of any extended, well-developed (or rational) scenes that allow me to connect with any of the characters. Thanks to the voiceover I can grasp what is happening, but it remains removed, distant, in part because I have to guess what is going on.

The cutting is discontinuous and jumpy. Shots within scenes don’t always cut together, and transitions between scenes are abrupt, and often defy (waking) logic. No effort is made to help us follow the story from scene to scene.

The shooting (some of it by Franco himself) is full of shots that are out of focus, abrupt, sometimes staggered, zooms, murky or under-lit. Sets (apart from the bigger budgets the Towers films afforded) are mostly whatever Franco can find. He dresses his sets and renders them more mysterious, with colored lights, often clashing colors for effect.

The ending of the film usually records the doom & destruction of the predatory heroine, often in a mysterious way that leaves me wondering if I’ve seen all the movie, or understood it.

Greater Appreciation

The DVDs I’ve seen, most produced by http://www.blue-underground.com include interviews with Franco, and his explanations and recollections increase my respect for him and appreciation for the movies. Often Franco found himself quite limited in what he could do, having to compromise the tale he would have told against the obstacles of low budgets, lightning shooting schedules, international censors, and ill-suited stars forced on him by the international nature of the productions.

The heavy use of voiceover and paucity of dialogue helps Franco in several ways:

• Shooting scenes without dialogue means the crew can concentrate wholly on getting the visuals right without worrying about ambient sounds or voice performances
• Voiceovers don’t need to be overdubbed and lip-sunk for international audiences
• Voiceovers allow us to see into the soul of a character who is portrayed by a pretty, sexy, but vapid actress
• Voiceovers can smooth over gaps in the tale where censors have removed scenes or so heavily cut them that we can’t tell what is happening.
• Voiceovers also allow Franco to describe acts that would be impossible to film, mostly out of concern for the heavy censorship of the day

Franco’s zooms let him adjust the compositions and seem to move the camera through space without having to take the time to lay dolly tracks and practice elaborate tracking shots. They also give him more flexibility in editing, since the wider framing might include material the censors would ban. His murky, under-lit, and out-of-focus shots allow Franco to include footage where it is unclear just what is happening, and we are left with suggestions only, to guess what’s going on. This is another ploy to get past the censors. The theory here is to give us enough footage to

• allow the running time of the censored movie to reach feature length
• give us enough time within the scene to construct in our imagination what’s really happening, and to enjoy this dream we ourselves create based on the clues Franco provides.

In short, Franco describes himself as an expert in making us see what he doesn’t show. The censors must let the footage pass, but we in the audience, with some work of our imaginations, fool ourselves into thinking we are watching the scene that Franco would have shot had he been free of censorship.

Many Films, Many Edits

Because Franco struggled against the censors, and different countries had different censorship limits (and changed those limits during Franco’s career), there is no one definitive version of any of Franco’s movies. This is not like the Hollywood director who completes his film only to find the distributor later has someone else recut it. In that case we have two versions, the director’s and the studio’s. But Franco knew in advance how many traps and taboos lay in his tale’s path, and he planned for them in advance. He knew there must be many versions of his movies, and he shot with an eye toward creating the footage he would need to assemble any and all of these versions.

These versions could be quite different. In Female Vampire (or Bare Breasted Countess, or La comtesse noire, or Erotikill or Les Avaleuses — multiple titles abound as well as versions), a 1973 French erotic horror film, Franco cast Lina Romay as a demonic, supernatural sort of sex-vampire, who extracts life-essence from her victims through oral sex. Well — Franco knew this very idea would get the film banned in many countries, so he shot alternate takes of the climactic scenes in which Romay bites her victims on the throat and drinks their blood in the traditional movie-vampire manner. Which version is the ‘true’ movie? Both, actually. Franco was making one movie for some markets and another movie for other markets, at the same time.

Censors

Because Franco’s taste runs towards the entertainment of shock, violence, and sex, he faced heavy censorship throughout his prime first decades. He felt the chains of censorship heavily; in one interview he heatedly describes his confrontation with the Spanish censor on the day he left Spain to work abroad.

Much of the technical criticism that I can aim at Franco turns out to mask elaborate, well-planned, ingenious tricks and techniques to evade and defeat the censors. The rest of the technical criticism I can put down to the low budgets Franco has always had to work within.

Different Judgments

Seeing them strictly by themselves, I don’t much care for Franco’s films, and I can’t rank him as highly as many critics do. But when I consider what Franco says in the interviews, I find myself appreciating his filmmaking and ingenuity much more.

But is it fair to judge a tale by the circumstances of its telling? We in the audience sit at the talesman’s feet like children. ‘Entertain us,’ we say. ‘Enchant us, delight us, astound us!’ And our first impulse is to judge tale and talesman simply and wholly by the effect the tale produces within us. We don’t care about the talesman or his problems, we look only to the feelings we experience as the tale unfolds for us.

If I then feel a higher regard for Franco’s films in considering the facts of how he made them, I wonder if I’m not apologizing for and making excuses for the talesman. Maybe because I am a talesman myself, and so try to stand alongside my colleague? Or maybe, being a talesman, I can tale joy in following alongside the tale the way in which the talesman tells it.

The questions of limitations upon how a tale is made is a big one for movies. It is also a big question for theatrical productions. Both plays and movies depend upon so much technical expertise and equipment. But even a tale told by a fire has its production limits — for example, if the talesman suffers a head cold or is losing his voice. And to consider Lord Dunsany’s writings as first drafts with no rewriting, published just as he scratched them on paper for the first and only time with his quill pen, as Lady Dunsany insisted he did with all his works, is to enjoy a special, added impression of respect and delight.

(Composed with pen on paper on Tuesday, January 22, 2008)