Interview by Alfie | Illustration by Kaelin Richardson
"Excellent as the existing literature on Franco has been, the authors refer to little of it and rely on it not at all. It's impressive in its independence and promises to be quite a saga."- Tim Lucas, Video Watchdog
I first became aware of Jesús Franco - the prolific Spanish director of over 180 films - as a teenager after cutting the seal on my brand new Jackie Brown soundtrack. The insane title of a single track caught my eye: The Lions and the Cucumber by The Vampire Sound, Inc., which inevitably led me to the iconic film of the song's origin, Vampyros Lesbos, plummeting me headfirst down the rabbit hole of demented horror, surreal film noir, warped adventure, and incredibly strange erotic films that Jess was known for. Collecting Franco's films like Pokémon quickly becomes the obsession for cineastes who hone in on his psychic signal - in fact, Obsession is the title of the first critical book written about the director in 1993. Since then, an avalanche of enthusiasts have recorded commentaries, published essays, hosted podcasts, and written books dissecting the delirious cinema of the rebellious auteur - some of whom have become walking encyclopedias of Franco's filmography. In an industry where historians like Stephen Thrower and Tim Lucas are active in their field, is a new study dedicated to Jess's filmography really necessary? Turns out, yes - it absolutely is!
Italian authors Francesco Cesari and Roberto Curti have recently published the first volume of a brand new tome that examines Franco's life and career - ranging from his first short film in 1953 to the moment he cut ties with his home country and became an "international" director in 1966, providing critical analysis, in-depth discussion, and detailed production history on the cult classics that kicked off Jess's cinematic universe. Their book is a fully loaded treasure chest, and the purveyors of this historic gold have graciously offered up their time to stop by Movieland Video for the holidays to celebrate the savant filmmaker who, thanks to Severin Films, is the angel that tops our tree.
What originally led both of you down the Jess Franco rabbit hole?
Francesco Cesari: A philosopher, Alessandro Battel, first told me about Franco's cinema in the late 1990s. He described to me an intriguing scene where a girl immerses herself in a bathtub and disappears in it, the ending of La Comtesse noire (Female Vampire). Then, one night on television, I saw three of his films in the original language. I didn't think they were masterpieces, not at all, but I was amazed, nonetheless: it was something different from everything I had seen until then. So, there had to be a secret... I started looking around for others, and within a few years I saw almost all of his films, though never in Italian. The fact that I liked them even if the dialogue and plots weren't entirely clear definitely won me over.
Roberto Curti: My initial introduction was not by means of images, but words. As a kid around 1979, my dad bought me my first cinema dictionary, released on newsstands in weekly installments which at the end you would bind in four volumes - it was a common occurrence back then. My dad regularly brought me to the movies to watch reruns of old classics, such as Vera Cruz and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even told me about films I hadn't seen yet as though they were fairytales. I remember knowing Stagecoach by heart before watching it, even knowing some of the best lines. Being obsessed with moving images since I was a little kid, I read the capsule reviews trying to imagine what all those movies were about. I noticed a name recurring over and over, sometimes in vaguely different forms...
Who was this man Jess Franco, or Jess Frank, and how could he have made so many films? I'd later discover that the AKA's were many more than I suspected. I think the very first movie of his I watched (and now Francesco is going to faint) was Un capitán de quinze años when it was broadcast on local television, which was his Jules Verne adaptation and definitely not a high point in his filmography. I have vague memories of Sospiri (Night of the Assassins), and surely among the first titles I rented when I got my first VCR were Count Dracula and Bloody Moon. I remember watching Almodóvar’s Matador in a movie venue and jumping on the seat when at the beginning you see Eusebio Poncela watching scenes from Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace and Bloody Moon. By then I was hooked, and when I began trading films with other collectors in the early 90s, I tried to gather all the Franco films I could - of course, many of them were in foreign languages and awful-looking copies.
The Fangoria interview by Donald Farmer was another highlight: finally, the man himself got to speak about his movies. When I discovered there was a book out called Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco, I knew I had to buy it. I traveled by train to Milan to the local Profondo Rosso store and spent almost all of my meagre student savings to purchase it. At that point, I realized that I was just at the beginning of the real adventure.
What initially sparked your passion for writing about cinema?
FC: If you search the internet, you'll see that I'm a musicologist, not a film historian. So, it never evolved into a career, and it never will, in spite of the deep love I have for some directors - François Truffaut, among all. On the other hand, Franco defined himself as (and was) a "musician who makes movies." It is normal that musicologists also deal with his cinema. His best scenes are built on music or noises. Have a look at the silent drug party in Mil sexos tiene la noche: fifteen minutes of images and sounds inside of a room.
RC: My father was a fervent cinephile and I caught the bug early on, writing in my diary at school about movies I'd seen. I remember for my eighth grade exam I wrote an essay on Easy Rider and, while I studied Law at University, I managed to make my thesis about film censorship laws in Italy. Anyway, I wouldn't call this a career, rather a pastime. I try to keep myself busy and write about things that interest me.
What were the first pieces you wrote about Jess?
FC: The first was an article on the Fu Manchu diptych (The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu) for the Turkish magazine, Geceyarisi Sinemasi. One of the many scholars of Franco's cinema whom I met thanks to the internet, Kaya Özkaracalar, commissioned it from me and translated it into Turkish in 2003. Franco's followers are scattered all over the world, they are kind of a secret society, a formidable army perhaps similar to the one led by the fearsome Dr. Fu Manchu.
RC: It was a piece for the magazine Noctunro Cinema. My late friend, Tommaso Le Selva, and I devoted a whole chapter to Franco in a book we wrote that was first published in 2003, Sex and Violence: Percorsi nel cinema estremo - a massive volume on 'extreme' cinema ranging from early exploitation to gore, and auteurs such as Jodorowsky and Robbe-Grillet to Italian cannibal movies.
Then came 2007, when I was commissioned to edit a special Nocturno issue devoted to Franco. "Very well," I said, "but I need two issues, not just one." I didn't dare ask for more. I then had to find someone crazy enough to help me put together two issues that would include reviews of all of Franco's films. One fateful day, while surfing on a film forum, I noticed a guy whose nickname was "Uncle Howard" who seemed to know everything about Franco's cinema. I sent him a private message and the poor guy replied.
Tell me about the origins of "The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953 - 1966"...
FC: Everything began thanks to Roberto. It was he who contacted me in 2007 to edit a two-issue special on Franco for Nocturno Cinema. In three months, we wrote down entries for most of his films and a handful of essays on various aspects of his cinema.
In the wake of this extraordinary experience, Roberto proposed sometime later that we write a monograph together. We initially thought about the Italian market, but we couldn't find a publisher. In the end, he convinced me to do it with McFarland, in the United States, where he has been publishing monographs on Italian cinema at a truly 'Franco-esque' pace for some time. Now that I have the first volume here and I see the result, I can say that I am very happy that I let myself be convinced.
RC: Indeed, the Nocturno experience was a hectic but happy one. Francesco and I got along very well, then we got to meet each other in person (he lives in Venice and I am based in the Tuscan countryside) and became friends. The idea of expanding our work into a book kept buzzing inside of my head, but nobody in Italy was interested back then. It must be said that in the meantime, Francisco managed to edit an excellent, multilingual collection of essays, Il caso Jesús Franco, published in Venice, for which I collaborated alongside other Italian and foreign writers. Eventually, we made up our minds to try and write the book in English. After all, if Franco had left Spain and expanded his cinema abroad, we might as well do the same!
How do you even begin to tackle the gargantuan task of writing about Jess's life and work in a way that we haven't seen before?
FC: Here, perhaps, the responsibility is mine: when I take a road, you never know where I'll end up. I first turned to the Filmoteca Española in Madrid out of pure curiosity but, little by little, the search spread like wildfire. However, when Tim Lucas writes that "the authors refer to little of the existing literature on Franco," he refers to the critical literature, not the documents and information published by other scholars, which instead are used and cited in a systematic way, starting with the grandiose data collection work carried out by Alain Petit between the 1970s and 1990s.
RC: Naively, I thought we had most of the work done after our 2007 two-issue special, but Francesco proved me wrong. We discovered a treasure trove thanks to him. This helped us immensely, as it allowed us to see and appreciate themes in Franco's cinema, recurring ideas and plots, and many other elements under a different perspective.
From what I understand, you underwent ten years of research to write this volume...
FC: The decades-long research covered Franco's entire filmography, not just the period covered by the first volume. Among other things, in recent years, Roberto and I have also worked on liner notes for Mondo Macabro's Blu-ray releases, The Other Side of the Mirror and The Sinister Doctor Orloff, always based on unpublished archival resources. It should be considered that the documentation relating to a director who worked for sixty years and shot almost two-hundred films is immense.
We tried to collect as much as possible, and certainly the juiciest news has come from the libraries of Madrid and its surroundings. No less exciting was getting to know the people close to the director. The introductory chapter is accompanied by photographs of Jesús as a child - a gift from his sister, Gloria. Being able to talk to Gloria about Franco's childhood was extraordinary. I should name many other people, but I will limit myself to Antonio Mayans, a true friend who was Franco's main actor, right-hand man, and accomplice for decades. In 2012, I had the opportunity to spend some unforgettable days with Franco himself at his house in Malaga, thanks to my friend and his last producer, Ferran Herranz.
RC: The search is not over, as there are many things to explore and unearth. Sometimes, it can be a small newspaper blurb giving you a clue, sometimes a literary connection that pops up unexpectedly, and so on.
How difficult was it to track down Franco's earlier work to view?
FC: It was very easy, thanks to the extraordinary accessibility of the Filmoteca Española. Everything started from there. The only films we weren't able to see were the four advertising shorts featuring comedian Miguel Gila.
There remain a few later films that no one has been able to track down, the most important being Sex Charade - the delightful screenplay for it (entitled Laberinto) we published in The Jess Franco Files, Vol. 1: Four Screenplays and a Synopsis by Jesús Franco (Vial Books, Barcelona): a dual language volume in Spanish and English containing four scripts; Laberinto, La noche tiene ojos, Un tiro en la sien, and El Castillo de Frankenstein which eventually evolved into different projects (Sex Charade, Les Cauchemars naissent la nuit, Les Ébranlees, and La venganza del Dr. Mabuse) commented on and accompanied by specific essays, plus the synopsis for Orloff 2001, Franco's unmade project of reviving Orloff in the late 1990s. It circulated little outside of Spain, but it is the elder brother of The Films of Jesús Franco, and I think it might be a very good companion for those wanting to dig deeper into Franco's most obscure side - that of the unproduced works.
RC: And of course, we'd love to have a look at the different, untampered versions of some films that still circulate in copies over which Franco had no control.
What advice do you have that might be beneficial to writers aspiring to tackle a project like this?
RC: I'd say it's a matter of obstinacy, not being content of surveying the surface and always trying to dig deeper. And, also, always trying to put films and filmmakers within their historical, cultural, and social context.
FC: I can only say that Franco is not a director, he is a world. Therefore, there is still so much to discover of him - in archives, in periodicals... and, who knows, maybe some laboratory will give us back some films we have never seen. Five years ago it was Vaya luna de miel, discovered and presented in Madrid by Álex Mendíbil, one of the leading experts on the subject.
What were your biggest challenges in writing this book, and what are you proudest of?
FC: The biggest challenge was not being able to use my native language. English has a different construction from Italian, it is a language born from a more pragmatic culture than ours, and therefore aims at focusing on concepts. But clarity is not always a friend of truth.
Franco's cinema is not, and never wants to be, a theorem - a Cartesian discourse. Indeed, sometimes it is not perfectly 'in focus', even in the technical meaning of the term! Furthermore, its richness and strength lie precisely in its ability to escape any definition and classification. It goes without saying that words should be used not only to illustrate it, but also to preserve its complexity, nuances, and shadings, which is easier if you use a language with a strong 'poetic' vocation.
RC: The biggest challenge for me was to keep our focus over time. Over the years you change, you get old, you deal with different life experiences, and all this inevitably reflects in the way you cope with the act of writing (not to mention that, as Francesco noted, I was busy working on other books and assorted projects in the meantime.)
I'm very proud of the way Francesco and I managed to merge our different styles, personalities, and sensibilities in this book. It's been a very different working process compared with other books I've co-authored, and I believe that something unique has happened in the way that we exchanged innumerable versions of the same entry - changing, rewriting, moving paragraphs, fine-tuning, and so on. In a way, it was like composing and then arranging a very long and complicated piece of music, and this is all Francesco's merit.
What is your favorite film by Jess, and which would you most like to screen for an audience?
FC: My personal favorite might be A Virgin Among the Living Dead (which Jess wanted to call The Night of the Shooting Stars), which is a perfect example of what I was saying earlier: a film that blurs the boundaries between dream and reality, truth and joke, in which everything lends itself to evolving into its opposite. A disorienting and therefore supremely poetic film. As for choosing a single film for an audience of neophytes, despite the growing success enjoyed by non-Euclidean geometries, I don't think Tim Lucas' theorems "you can't see one Franco film until you've seen them all" has been proven wrong. I'd show them all together, simultaneously.
RC: I don't have a single favorite - or, perhaps I'd say that they change over time, depending on the mood. Among the titles included in the book, I'd say Death Whistles the Blues - but I also love films such as Tenemos 18 años or Vampiresas 1930, which can be off-putting for viewers who associate Franco's cinema with sex and horror.
I agree with Tim Lucas: let's think of Franco's cinema as the sea. Think you are there, on the beach, the sun is high in the sky, a boat is on the horizon, and someone's playing a song in the distance. What would you do? Just take a deep breath and dive in.
When asking Francesco to elaborate on his time spent with Franco at his home in Malaga in 2012, he graciously sent me an article that he published for the Italian magazine Blow Up, which he defines as a short private diary. While Roberto was not present in Malaga, it was he who both had the idea for it, and suggested translating it to English for this post.
The Malaga Chronicles
By Francesco Cesari
Malaga, July 2012. Together with Álex Mendibil, I'm going to Jesús Franco's place to interview him. We have been invited by his latest producer, Ferran Herranz, who is also working on a documentary interview. The small apartment is occupied by the cast and crew of two films that have just been wrapped: Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies (the title was intended to be Culitos in the Night) and Alligator II (which will be completed years later by Antonio Mayans and become Revenge of the Alligator Ladies).
Jess is sitting on his sofa, slightly apart, with a mongrel dog curled up at his feet: "¿Es tuyo?" (Is he yours?), I ask in Spanish. "No. Però è un buon amico" (No, but he is a good friend) he replies, in fluent Italian. He tells me that he lived in Rome in three different periods, between the 1960s and 1970s. He recalls with amusement the time when Bruno Nicolai, who composed some of his most beautiful soundtracks, took him to the set of Casanova, and his surprise at seeing the Fellini improvising on the set, "He was crazy!" Look who's talking...
When I arrive, the small living room is crowded: there are the actresses (and the dog's owners) Carmen Montés and Paula Davis, who will leave the company that evening, lead actor Antonio Mayans, Luisje Moyano, who has not yet started his career as a director, director of photography Ferrando Barranquero, and the mysterious and taciturn Naxo Fiol, who is capturing everything that happens in the room with his video camera just as until a few hours before, on the set, he did with the shooting. His extraordinary making-of will be released two years later as A ritmo de Jess.
I spend four days as a guest at Franco's home in the center of Malaga, from morning to evening. One morning I see him dictating an article about cinema, "I like working, I want to work," off the cuff. When he is not working, Uncle Jess loves to talk about everything, but especially about his two great passions: music and cinema. For him, music means first and foremost golden age jazz, from the 1930s to the 1950s. He merely needs a few notes to identify his favorite musicians. Human voice is less appealing to him. He plays Charlie Parker's Jam Session for us. He punctually greets the entrance of each band member with the joy of a child, describing with the finest sensitivity the different ways Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, and Ben Webster play the saxophone. He also likes the group's pianist, Oscar Peterson, but a little less, "He's too perfect. He's a Black man who plays like a white man."
When he was young, Franco did play in jazz bands, especially as a pianist and trumpetist (his trumpet can be heard on the 1990s CD Manacoa Experience, his piano in his 1983 film, Los blues de la calle Pop, where he plays the pianist Sam Chesterfield - a clear nod to Casablanca). In those distant years he met, among others, Bud Powell, one of his favorite pianists ("absolutamente loco") and Chet Baker, the trumpeter who inspired Venus in Furs, one of his most famous films. He has sometimes unusual, yet always refined, preferences - such as for Tete Montoliu, the Spanish pianist who was born blind. He's not really interested in what happened to jazz after the 1960s, but there are some exceptions in 1970s fusion - for example, bassists Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius. We also listen to some excellent Latin jazz and - another of his vintage passions - some old Caribbean music records.
In the alleys of Malaga, over delicious tapas, Ferran Herranz, also a jazz enthusiast and a valuable source for what I am writing, tells me an anecdote that gives the measure of Franco's culture and musical sensitivity. One day, during pre-production, Ferran puts on a record by Greg Cohen and his group, a tribute to Duke Ellington (Way Low), without revealing the performers' names or the performance date. A few seconds pass, and Franco states, "The musicians are not African American. It's not music played with the passion of Black people; it's played as if for fun, with a bit of irony." After a while he specifies, "Actually, they must be Jewish, you can hear it from the way they interpret the music, cold and perfect; they never flub a note, but they keep their distance from the original composition." Well, they were indeed mostly white and Jewish musicians.
Of course, we also talk at length about Bruno Nicolai and Daniel J. White, who created the most beautiful scores in his filmography. The latter was, among other things, one of Franco's few true friends. The house's walls are covered with small paintings signed by Daniel J. White, among which you can see a bonsai copy of Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet (which Alex quickly photographs), which, in turn, you can recognize one of the first shots of Vampyros Lesbos, starring the wonderful Soledad Miranda.
There wouldn't be much talk about classical music if he hadn't recently finished editing the new soundtrack for La cripta de las condemnadas (parts I and II), which, except for a couple of pieces by Stan Kenton (the film ends on Artistry in Rhythm, and Franco had already used Kenton's Intermission Riff without crediting him in the 1980s for ¿Cuanto cobra una espia?), is based on classical pieces from the from the repertoire of the first half of the twentieth century: Ravel, Respighi, Hindemith, Bartók, as well as Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582 proposed in Respighi's symphonic transcription, dated 1930. He tells me that among classical composers, Bach is his favorite. The slow, steady pace of that Passacaglia seems like a sound portrait of Jess's life, as it had been and as it still is. I admire the perseverance with which he still manages to light his beloved cigarettes now that his hands are shaking, after endless attempts but without ever getting impatient, that way of slowly fueling each new response, as if to give his thoughts time to condense before starting, almost always from a cue, even the slightest sigh or exclamation - an unpredictable journey, sometimes full of retorts, but capable at any moment of turning and suddenly lighting up... and all this without ever losing the thread. If no one intervenes, Franco continues to talk endlessly. Or, sometimes, until he falls asleep.
Old Jess's nights aren't always restful. During the day you can find him asleep, there, on his sofa - but when he wakes up, looks around and realizes he's in company, he immediately jumps into the game, as if his personal "jam session" had never stopped: always ready for dialogue, a joke, a curse, or a "high note."
There's a lot of talk about his films, of which he seems to remember all the productions details, the adventures, and the actors. His stories, decipherable only by hardened Franco-maniacs, always contain some inventions... and they don't always correspond to what he said the day before. But for a restless storyteller, how could it be otherwise? Ferran tells me that Jess loves to introduce his friends to his cinema by screening them the DVD of Vampiresas 1930, an old musical from 1961 that he never gets tired of watching (or perhaps listening to). I suggest we watch Vampire Junction, one of his most personal works of the last fifteen years. One of the refrains he loves to sing, in private and at every new interview, is No me gustan mis películas (I don't like my films), and yet, when the images start to scroll, his eyes are glued to the screen and his expression becomes serious, attentive to every detail.
On the last afternoon, Ferran, Antonio Mayans, and the other friends go shopping. I spend a few hours alone with Jess, who is taking a nap on the usual sofa. When he wakes up, I ask if he wants me to put on a film. He looks at me, "One of mine? Noooo!" When I ask him what he feels like watching, he answers without hesitation, "Siodmak's The Killers." From the sofa, he points to the shelf of his old videotapes, warning me that the film is dubbed in Spanish. And so, we find ourselves immersed once again in those distant 1940s in which a part of him (born in 1930) seems to live. He knows everything about that film: every shot, every line. He talks a lot about the actors - career, private life, everything - but also about cinematographic technique. He eagerly awaits the start of the lengthy sequence shot (and daring camera movement) with which Siodmak films the robbery scene. After the screening, as I take out the videotape, he spreads his arms and, looking at me in his straight, true caballero way, says, "You see a film like this, and you're happy... what else do you need?"
Purchase "The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953 - 1966" at McFarland & Company here!
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