The amazing amount of support and appreciation for the work and life of Jess Franco continues with an outstanding collection of thoughts on the labyrinth of sexy shockers that are THE FRANCONOMICON published at the TCM Blog
MOVIE MORLOCKS. Participants include Pete Tombs, Tim Lucas, Heather Drain, David Gregory, Nathaniel Thompson and...your humble blogger / Franco Fetishist. Many many thanks to Kimberly (of
CINEBEATS fame) for the invite, it was a real honor and I feel a little humbled by the company I'm keeping there.
This was a lot of fun to write, I did not want to use my initial thoughts (right here) and found myself dreaming the night away trying to come up with a metaphor that I felt would explain my relationship to being a Franco fan. What I finally settled on was pretty much it, but the dream was of standing with many of my friends in the cinema communities I've rambled through over the years. Some love the Franco. Others really find his films a waste of time. But all of them have watched some, if not many of the films. I kept seeing the collective drive to watch these movies as us all standing at the entrance to one of Franco's barmy buildings on a beach...the doors were all there but the order of the rooms they lead to keeps shifting. We all have a big set of keys to get through the locks on the doors, but sometimes it takes a lot of searching, some luck and on occasion some lubrication (!) to slip the key into the hole and turn it. You might just find yourself walking through the door to be standing in the exact same room you left. If you turn around and go back, you could be decades away, with the same people...with no color... or burning converted signals from distant lands...
It was weird. But hey, it's a reflection of my relationship to these films. I turned the key with cinema by starting up with Franco. I loved movies before I met him, but I became obsessed with cinema with Jess Franco. And Lina... And Howard... And Alice... And Soledad... And...
*click*
I've got to get back to the keyring and see what happens next. I'm obsessed.
2 comments:
You've described an almost ethereal connection to him and his work, David.
Franco, to me, was a state of mine, a state of rebellion.
That's gone.
That's terribly sad.
Like a song fading that you'll never hear again. Never!
Thanks! It is really sad to see Jess go into the smoke of his cigarettes and into the realm of having his life preserved in all it's variant tellings, just like his films. Luckily he captured so much of his imagination for us to pick through, I know it will keep me busy. There will not be another like him.
Ever.
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