Description
NOTE: This title does not ship the the UK, any orders placed in error will be refunded.
Jean Rollin, 1973
PLEASE NOTE: This is an NTSC (USA/JAPAN format) Region 0 DVD
The Iron Rose is a haunting experience – a macabre tone poem about youth and age, love and nihilism, nostalgia and superstition, and above all, life and death. Francoise Pascal (There’s a girl in my soup) and Hugues Quester (Three colours: Blue) go on a metaphysical, Orpheus-like journey inside an ancient, all-but-abandoned graveyard but, as night falls, they cannot find their way out. As Quester’s nihilism crumbles to impatience and terror, Pascal transfer her disappointed passion for him to the cemetery itself and becomes jubilantly (and dangerously) attuned to its dead. Pascal gives a remarkably intuitive performance, at times so spontaneous in spirit, one cannot imagine how parts of it were ever scripted.
The cemetery itself is analogous to Rollin’s love for things antiquarian, including the old train station and the nearly moribund city of Amiens. If Orson Welles was correct when he estimated that a film could only be considered good to the extent it represented the artist who made it, The Iron Rose is Jean Rollin’s first authentic masterpiece.
Special features:
Mastered in HD from the 35mm negative
English dubbed version
French with optional English subtitles
Introduction by Jean Rollin (2 minutes)
Interview with Francoise Pascal (20 minutes)
Interview with Natalie Perrey (7 minutes)
20-page booklet with an essay by Tim Lucas, editor of Video Watchdog
Four original trailers for The Iron Rose
Original trailers of four other Rollin films
English opening title sequence
Film details:
France 1973 Colour 80 min 1.66:1
Written and Directed by Jean Rollin
Produced by Sam Selsky
Director of Photography: Jean-Jacques Renon
Music by Pierre Raph
With Francoise Pascal, Hugues Quester, Natalie Perrey
Produced for video by Bret Wood.
