Fascination (1979) - Jean Rollin

In 1979, and now established as a somewhat successful director, Rollin created Fascination in which he returned to the roots of the fantastique genre his early works are known for.

The film is inspired by the short story Un verre de sang (A Glass of Blood) from French poet Jean Lorrain with tells the tale of wealthy French people, whom, at the turn of the century begin to drink the blood of bulls in order to cure anemia.

The title of the film refers to and pays homage a French magazine of the same name with is dedicated to different forms of eroticism in art.

Rollin's story of Fascination differs slightly from that of Lorrain's novel, in that, in the year 1905 a group of wealthy Parsian women arrive at an abattoir to drink the blood of an ox as it is believed to be a curative for anemia.

The central story follows two lovers Elizabeth and Eva (Franca Maï and Brigitte Lahaie respectively), chambermaids-in-waiting who reside at a deserted castle and are suddenly interrupted by a thief named Mark (Jean-Pierre Lemaire), who takes refuge at the castle in order to hide from a group of thieves he has stolen coins from. (Wikipedia)

Simbolismo é um movimento literário da poesia e das outras artes que surgiu na França, no final do século XIX, como oposição ao realismo, ao naturalismo e ao positivismo da época. Movido pelos ideais românticos, estendendo suas raízes à literatura, aos palcos teatrais, às artes plásticas.

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art.

Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism of art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism.