Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
Underappreciated Spanish director José Larraz made his first five films in Britain, and his best-known and most reputable, the psychological mystery Symptoms, even represented the UK at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974. The isolated mansion of Symptoms, where obsessive passions dangerously brew, the surrounding damp, leaf-littered woods and the murky river hiding buried secrets,... Continue Reading →
I contributed an essay on the castle in Jean Rollin, exploring the Gothic and surrealist origins of one of the director's preferred settings, the real locations used, and their subversive significance to LOST GIRLS: THE PHANTASMAGORICAL CINEMA OF JEAN ROLLIN, edited by Samm Deighan and written by all women critics, scholars and film historians, published... Continue Reading →
Mixing exploitation with politics and formal experimentation, the Female Prisoner Scorpion series created a mythical female avenger that fired off the imagination of 1970s Japanese audiences. It sparked numerous sequels, although none ever came close to the original three films, directed by Shunya Itô and starring Meiko Kaji. Adapted from Tôru Shinohara’s violent manga, it... Continue Reading →
Death and Beyond: In this month’s show, Virginie Sélavy caught up with Death Waltz Records’ Spencer Hickman and legendary composer Fabio Frizzi at this year’s Horror Channel Frightfest to talk about Frizzi’s scores for such classic Italian horror films as The Beyond and Zombi 2 in the light of his upcoming new London live show... Continue Reading →
As part of the Barbican’s ‘Cheap Thrills’ season, I examine the unique women directors who worked in the golden age of exploitation cinema, their struggles and successes, and the singular works they created in this one-hour lecture. Stripped and slashed, sometimes both at the same time: this is the fate usually reserved to women in... Continue Reading →
Ballard and the Seventies: In March, the Electric Sheep Film Show focuses on J.G. Ballard. Virginie Sélavy talks to his daughter, the artist Fay Ballard, as well as director Harley Cokeliss, who made the first film version of Crash featuring J.G. Ballard for the BBC in 1971, and director Ben Wheatley, who discusses his long-awaited... Continue Reading →
In the 1960s-70s, the relaxation of censorship, together with women’s greater social assertiveness, led to the appearance of a substantial number of art and/or exploitative films that explored male/female relationships through sexual power games. A large sub-section, including Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963), Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967), Sergio Martino’s The... Continue Reading →
After producing Alejandro Jodorowsky’s incendiary first feature Fando y Lis (1968) as well as El topo (1970), Juan López Moctezuma went behind the camera in 1971 to make The Mansion of Madness (released in 1973), which was loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. He followed it up with two vampire stories, Mary, Mary,... Continue Reading →
My Ph.D. thesis, completed at King's College, London, in 2003 (unpublished), focuses on Hollis Frampton, a central figure of the practice of film that has variously been referred to as “experimental”, “underground” and “avant-garde”. This thesis attempts to demonstrate the coherence of Frampton’s ambitious project of constituting a tradition of film. It is a detailed... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 