I saw Shiver of the Vampire in Chicago (RIP Jean Rollin) maybe four years ago? Most likely a rental from Odd Obsessions. Even though I’m pretty sure I watched the movie sober, I don’t really remember a thing about it aside from the soundtrack, which was fantastic. It was composed by some French band called Acanthus whose members were all in high school, and according to one internet account, met during May ’68. Don’t know anything else about them, as far as I know their existence begins and ends with this film. The music is great though, on a doomy Pink Floyd tip.

Acanthus – Night Excursion

Soundtrack music is fantastic. Distilling musical vision into 45 second to 2 and a half minute gems.

GODARD: The production went very smoothly. But afterward, you stumble into distribution, circulation, and it’s a whole other story. I wanted to distribute my film across the same amount of time that the production took — meaning across four years…

COHN-BENDIT: You put four years into this?

GODARD: Yes; I told them: it’s going to take four years to make it — actually, no, I didn’t tell them that. And I wanted to distribute it like this: you take a boy and a girl, or two or three small groups, you give them video copies, you drop them out of an airplane by parachute, they have a map of France, they don’t know where they’re going to land, and you let them sort things out, go into cafés, show it a few hundred times… Then you look at what’s happening — they get the lay of the land, they find out what people think about the film. In the second year, you show it in a few screening rooms at small festivals. Afterwards, you no longer need to release it — you’ll have recouped everything, especially since the producers have put in so little — 300,000 euros — but this will have taken four years. In lieu of that, it’s being distributed into a world for which it wasn’t produced…

FIN DES BLOGS