Michel Gast - J'irai cracher sur vos tombes aka I Shall Spit on Your Graves (1959)-Cinema of the World

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Michel Gast - J'irai cracher sur vos tombes aka I Shall Spit on Your Graves (1959)

Gönderen anybody

“These guys are supposed to be American?
My ass!"

- Boris Vian -

PLOT SUMMARY :
Joe Grant, a light-skinned african-american, heads to a small Southern town to investigate the lynching death of his brother. He draws the attention of a gorgeous heiress whom he learns may have been involved in the killing.

IN A NUTSHELL :
I Spit on Your Graves by Frenchman Boris Vian is dreamily convincing on heated sexual and racial conflict in the U.S. Appearing for the first time in English, this is a work of authentic forgery: first published in France in 1946, it masqueraded as a translation of a censored American work by one Vernon Sullivan and went on to sell more than half a million copies. Main inspiration would have been the slew of Hollywood movies that opened in Paris after the liberation, identified by the French as films noirs. I Spit… is straight noir, but also a work of liberated imagination after four years of Nazi occupation: heady, abandoned, fevered and lubricious. A fusion of prime U.S. pulp and French sado-eroticism, the author was a jazz aficionado, boulevardier and pamphleteer who wrote it for a bet in a fortnight. Stranger even than Vian's book was his premature death, aged 39: in an act of bizarre poetic symmetry, he managed the ultimate critical statement by dying of an attack of rage while watching the opening of a movie version.
- source : Chris Petit

COMMENT
It may be that the nightmarish quality of my memory of this movie is caused by my having seen it at about 2 a.m. one night in New York at one of those very seedy all-night theaters on Times Square while I was waiting for a 6 a.m. train. The American "South" portrayed in the film was as phantasmagorical (and real, in its way) as the vision of the country in Kafka's Amerika. As I recall it, the screenplay was quite faithful to Boris Vian's original novel of the same name, and both developed from European stereotypes of American culture, with some probable input from Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. The acting was barely tolerable, but the filming technique (again, as I remember it after almost 40 years) made it seem appropriate. Altogether this was a startling and powerful experience, obviously memorable, but I am sure that it was artistically very bad. Somehow that suggests that some examples of bad art can transcend their own badness, though the reasons are seldom clear.
- source : Tom Dillingham

A FEW WORDS BY RADLEY METZGER
"There was another picture that we re-edited, rather severely, called I Spit on Your Grave. The original French title was J'irail cracher sur vos tombes. It was written by a rather famous French author/musician/actor/drug addict of the 50's called Boris Vian. He wrote this book without ever having been to the States! It's about a black man that passes for white. It's about what happens when this man's brother is lynched for dating a white woman. The characters are supposed to be in Ohio, but there were palm trees everywhere and all these ridiculous things in it. It was shot in Nice, at Cinécittà. Everybody looked at it and they just laughed. Somebody bought the film, took it to the states and it folded because everybody just laughed. Again, if they had been film editors they would have seen the possibilities. The film was absolutely sensational and had a terrific cast. One of the actors in it is Claude Berri who made Manon of the Spring and Jean de Florette." Star Christian Marquand later directed Candy.

"Anyway, we dubbed it with Southern accents. Instead of taking place in the North, it was taking place in the South. That's where the book is set. We cut out all the stupid references and the bad geography and it really became a John Wayne movie for black audiences. It appealed to both black and white audiences and did terrific business. That film was our first really big success. Funnily enough, I think that the guy who did that horror film (of the same name) wanted to buy into the original French film. We had met him, and he was mad about the title. Several years later, he went out and made another film with that title."
- The Erotic World of Radley Metzger, Psychotronic Video No. 17, Winter 1994
source: mondo-erotico/metzger/interviews

ABOUT THE BOOK :
(…) In late 1946 Vian announced that he had found the perfect American novel to kick-start his friend's new publishing house (Editions du Scorpions). He claimed that J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Shall Spit on Your Graves) was his translation of an underappreciated young black author whose work was banned in his native country. Vernon Sullivan, it was claimed, was now an expatriate, living in France to escape racism and censorship in the US. Vian wrote the book in a two-week burst, and concocted the story of Sullivan as a way to get it published.

If I Spit On Your Graves remains shocking, it was spectacularly explosive reading in 1947. It is the story of Lee Anderson, a black man whose white complexion allows him to cross racial barriers. He is hiding out in Buckton, a small southern town, after the lynching of his brother. Working in a secondhand bookstore, he is soon hanging out with the teen crowd, indulging in lots of breathlessly described sex with teens whose breasts are "firm to the touch, like ripe plums", and using his worldliness to his advantage.

When he sets his sights on the beautiful daughters of a local plantation owner, a plan for terrible revenge against the society that murdered his brother is put into action. He sleeps with both sisters, turning them against each other and humiliating them, before the scene is set for an orgy of violence.

Despite the unpleasant synopsis, the book is funny, scatological, and neither endorses nor condemns its characters. At first we sympathise with Anderson, then we are repulsed by him, as his desire for revenge turns him into a bloodthirsty psychopath. All we are left with as a final image is his erection, still sticking out of his pants, as he hangs from the lynch mob's rope.

In France, the book quickly found itself the centre of some unwanted attention. A moral watchdog (The Cartel d'Action Sociale et Morale, which was responsible for getting Henry Miller's work banned in France) denounced it, generating lots of sales-fuelling publicity. It was soon the most talked about book of 1947. Vian cranked out three more books that year in a similar vein, including The Dead All Have the Same Skin Colour, a book that turned I Shall Spit's concept on its head, by having a white protagonist who could pass for black. This book too culminates in rape and murder, and Vian mockingly chose to name his protagonist after the head of the Cartel d'Action Sociale et Morale, Daniel Parker.

The original book proceeded to grow even more controversial, being linked quite directly to a real-life murder. A man had strangled his mistress, and left an open copy of the book on the bedside table with the following passage circled and underlined: "I again felt that strange sensation that ran up my back as my hand closed on her throat and I couldn't stop myself; it came; it was so strong that I let her go ..."

The book went into reprints and sold more than 500,000 copies, but the case against it had gathered too much momentum: Vian was tried for translating "objectionable material" (funnily enough, the author was still nowhere to be found), fined 100,000 francs, and in the summer of 1950 the French government banned further sales of the book.

The book was something of a curse for Vian. After the court case, his reputation was considered somewhat unsavoury, and it wasn't until after his death that his books started to creep back into print. He died, ironically enough, at a 1959 screening of the movie adaptation of I Shall Spit On Your Graves. He had already disowned the film, and asked to have his name removed from it. Ten minutes into the film, Vian is reputed to have sneered, "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!" before collapsing back into his seat, suffering a fatal heart attack. In many ways, it is the kind of absurd twist of fate that could well have spilled from the pen of the great man himself...
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