Page 124 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

ways in which they open, reanimate, terrify and nauseate. Radices cornucopia of embodied suffering.
is about the ecstatic display of extremities of flesh more than narrative cohesion, more expressionism
than realism. His deaths are moments of pure cinema, desired, experienced and given meaning by
the viewer. His characters are not distilled into a single stereotype. Radice dies as an aggressive, racist
cocaine addict (Cannibal Ferox), a sexually frustrated neurotic (City of the Living Dead), a mentally
challenged but essentially harmless youth (The House at the Edge of the Park), a Vietnam vet (Cannibal
Apocalypse), a cult member (The Sect). But if we are tempted to say all his characters are dysfunctional
he is also killed playing a priest (The Church) and a ballet dancer (Deliria).
Essentially, Radices characters are less important than his deaths, because although some may
deserve the extremity of their demise, most of the characters die in films where almost all the
characters die. However, Radices deaths (with the exception of The Church) stand out as spectacular.
These deaths are fascinating to both genders, and it is the extreme conditions of his flesh that the
viewer libidinalises, not his character or his potential as object of desire. Because this is pure cinema
of the body-in-pain, both his and our pleasure is masochistic. His because he heralds and signifies
the experiencing of pain in most films in which he appears. Ours because the pleasure of viewing
him is not so much sadistic (a rudimentary and unnecessarily binarised positioning of the pleasures
of viewing gore films) as masochistic - hard to watch, harrowing, deliriously beautiful, thus evoking
conflicting and perverse definitions of pleasure in the act of viewing.
Because I aim to pervert the persistent use of psychoanalysis in analysing Italian horror film, I
choose Lyotardian masochism over Lacanian desire (as satisfying lack) as the model through which
to tease out my argument. Masochism is a perversion in psychoanalysis beyond heterosexual desiring
dialectics; masochism is a particularly male pathology, evinced even to renegotiations such as Gilles
Deleuze's rereading in Coldness and Cruelty; masochism in Lyotard is a jumping off point to entirely
other ways of thinking desire. Lyotard concludes that the point of masochism as being simply an
openness points to the possibilities of what he terms 'use me'. An occlusion of space between viewer
and viewed results from the opening up of the embodied desiring self as infinite void. Radices
suffering is not about gender reversal or a master/slave dialectic but corporeal excess in the activity of
viewing. The cinesexual masochist begs 'Use Me' outside of any 'reality'. Neither the image nor the
pleasure it evokes is transcribable to reality but is an event of pure cinema. Bravely against and outside
of the master/slave insinuation, Lyotard is adamant:

The question of'passivity' is not the question of slavery, the question of dependency not the
plea to be dominated. There is no dialectic of the slave, neither Hegel's nor the dialectic of
the hysteric according to Lacan, both presupposing the permutation of roles on the inside of a
space of domination. This is all macho bullshit ... The passion of passivity of this offer is not
one single force, a resource of force in a battle, it is force [puissance] itself, liquidating all stases
which here and there block the passages of intensity.6

Passivity is openness to opening, to non-thought and to possible libidinal banding with a certain
strangeness. In essence the viewer submits to the submissive Radice. This redoubled submission
suggests the turning back of a term on itself as not representative of negation or absence but a twist

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