Page 125 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

toward a new becoming. Redoubled submission is infinite openness rather than the eternal return
to prior self-masochism demands. Its result folds the two - viewer and viewed - into one continual
hand(ing) of affect. When the viewer desires an image, the opposition of viewer and object of desire is
exchanged for durational folding of material image and imaged body. Because desire sets itself within
a system of opposition, Lyotard uses the word 'libidinal' to express the folding, working through
or theatrical 'band' that twists the 'inevitable confusion' 7 of oppositions. Libido is an openness to
the excesses of the everyday by refusing to lose the intensities and affects of all expetience blocked
by signification. Such an engagement allows for the possibility of the breaks and flows implicit in
the relationship between discourse, matter, affects and chance to express force (puissance) and hence
differing, multiple futures.

Lyotard names his conception of this plane of intensity 'the great ephemeral skin'. This skin
also includes (but because it is figural does not oppose) image, the viewed, the flesh of others and
the opened body flattened out toward infinity. The skin is not 'one's' skin, or 'my' skin, it does not
enclose or integrate, it continually extends and opens. Radices flesh in pain is not material in that we
can reach out and take his body as real, but it is material in that we enter into an affected and actual
intensification and libidinal 'turning' with, and inextricable from, the images.
If critics of European horror claim these films and scenes make no sense, what is the sense of
pleasure found within them? A drill through the head, the top of the head sliced off, dismemberment,
a shot to the mouth make perfect sense if it is the sensorial we are after. But our pleasure makes
no sense either. It is not realisable in the 'real', yet it is realised in the viewing flesh. The tension
of seeing Radice enter only to await his inevitable and spectacular 'exit' plays an important role
in the situation in which we view. 'How' and 'when' become important expectations for Radices
fans. His death is extended in Cannibal Ferox into a triptych death of castration, dismemberment
and decapitation. It is doubled in City of the Living Dead as he returns from the dead. In Murders
in the Etruscan Cemetery he creates a postmodern referent to his own persona when he replays the
character of Bob from City of the Living Dead, which immediately sets him up for a visceral fall.
Michele Soavi cleverly foxes expectation in The Sect when Radice shoots himself within the first ten
minutes of the film, almost getting his death out of the way so that the audience will concentrate
on the plot and not await Radices demise. Radices screaming face and tortured body contort with
our wide-eyed shocked pleasure, and, as Soavi clearly acknowledges, overwrites character, plot or
narrative.
The redoubled submission of opening to Radices body-in-pain evinces passivity as not within
a binary economy space of domination limited to which gender holds which role, but of passivity
as a sexual and political openness to (becoming) force itself. Force insinuates change, temporal (not
temporary) differentiation. Differentiation is different to absolute difference, which carries the
possibility of negation because it always only refers to different to one. Differentiation is constant
multiplication, proliferation of intensities and possibilities. It may result in the same but only as a
possibility among many rather than either different to or not.8 The horror of watching his deaths
liquidates our gendered desiring gaze and our understanding of what is pleasurable and what is
traumatic. The viewer reflects his screams and groans and yet ours are elicited simultaneously and
beyond the binary of agony and ecstasy.

111