Page 130 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

is perverse seduction because, like true masochists, we are the - not willing, but demanding - victims.
We want to watch because watching extreme and impossible images is the true encounter of film
- becoming open to worlds, textures, sounds, colours and intensities unable to be encountered in the
'real' world. The sadistic gaze becomes the masochistic demand of the viewer upon the suffering bodv
of the victim on-screen thus perverting the order of signs in film language and systems of images.
Radices body becomes a form of the body-without-organs, de-stratified and re-signified through
protean transformations facilitated by everything from extreme but possible violence to becoming-
zombie. We are continually reminded he is less a male than a series of fleshly fabulations. Even though
he is castrated in Cannibal Ferox, invaginated in Cannibal Apocalypse, penetrated in City of the Living
Dead, dismembered in Deliria, stabbed (another invagination) in The House at the Edge of the Park
and fellates a gun in The Sect his body is less feminised than functionally renegotiated altogether. His
masculinity is broken down but this does not necessarily mean his femininity is built up. Resisting
binaries places the emphasis on our capacity to break down our role as master of the meaning of the
images and allow ourselves to be used by Radices flesh. He is a body in a visceral but not subjective
sense. Representations of the internal plateaus of his flesh and the possible plateaus of his pain are the
layers of the body with which we can identify over character. Any discursive practice located around
the body cannot contain its excesses, just as any claim to excess corporeality, through practices from
perversion through body modification and becoming cannot exist without a discursive system, as a
referent, a residue or a memory.

CONCLUSION

Whether stabbed, drilled or cannibalised, Radice's visual texture in these films is a line of flight toward
an openness to the excesses of signification to do with gender, sexuality and pleasure. This deliberately
rudimentary experiment in thinking European horror as renegotiating traditional paradigms of desire
resonates with post-structuralism's project of utilising the unbound potential of desire to trouble
traditional notions of subjectivity. The increasing popularity of non-canonical European cinema,
particularly horror, simultaneous with its burgeoning popularity in academia, clearly highlights cinema
as being pleasurable and available along different paradigms to those familiar to us as 'Hollywood
cinema'. This chapter has attempted to offer both an addition to the increasingly complex academic
interest in these films, and also a discussion of the ways in which, through ambiguity, gore and beauty,
Italian horror can assist in thinking the viewer, desire and pleasure differently. Radice as an Italian
actor in Italian films offers a rare glimpse, against the Hollywood obsession with masculinity in crisis,
of masculinity in crisis and enjoying it. Jenks points out that Steele is horrific primarily because she
is 'not the site of lack but too much body'. 11 Radice is male and flesh and living and dead and thus
no longer reliable as a guarantee of traditional gender or viewing or even human positions. What
psychoanalysis and post-structuralism has always known is that desire and pleasure are unreliable,
something to be controlled to express our gender, rather than let loose. Italian horror is brave in
(literally) letting loose the flesh, leaving the viewer in an abyss of cinematic pleasure with few binary
markers intact to orient this pleasure. Perhaps this is why they have been maligned and banned. But it
may explain why they have also become such ripe territory for philosophical analysis.
116