Page 142 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

lead to feature-length nunsploitation films. In the film, Edwige Fenech decides to become a nun when
she is prohibited from marrying her lover and subsequently carries on her romantic affairs once in the
nunnery. Within the Decamerotico vein, this film was the middle step between the nun vignettes and
full-length nun exploitation films that were beginning production at that time.
A second lineage to nunsploitation comes from Russell's The Devils, which shook viewers around
the world in 1971, the same year as the release of the first Decamerotico film, La betia, and Pasolinis
The Decameron}1 Though The Devils was based on an earlier work, Aldous Huxley's 1952 novel, The
Devils of Loudon, Russell's film was what gave the story public attention and notoriety. In it, Oliver
Reed plays Father Grandier, a powerful and progressive priest in the town of Loudon whom many of
the men envy and most of the women love. There, the Mother Superior, played by Vanessa Redgrave,
shows an obsession with the priest that increases to the point of sexual hallucinations, mastutbation
and finally hysteria. While the Decamerotico films followed a gradual movement from nunsploitation
shorts to features, The Devils provided a worldwide and explosive reaction to and interest in films that
exploited nun transgressions; and while the Decamerotico films embraced playful and liberating nun
sexuality, Russell's film set a new standard for 'the forbidden' and the punishments of a patriarchal
society. Although the film made profound statements about human desire, possession, mass hysteria
and witch hunts, much of its impact was first lost in its high degrees of distracting sex and violence.
The Devils caused uproar and sparked protests in various parts of the world for its attack on the
Catholic Church and its institutions. Italy also contributed to the mixed reactions of interest and
disgust: the film was often confiscated and, when shown, it was heavily censored. Among the scenes
taken out, the most unsurprising were those with sex (the nuns' collective hysteria, masturbation and
lesbianism) and violence (the graphic Inquisition torture). In fact, the film caused such a scandal in
Italy that both Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed were accused of public defamation of the national
religion of Italy and were prohibited from entering the country for three years.12 In spite of - or
because of - Russell's scenes that were rich with shock value, the filmic trend of nunsploitation was
set in motion among some circles of filmmakers and filmgoers.
Finally, a third and perhaps lesser nunsploitation tradition comes from the well-known
seventeenth-century scandal of the nun of Monza. It is a narrative that remains in the Italian
imagination and which reappears in one of the most important novels of Italian literature, Alessandro
Manzoni's I promessisposi (The Betrothed, 1840), and sporadically in some post-war Italian films, such
as Raffaello Pacini's LaMonaca di Monza [The Nun of Monza, 1947). Forced into the convent by her
aristocratic family, Virginia de Leyva (or the nun of Monza) first snuck in her lover then practically
continued the life of a married woman by having and raising two children with him. After the two
were discovered, they used threats and even murder to avoid persecution. Virginia, after a long and
recorded Inquisition trial, was sentenced to live the rest of her life (thirteen years) cemented inside
a small and isolated cell. Although by today's standards Manzoni's representation of the nun seems
quite innocuous, at the time it caused such a scandal that the archive that had lent the author the
Inquisition documents closed its doors around 1836. The reopening of the archive to scholars after
keeping the documents in the dark for over 120 years and the subsequent publication of studies on the
nun in 1961 and 1964 by Mario Mazzucchelli helped renew the interest in cinematically depicting the
Monza scandal in greater detail.13 It is worth listing some of these films in order to indicate just how

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