Page 144 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

FIGURE 27 Promising the titillating and shocking truth about convent life: Killer Nun (1978)

veracity of the events depicted. These titles and statements act as frontispieces to the overall structure
of nunsploitation films and their promise to document and show us 'what really happens' of a world
that usually remains hidden from view.
The way in which truth is revealed in nunsploitation films is through various modes of bodily
and verbal confession. Besides the obvious use of nuns going to confession as part of their religious
regimen, the films exploit the fantasy of voyeuristically entering the forbidden cloister with the camera
and of cinematically framing the women's bodily confessions; that is, of catching the girls in naughty
acts. Mary Russo writes in The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity that being 'caught in
the act' is more often than not a feminine danger. A nun, as a woman on the convent stage, is set
up to be caught in various compromising positions and at risk of 'making a spectacle out of herself.
In this moment of being exposed, she has transgressed 'proper' behaviour — moving from quiet to
laughing too loudly, from old to dressing too young, and as Russo states, from being the 'cloistered
St. Clare' to becoming 'the lewd, exuberantly parodistic Mae West'. 14 Nunsploitation films are about
repeating this moment of revelation and of frenzied bodily confession, in which the virginal nun is
caught showing her Mae West underside. Although verbal confession is an obvious part of Catholic
iconography and narrative, here I would like to focus on the bodily confessions that occur at the
junction between convent imagery, exploitation fantasy and the medium of film.
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that Western sexuality has been governed
by a scientia sexualis - a cultural power-knowledge matrix that is forever in search of the 'truth'
about sexuality and sexual pleasure.15 He finds that our various social and scientific institutions are
so structured within this matrix that we have engineered spaces in which we can control and attain
those truths - spaces that encapsulate bodies and that make them confess their truths. In Hard Core:

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