Page 145 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Power, Pleasure and the 'Frenzy of the Visible', Linda Williams contributes to this atgument by defining
cinematic pornography's role in this culture of scientia sexualis}'1 From the beginning of the moving
photograph, the leading belief has been that the mechanically-produced image provides a more
truthful account of the world especially when it comes to the study of bodily movement. From this
basis, the moving picture has maintained its ethos of showing what the naked eye fails to capture, of
making the filmed bodies confess truths that were not previously apparent without the mechanical
apparatus. Williams argues that hard-core pornography develops from within the framework of
scientia sexualis and contributes to the culture of cinematic sexual confessionals.
From this point of view, nun exploitation is one logical conclusion to the quest for confessed
sexual truths on the cinema screen. At sevetal points in his study, Foucault returns to the role that
Catholic confession played in the formation of the scientia sexualis. He writes that the current practice
of 'transforming sex into discourse', which has become secularised and compartmentalised into
various institutions such as psychiatry and pedagogy, originated in monastic life and in Countet-
Reformation enforcement of confession. Moreover, 'by making sex into that which, above all else, had
to be confessed', Foucault argues, the Christian pastoral contributed to the core motivation of scientia
sexualis, that of 'speaking of (sex) ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret'.17 Nunsploitation
films, by adhering to the Catholic context and frequently narrating from the historically repressive
Inquisition period, return the secularised and scattered manifestations of the scientia sexualis to their
religious and historical origins. This movement gives the films other levels of truth in which to
divulge: 'real' historical nuns, 'real' historical moments of overt and visual oppression, and 'real' sexual
secrets kept within the convent walls. As a result, the secret of sex no longer becomes one component
of the films' 'cinematic discourse', but becomes the actual structure and driving force for the narratives
in which the convent itself becomes a rype of safe, rhe keeper of the secret that we desire to know. The
only apparatus that holds the key to this safe is the voyeuristic camera.
One world-famous Italian filmic tradition that specialised in using this type of prying and
'ethnographic' camera was that of the early 1960s Mondo films, which were themselves a spin-off
of the earlier 'sexy by night' films from the late 1950s. Films such as Alessandro Blasetti's Europa
di notte {European Nights, 1959) and Gualtiero Jacopetti's Mondo cane {A Dog's Life, 1962) were
intended to be pseudo-ethnographic documentaries of the harsh realities of cosmopolitan nightlife
and the uncivilized within our seemingly civilised society. They instead sparked filoni of their own as
producers sought to exploit the films' freak show and financial potential. 18 Soon the 'by night' and
'Mondo' coverage of alienated cosmopolitan life and Asian dog-eaters began to increasingly focus
on strip clubs, prostitution and nude tribeswomen, providing the viewer with a first-hand account
of what goes on in these closed-off or far-off spaces. Considered the 'reality T V ' of their times, these
films also smacked of 'the prohibited' and were perhaps the earliest Italian films to exploit the notion
of capturing 'real' sinful behaviour on camera.19
Like these Mondo films, nunsploitation - with its claims to veracity and its 'ethnographic' camera
that documents the secret lives of nuns - promises to capture 'real' images of girls committing sins.
For one, the films stage and ate founded on the same principles by which Foucault explains why it
is 'so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression. ...
If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, non-existence and silence, then the mere fact

131