Page 146 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.'20 These exploitation
films, therefore, repeatedly set up a system of repressive and silencing forces to extract confessions
from the nuns' bodies in the form of transgressive sexual acts or irrational outbursts. By establishing
the familial and monastic institutions that control the girls' sexuality and, in a Foucauldian way,
establish that the nuns are neither in the social position or location to merit sexual expression, the
films play out the fantasy of showing frustrated girls who then masturbate, sleep with each other,
sneak in lovers, or confuse sexual ecstasy with orgasm. By setting the Church as an institution with
traditionally strict rules and Inquisition punishments, the films use those rules and punishments
as an excuse to show nude whippings and torture that are necessarily eroticised. By presenting the
convent as a prison with internal strife (playing off girl prison films), the films show the girls use
murder and witchcraft as an alternative means to power. Although a couple of the Decamerotico-
influenced nun films represent a world that Foucault has looked back to - a pre-Victorian, pre-
repressive era when bodies openly 'made a display of themselves' and were not put on display as
examples of aberrant behaviour - it is significant that the overwhelming majority of nun films take
place during or after the 1600s, the exact period that Foucault marks as 'the advent of the age of
repression ... after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression'.21 By setting the narratives
in a past governed by the patriarchal Inquisition, ruled by institutionalised sexual repression, and
regulated by penalties of unlimited torture, nunsploitation films lay the groundwork for women to
willingly or even mistakenly transgress the rules and be caught in the act.
Nunsploitation films, however, do not elicit a response from the viewer simply because they
show girls breaking the rules; they are pleasurable because they set up the repression/transgression
structure and the voyeuristic 'ethnographic' lens around a stage on which anything that appears is
constructed to horrify and excite us, and to excite us because it horrifies us. We are to play the role
of shocked viewer, for the mixture of transgression and spectacle is the very basis for nunsploitation's
continued success as cinematic peepshow and freak show. Thus, it is not just that the girls are not
supposed to be sexual, it is that they are not supposed to exhibit sexual speech in a space that is not
designated for such expression. In Foucault's discussion of institutionally and socially regulated places
of speech and silence regarding sex, one of the spaces that he claims is designated 'for illegitimate
sexualities' is the brothel, a place where those sexualities 'could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits
of production, at least in those of profit'. As he explains, at the brothel 'words and gestures, quietly
authorised, could be exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would untrammelled
sex have a right to (safely insularised) forms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed and
coded types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, nonex-
istence and silence.' 22 In the 'real world', a nunnery is not supposed to take on similar qualities as
the brothel or to become a safe haven for untrammelled sex. At most, the meditative space of the
cloister must remain insulated from sinful desires that can only be released within the controlled
box of the confessional. But in the fantasy world of nunsploitation films, the most virginally pure
sanctuary takes on the role of container of uncontrolled sex, conflating the spaces of the convent and
brothel and transforming the convent as a whole into a cinematic confessional in which sex is put
on display. When this happens, the films set up a necessary conflict and confusion of where sexual
expression should or should not be contained.

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