Page 147 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

CONCLUSION
It is precisely the confusion and instability of institutionalised containment of expression that allows
the 'images of a convent' to be read as simultaneously horrifying and exciting. When the brothel can
no longer be the Foucauldian space that is 'quietly authorised' and safely tucked away from public
view, and when the convent can no longer be the guaranteed and architectural protector of virginity,
the world of exploitation fantasy must contend with the scenario in which each institution starts to
spill into the other. The result, and the source of the horror, is that the very structures of civilisation
that are meant to protect 'modern puritanism' from the 'other Victorians' seem to give way to the
irrational and 'primitive' forces of the women who are allowed to rule themselves without male
supervision. With the fantastical ethnographic touch borrowed from Mondo films of the uncivilised
within our civilised world, nunsploitation films display the nuns as the primitive within our modern
culture. They are represented as caged tribeswomen who follow their own rules, power structures,
and rituals that are not always comprehensible to 'logical Western man'. Once the camera enters
the forbidden space of the cloister, it presents a freak show in which the unruly girls behave like
primitives, expose their breasts, battle over convent hierarchy and partake in bizarre ritual whippings,
all under the roof of the Church-sanctioned nunnery.
Nun exploitation films, by combining their ethnographic camera that unveils the truth of cloistered
life and their freak-show spectacles on the convent stage, re-enact the conditions that Mary Russo has
described with sideshow freaks. On one hand, the women are the 'performers of ... objective bodily
"truth",' a throwback to nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical discoveries and exhibitions, and

on the other, they are the caged spectacles in the sideshow whose exotic lives are narrated by a barker.23
The films shout, 'Masturbating nuns! Lesbian nuns! Black magic nuns with knives who bear satanic
babies and set priests on fire!' It's time to buy your tickets for the Mondo Monaca.

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