Page 161 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Western impressions of these locales as sites of physical excess reflect the levels of sexual repression and
morality that dominated Europe at the time.
Although McCIintock's account deals primarily with the social and sexual tensions that affected
images of race during earlier historical periods, they can also be applied to more recent cinematic
representations drawn from the European experience and imagination. Specifically, I wish to use such
theoretical advances to consider the 1970s Black Emanuelle films created by the Italian exploitation
director Joe D'Amato (real name Aristide Massaccesi). In a career that spanned the genres of horror,
pornography, post-apocalypse science fiction and mythical adventure, the late DAmato pioneered
.1 series of bizarre and trashy genre-hybrid movies designed to tap into the 'sex and death' tastes
of European grindhouse audiences. At its most extreme, this controversial cross-generic overload
produced films such as Le Notti Erotiche del Morte Vivante (Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, 1979) and
Holocausto Porno (Porno Holocaust, 1980), which used third-world locations as a 'primitive' backdrop
to juxtapose explicit sex scenes with extreme acts of violence. (The most outrageous example of this
cross-over horror/porn strategy remains a scene from Porno Holocaust in which a European woman is
forced to have anal sex with a black zombie.)
Beyond these infamous productions, it was a preoccupation with the monstrous nature of ethnic
sexuality that also dominated the Black Emanuelle series with which D'Amato became associated in
the 1970s. The cycle featured the Indonesian actress Laura Gemser as a photo-journalist who scoured
the globe exposing not only herself, but also acts of violence and injustice perpetrated against women.
In true exploitation fashion, the series had been 'hijacked' by Italian filmmakers from the earlier and
more polished French template of Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974). While liberally drawing from
Jaeckin's original source material (Emmanuelle Arsan's novel of the same name), Italian producers
even reduced the spelling of their heroine's name from two 'm's to one, to avoid any legal wrangles.
While Joe D'Amato was not the only director who deployed the talents of Laura Gemser as a vehicle
to exploit the success of Jaeckin's film (other notable directors included Alderberto Albertini, discussed
below), he became synonymous with the cycle for two reasons.
Firstly, the Black Emanuelle series initiated his longstanding working relationship with Laura
Gemser, who went on to appear in more than twenty films for D'Amato as well as providing costume
design for many of the movies distributed through the director's Filmirage production house. Indeed,
it can be argued that the only coherence provided to the cycle emerged from the repeated participation
of Gemser who played Black Emanuelle in sixteen films (three produced back to back in 1976 alone).
Alongside the cycle, she also worked for D'Amato in a series of related erotic dramas such as Eva Nera
(Black Cobra, 1976) which were subsequently re-titled as 'Emanuelle' adventures for sale in foreign
territories. Secondly, Joe D'Amato's entries in the Black Emanuelle series can be distinguished from
other Italian emulations in the field because of the macabre fashion by which they situated the heroine
in repeatedly ghoulish, violent and grisly situations. By pitching his heroine against rapists, cannibals
and snuff movie directors as well as slave traders and manipulating mystics, D'Amato constructed a
seties of narratives more befitting a horror 'Scream Queen' than a porn diva. As Gemser's deathly
status was often conflated with her blackness, D'Amato's films provide a way into understanding the
very specific Eutopean fears and contradictions around black sexuality and savagery underpinning this
cycle of 'exploitation' cinema.

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