Page 163 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

subsistence activities, kinship, religion, myths, ceremonial ritual, music and dance, and - in what may
be taken as the genre's defining trope - some form of animal sacrifice'.2
Even when ethnographic cinema merged with fiction film, it retained a scrutinising gaze at ethnic
difference as its central motif. For instance, the Black Emanuelle series can be classified as a variant of
the 'Mondo' tradition of ethnographic film popular in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. This format
(as popularised by titles such as Mondo Cane (1962), Africa Adido (1966) and Africa Segreta aka
Secret Africa (1969)) utilised different documentary loops from across the world and often embedded
these short excerpts within a fictional or 'staged' format that were then marketed on their factual
information and 'educational' content. However, the Mondo film's obsession with documenting
images of primitive black sexuality and its associated links with 'savagery' demonstrates the extent to
which the cycle's pseudo-intellectual aims concealed a salacious drive consistent with 'exploitation'
cinema.
Central to the appeal of the Mondo film was not merely an exploration of racial Otherness,
but also 'an aestheticisation' of difference within its 'natural' domain. Typically, this meant the
reduction of the non-European landscape to a form of picturesque display, to be surveyed by Western
travellers. Thus, it seems appropriate that when Rony refers to 'travelogue cinema' as a branch of
ethnographic film, she is in fact referring to a type of production that represents 'travel as penetration
and discovery'.3 The central features of the format of the travelogue genre (as defined by their peak
period of production between 1898-1922) included a narrative structure that was short in duration,
beginning and ending with a panoramic view of the landscape. This type of production also provided
a guiding narrational device in the figure of the white tourist/narrator. Equally, Rony notes that unlike
narrative fiction the travelogue production made little effort to conceal its basis in documentary, with
people openly addressing the gaze of the camera (and that of the white explorer behind it).
The format of travelogue cinema, with its emphasis on a tightly constrained duration as well
as its spurious fusion of fact and fictional orientated titillation, is directly reproduced in many of
the projects that Laura Gemser undertook during the 1970s. These included the series of 'sexy'
documentaries such as Le Notti Porno Nel Mondo (1977) and Emanuelle E Le Porno Notti Nel
Mondo 2 (released in Britain as Mondo Erotica, 1978) which she completed for Italian exploitation
directors such as D'Amato. These works cast Gemser as on-screen host/narrator who oversees the
'documentary' inserts from swingers' clubs, massage parlours and racy discos dotted around the
world. As well as disclosing (and unclothing) between the excerpts, these films also saw Gemser
dispatching a rather curious brand of puritanical morality upon selections of film footage that
had clearly been collated for jaded European audiences. Although these sexy documentaries were
essentially light in tone, they retained travelogue cinema's obsession with replaying colonial myths
surrounding the savagery associated with black sexuality (albeit in comical form). For instance, the
opening excerpt from Emanuelle E Le Porno Notti Nel Mondo 2 finds Gemser narrating a night-
club scene whete a white maiden prepared for tribal sacrifice endures intercourse with a primitive
'monkey man' in order to secure her freedom.
Although the Black Emanuelle series that Laura Gemser completed alongside these documentaries
retained the elongated type of duration normally associated with feature-length fiction productions,
this does not invalidate considering them as a branch of travelogue cinema, using the criteria that

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