Page 165 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

authors such as Tobing Rony have outlined. Indeed, the duration of these films are dramatically
reduced if one considets them as actually embedding two types of narratives together: extended scenes
of fictional action with shorter documentary scenes around the 'exotic'. The significance of these
shorter, more constrained, factual elements are underscored by the fact that they actually work against
the progression of the text's fictional dynamics.
An example of these 'embedded' travelogue traditions can be seen in Joe D'Amato's 1977 film
La Via Delia Prostituzione [Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade). Here, the narrative oscillates
between a fictional focus on the heroine's attempts to expose an intercontinental sex trade in women
and a documentary exposition of the 'colourful' cultures she witnesses during this journey. The
tension between these two cinematic modes is indicated in the credit sequence of the film. Here,
fictional shots of Laura Gemser and her white companion Susan Powell driving around Kenya are
intercut with documentary footage of tribal activity and scenes of wild antelope roaming across
the African planes. These scenes, along with shots of Emanuelle buying 'traditional' jewellery and
trinkets from local traders, are all photographed by the heroine, thus fixing the local landscape
within a primitive (and visually decodable) past. Via these features, the sequence performs a similar
ideological procedure to both the ethnographic and travelogue traditions that Rony has explored.
Namely, by diluting other cultures to a picturesque (and desirably photographic) status it reduces its
inhabitants to a 'people without history, without writing, without civilisation, without technology,
without archives'.4
Rather than functioning in isolation, these initial documentary depictions of the exotic form
a pattern that dominates D'Amato's film, and the cycle as a whole. Indeed, Rony's comment that
travelogue cinema often begins and ends with trains/ships either entering or leaving an exotic location
is replaced in the cycle by an overemphasis on plane travel as a European mechanism of discovery.
It seems hardly a coincidence that from Gemser's first appearance in the role of Emanuelle, plane
travel eithet features prominently in the credit scenes of these productions, or else airports are used as
locations where important narrative information is divulged. For instance, in the case of Emanuelle
and the White Slave Trade, it is while waiting at an aitport that Gemser first discovers evidence of the
illegal trade in white female prostitutes between European and African gangsters that motivates her
subsequent quest. In the course of this investigation, the film even goes so far as to disguise the heroine
as an air hostess, as seen in a sequence where Emanuelle and Susan try to entice information about
local racketeers from an Eastern prince who has just arrived at Nairobi airport.
Although the film eschews plane travel in favour of a motor vehicle in its opening scenes, the
use of a Land Rover (with its overtones of safari travel and Western exploration) maintains these
established travelogue connotations. The trait of air travel is, however, included in a later scene in
the film, when Emanuelle and Susan are treated to a ride in a hot air balloon, during which the
heroine photographs both the landscape and its inhabitants below. In this respect, her role provides
parity with Rony's figure of the narrator/tourist: someone allowed to survey, both the environment
and the body of the Other from a privileged, voyeuristic position. As such, Emanuelle's dual status
as traveller and photographer underscores the fact that racial power and identity is 'signified by
whom gazes at whom. Performers do not look at the camera, but the gaze of the scientist is often

acknowledged'.5

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