Page 166 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

DESIRE, DISGUST AND DOUBLE FEATURES
While the Black Emanuelle films clearly display some of the features of ethnographic cinema, to
write off D'Amato's films (or indeed the cycle as a whole) as merely ideologically laden on a colonial
level provides only a simplistic analysis of the tensions inherent in the series. The position of these
works is arguably complicated by the format in which they appeared: that of exploitation cinema. As
Barry Keith Grant has argued, cult and exploitation movies frequently oscillate between definitions
of the conservative and the transgressive because of the way in which they give access to otherwise
marginalised sexual and ethnic voices in the figure of the 'Other'. Importantly, Grant acknowledges
the essentially contradictory nature of the Other in the cult film, noting its frequent associations with
constructions of the monstrous. As he notes in his essay, 'Second Thoughts on Double Features',
while such works

commonly seem to offer some form of transgression, many of them also share an ability to
be at once transgressive and recuperative. These are films which reclaim what they seem to
violate. ... They tend to achieve this ideological manipulation through a particular inflection
of the figure of the Other. This figure which, while of course present in and fundamental to
several genres, becomes in the cult film a prominent caricature that makes what it represents
far less threatening to the viewer.6

What complicates ideological readings of the Black Emanuelle films is the fact that its contradictory
attraction to and repulsion from the black body are mediated through a heroine who is herself defined
as racially Other. It was a shift from replicating the white European body of the original Emmanuelle,
Sylvia Kristel, to the black body of Gemser, which goes some way to explaining the different narrative
trajectories that the two cycles took. As Linda Ruth Williams has argued, Just Jaeckin's original
Emmanuelle displayed a pseudo-philosophical edge to its depiction of desire through a quest to
'unite the cerebral with the animal'. 7 As Williams indicates, Jaeckin's movie sought to popularise an
aestheticisation and acceptability of porn that paid as much attention to chic interiors, abstract art and
cheese plants as it did to any act of fornication.
However, the Black Emanuelle cycle that emerged from this 'feel-good' template replaced any drive
towards emancipation with a disturbing focus on death, decay and the macabre. This was achieved
by adding outrageous overdoses of horror and mutilation to an already eroticised text. Through
these deviations, the Black Emanuelle films maximised an appeal to differing grindhouse audiences.
Simultaneously they also alienated and outraged those critics searching for a radical message in 1970s
'porno chic'. It is undeniable that such economically motivated cross-generic overload reveals the
series as disparate and hastily assembled. Yet I would argue that the Black Emanuelle films retain a
cultural significance relating to their focus on a black female protagonist whose erotic and implausible
investigations embroiled her in archaic and monstrous situations. If, as Grant has argued, the cult
film works through a contradictory double feature, whereby the Other's position is both elaborated,
and then coded as monstrous and transgressive, then it seems appropriate to consider the way in
which Gemser's construction and activities isolated her from the original, white Emmanuelle. The

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