Page 167 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

central differences that separated the black Gemser from Sylvia Kristel's white character were mapped
out in Emanuelle Nera (Black Emanuelle, 1975). This film, directed by Adalberto Albertini, featured
Gemser in her first appearance as the heroine. During the narrative, she travels to Kenya to provide a
photographic record of the European business and beatnik classes that reside there.
With its subsequent emphasis on the heroines endless and emotionless encounters, Albertini's
Black Emanuelle clearly emulates the Arsan/Jaeckin model. For instance, it mimics the opening
section of the novel. Here, the plane-bound Emanuelle expands the concept of in-flight entertainment
by indulging in a number of sexual encounters with staff and fellow passengers. However, the opening
of Albertini's film also uses the musical score to signal its departure from the Jaeckin template. Sylvia
Kristel was introduced as the original Emmanuelle via a perky, up-beat piece of Euro pop sung in both
French and English by Pierre Bachelet. By comparision, the theme that accompanies Black Emanuelle
is far heavier in tone, combining a set of screeching soul sistets and a tribal beat over a tune arranged
by Nico Fidenco.
From the very opening then, the film alludes to the ethnicity of the star as a central feature
separating the two cycles. It seems pertinent that Gemser's blackness is frequently commented upon
by her fictional white lovers, usually in violent or aggressive terms. For instance in Albertini's film, the
heroine's lover, Gianni, informs his colleague that one could never fully love or trust a black woman
like Emanuelle in case 'she might devour you'. This threat was itself literalised in the theme tune that
Fidenco later constructed for D'Amato's Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade. Flere, the by now
familiar tribal tune about the heroine is accompanied by lyrics referring to her as a cheetah whose
breath her lover's feel down their backs before realising their 'clothes are in rags'.

FROM WHITE EMMANUELLE TO BLACK EMANUELLE: FROM DESIRE TO D I S T R E S S

The contradictory construction of black female sexuality as a source of both desire and threat is partly
traceable to longstanding constructions of Otherness that Italian popular fiction draws upon. For
instance, in her work on Faccetta Nera (or Italian Blackface), Karen Pinkus has discussed the ways in
which the black body connotes a monsttous excess of sexual attraction and repulsion in Italian culture.
Although this dual fascination and fear of the Other has its roots in the nation's colonial past, she
notes that 'even today ... blackness always elicits a gaze; a black body is black before it is anything
else'.8 In terms of the Black Emanuelle series, Gemser's blackness is used as a way of anchoring the
non-Western regions depicted.
Unlike Sylvia Kristel, whose European status guaranteed her an inoculating distance from
the landscapes under review, Gemser's blackness condemned her to being slotted into any exotic
culture. Indeed, it is significant that Kristal's tropical explorations involve a detailed examination
of usually only one foreign landscape at a time. For instance, the title sequence for the 1977 film
Emmanuelle 3 (aka Goodbye Emmanuelle) features a panoramic bird's-eye view of the Seychelles. The
camera gradually closes in on the location in the same way as its fictional European protagonists. In
contrast to this colonial centredness, Black Emanuelle literally spans the world in the course of a 90-
minute production. This transnational quest was often made explicit by the poster campaigns that
accompanied the series. These frequently depicted the heroine against historic and culturally definable

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