Page 172 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

identity that the heroine experienced in key examples of the Black Emanuelle cycle. For instance,
from the outset of the film, Eva is depicted as a character whose origins and relationship with the
East remain unstable. The opening sequence (staged once again at an airport), finds a surprised Julius
discovering that Eva is not a native as he had presumed, but rather that she is very much a tourist
determined to discover the Hong Kong 'we don't know about'.
As with the Black Emanuelle films upon which the narrative heavily draws, this initial uncertainty
over the heroine's racial origins allows the narrative to gradually incorporate her into the exotic regions
under review. (These locations are depicted in a series of Mondo-style documentary sequences set in
temples, exotic restaurants, massage parlours and lesbian discotheques.) Indeed, after discovering that
Julius is responsible for releasing the snake that kills Gerry, it is marked that Eva plans her revenge bv
taking him to the island where she was born. However, other than describing her village as a region
'not yet discovered by tourists', the film does not reveal the specific name of the location or indeed its
geographical relationship with the other Eastern regions the film depicts.
Not only does Black Cobra continue the ambivalent construction of its heroine's ethnicity
(seen in previous Laura Gemser roles), it also ties Eva's ambiguity not only to the exotic, but also
to the primitive and deadly (via her affiliation with snakes). This archaic set of associations is first
intimated in an erotically charged dream that occurs to the heroine soon after the depiction of her first
nightclub routine. Eva lies on her bed and looks off-screen left at images of herself performing with
the snake. This fantasy provokes an act of autoeroticism, to which the heroine responds by initiating
masturbation. The imaginaty act is then accompanied by another separate vision in which Gemser
begins to make love to a Chinese girl. In both cases, these illusory flashes of the female self-gesture
looks back to the bed-bound Eva, indicating a split in her identity.
Thus, while the Black Emanuelle films frequently used dream scenes to double images of the
heroine's (as if to underscore her identity as fissured), with Black Cobra, D'Amato triples this sense
of self in a truly disorientating manner. This loss of subjectivity also comes to the fore in the climax
of the film when Gemser leads an unwitting Julius to his death on the unidentified tropical island.
Here, the heroine becomes fully incorporated into sexually aggressive notions of the primitive
that haunt the narrative. As a Western observer to this transformation, Julius responds with an
appropriate degree of disgust. For instance, he makes clear his unease at Eva's insistence that she
be allowed to sleep on the filthy floor of a fisherman's hut just as 'she had to do as a child'. This
alteration in behaviour locates Eva as a site of excess sexual desire (taunting Julius by indulging in
group sex with the local natives), primitive and magical acts (by performing a black magic ceremony
before killing Julius), as well as also savage brutality (by killing him with a snake that burrows its way
out of a victim's body).
Although Black Cobra reveals how the heroine's association with snakes is mirrored by Judas'
obsession with reptiles, the film is careful to split this duel interest along racial lines. For instance,
during their first meeting, Jules informs Eva that the routine she enacts has 'ancient origins', which
'most people cannot perform'. This statement (along with Eva's own admission that the male
character caresses her as if she were a snake), strategically distances Judas' own reptilian obsessions,
which take the form of the classical colonial collector. (He informs the heroine that his 'prized'
specimens include examples from Africa, the Sahara and South America.) Once more, these

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