Page 19 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

in this volume does not always campaign for politically correct perspectives. But at the very least it
seems to be championing, almost anarchically, a call for liberty. It is that call that ultimately makes
alternative European cinema worthwhile.
OVERVIEWING THE EXTREMES OF EXPLOITATION AND UNDERGROUND CINEMA
The first chapter that exemplifies the borders around underground and exploitation cinema is on one
of the most reviled cycles in European exploitation cinema. This is addressed in Mikel J. Koven's
chapter '"The Film You Are About to See is Based on Fact": Italian Nazi Sexploitation Cinema.
Although the Nazi sexploitation movie would seem unashamedly commercial and cynical in its
titillating depiction of German wartime atrocities, Koven's analysis reveals a fluidity between high
art and popular film patterns in this field, replicating a dynamic that exists in wider patterns of the
alternative European domain. As the author notes, the Nazi sexploitation film in fact consists of two
related cycles: those which outline the decadent sexual tendencies of the Third Reich, and a separate
sub-genre based around the sexual humiliation of concentration camp inmates. For Koven, both
of these controversial cycles frequently slide between alternative (high art) and exploitation (mass
cultural formats) in a complex set of cultural and historical interchanges that often remains ignored by
critics of the cycle. For instance, the author offers a comparative study of Liliana Cavani s art-house'
work The Night Porter (which explores the sadomasochistic relations between a fugitive Nazi guard
and his former, female prisoner) and Cesare Canevari's 'exploitation' film The Gestapo's Last Orgy.
Although these two films sit across the presumed 'legitimate' vs. 'exploitation' divide, they follow a
similarly 'extreme' thematic trajectory in their accounts of the links between human desire, sexual
power and humiliation. For the author, where the two films differ is in their formal structure: while
Cavani's film offers multiple flashbacks around differing perspectives on the couple's concentration
camp love affair, Canevari's film uses a past-tense structure merely to motivate a revenge tactic that
unwinds in its closing scenes. While this may suggest that such structural differences do reiterate a
high art/exploitation cinema division of formal complexity, Koven notes that the more 'debased'
variants of the cycle do offer an interesting 'exploitation' of historical events as they relate to Nazi
power and sexual ideology. For instance, he argues that Canevari's film offers an explicit reading
of Rassenschande (or 'racial shame') in its contorted 'orgy numbers' between SS guards and Jewish
prisoners. Equally, the author picks out Sergio Garrone's infamous video nasty SS Experiment Camp
as providing an intriguing study of the way in which respected Jewish surgeons were exploited by Nazi
medics as part of their experiments into racial difference.

While Koven analyses a cycle often seen as too controversial to legitimise within the academy,
I. Q. Hunter argues that even obscure and aesthetically flawed European exploitation films tell
us something about the cultures they are part of and born from. In the chapter 'Deep Inside
Queen Kong. Anatomy of an Extremely Bad Film', Hunter considers Frank Agrama's 1970s British
exploitation comedy starring Robin Askwith (as Ray Fay) and Rula Lenska (as Luce Habit, a feminist
filmmaker). The author first analyses the film's obvious commentary on gender: Kong is female, the
damsel in distress is male - and carries a macho template as Askwith is best known for his sexual
(and sexist) opportunism in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and the filmmaker (pun on her name

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