Page 21 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

films, cutting-edge technology informs this director's look on reality, using special effects and virtuoso
style to maximise impact. Kercher rightfully emphasises how de la Iglesia's interest in mixing genres,
and his work for both Pedro Almodovar and Andres Vincente Gomez, also shows a curious relation
with Hollywood, not unusual for Spanish directors. Muertos de Risa, however, demonstrates how
specific cultural references and political commentary do need to be placed within local contexts to
be made sense of. Kercher first criticises Marsha Kinder's view on violence in Spanish films, arguing
instead for a discussion of violence in relation to comedy. Through a close analysis of both the
production context (including star profiles of Santiago Segura, El Gran Wyoming and Raphael)
and key sequences in Muertos de Risa, Kercher then analyses how the film uses a seemingly innocent
doubling of comics (Nino and Bruno) to point to how cultural narratives are formed and distorted by
history. As such, Kercher argues that references to both politics and local media invoke doubt as to the
real circumstances of the 1981 failed coup attempt in Spain. Kercher stresses how the very structure
and style of the film, both ridiculing history and commodifying it, allows for an alternative view on
how events unfolded, pointing to how media can shape and criticise cultural memory.
It is ability for alternative European film to tap into contemporary social and political crises that
also informs Ernest Mathijs' chapter, Alternative Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity: S. and the
Affaire Dutroux'. Here, the author uses an innovative mixture of reception theory, psychoanalytic
and close textual analysis to consider the extent to which Guido Henderickx's controversial movie S.
can be seen as a mirror to the real-life sex crimes occurring in Belgium during the 1990s. Specifically,
the film's emphasis on a young woman subjected to humiliation, habitual violence and sexual abuse
(before resorting to extreme violence herself) drew parallels with the infamous Affaire Dutroux'.
Here, police and official incompetence actually assisted the campaign of the former convict Marc
Dutroux, who kidnapped, abused and killed a number of young girls after being released early from
prison. As a result of the shock waves that the case has produced, Mathijs discusses the notion of a
'Belgian disease' (as embodied by extreme acts of violence, sexual perversion and political corruption),
which seeped into the popular imagination to optimise the nation's ills. Although Henderickx's
previous works and his penchant for flashy and realistic art-house visuals had already made him a
celebrated 'alternative' Belgian filmmaker, his film's ability to reflect this national malaise has often
been dwarfed by domestic reviewers. Conducting an international reception account of the film's
release, Mathijs noted that whereas local reviews emphasised S. s more gruesome and shocking
elements, overseas accounts made a more solid connection between these images and the Belgian
disease. Central to this unsettling effect that the film creates are the connections it makes between the
collapse of a social body (and its symbols, agents of order) and the physical body which is reduced to
a series of wounds, scars and floods. For Mathijs, this indicates the extent to which S. is socially and
psychically abject, reflecting a series of social events where the unpalatable image of the Belgian body
as deviant, imperfect and violated had been controversially exposed.
Over the last ten years, a great number of theoretical advances have been made into the study of
Italian exploitation and underground film (as discussions of the giallo genre, Dario Argento, Mario
Bava, Lucio Fulci and others testify.)" However, in his contribution to this collection, Christopher
Barry goes beyond that recognised body of texts, to unearth new examples of Italian exploitation and
underground cinema and argue that they act as a crucial mirror to social and political upheaval. In

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