Page 24 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

theatre, a profession that he has fed and developed by taking roles in European trash movies. Although
not entirely critical of the films he has worked in (citing his work with directors such as Michele Soavi
and Antonio Margheriti as highlights of his 'Eurotrash' career), the interview makes clear that Radice
sees differing performance styles and skills as operating across the platforms of cinema and theatre.
Interestingly, Radices admission that theatre requires a performance of the actor's total body has
relevance for the way in which his physical form has been exploited in his most infamous on-screen
demises. This is a point that MacCormack follows up by examining issues relating to his masochistic
positioning as European exploitation cinema's icon of male suffering. In response, Radice offers some
fascinating comments about the ways in which alternating states of sadism and masochism remain
a common feature of Italian horror, further relating his own depictions of masculine suffering to a
personal exploration of bisexuality. These points as well as Radices own interesting interpretations
of some of his own films (including an Aids-style analysis of Cannibal Apocalypse), provide the
interview with a fascinating overview of one of European exploitation cinema's most articulate and
endearing figures.
While the films of Giovanni Lombardo Radice can be interpreted as erotising the actor's deaths,
the chapter 'Barred Nuns: Italian Nunsploitation Films' moves further into disturbing images and
narratives of the sexual. Here, author Tamao Nakahara discusses how specific Italian exploitation
cycles depict the sexualised nun as a challenge to cultural order. As many of the original 'nun-
narratives' show, they are usually locked away for fear of being socially uncontrollable. Considering
a wide range of Italian 'nunsploitation' films, roughly situated between the mid- to late 1960s and
the mid-1980s, Nakahara traces their cultural origins. She first discusses the social and production
contexts, singling out the relationship between the all-dominant Catholic Church and the 1960s
sexual revolution as a source of inspiration, while also acknowledging the significance of exploitation
quickies (filones) as a production practice. The chapter then focuses on the importance of medieval
sex comedies (especially Pasolini's Decamerone film), Ken Russell's The Devils and the story of the
N u n of Monza (on which two books appeared during the 1960s) as lineages to nunsploitation.
Using both close textual analysis and the work of Michel Foucault, Nakahara proceeds to identify
some of the major tropes and ideological structures of these films. As Nakahara observes, there is
a double entendre in these films in that they promise to reveal (by penetrating into the cloistered
environment exclusively reserved for nuns) the 'truth' about convent life, implying that these truths
are titillating and shocking. But they also assume a viewing position that allows for that shock to be
recognised as something we did not want to see at all, thus saving the viewer from the accusation of
being perverse. However, it is the nuns' behaviour, not the viewer's that is condemned. As Nakahara
concludes, nunsploitation seems to be a logical answer to the perceived need for sexual confession
often associated with Foucault s notion of 'transforming sex into discourse'. As sex is turned into a
controllable narrative, it becomes controllable itself, thus allowing the reiteration of institutionalised
containment of sexuality.
In his chapter, 'Emmanuelle Enterprises', Garrett Chaffin-Quiray examines one of the most
influential and startling French films of the 1970s, Emmanuelle. He argues that Just Jaeckin's
provocative film not only came to define the sexual sentiments of a decade, but it also affirmed
wider international perceptions of mores and values of the nation that has produced these images.

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