Page 25 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Importantly for the context of this volume, one particular focus for this chapter is the extent to which
the international reception of Emmanuelle fed upon existing (and often mythical) conceptions of
French sexual morality and filmmaking culture. Central to the film's reputation, was the (primarily
American) view that the film could be viewed as a nationalistic celebration of the intellectual and the
libidinal, a view which Chaffin-Quiray critically examines. By tracing Jaeckin's influence back to the
source material of Emmanuelle Arsan's novel, the author concludes that its theme of a young French
architect's wife reaching a position of sexual liberation via a series of sexual encounters in Bangkok
remains a 'lofty palimpsest of cheap thrills and ambitions'. It is this uneven mixture of pseudo-
sophistication and titillation that is then examined in light of the film's presumed relation to national
filmmaking traditions. For many, Jaeckin's film can be seen as a natural extension of established
cinematic traditions such as the French New Wave. While this movement's celebration (rather than
suppression of) sexuality' seem to fit well with Emmanuelle (and the other French films defined as
spearheading the Tepoque erotique'), the structure of Jaeckin's movie seems far more conservative,
with static camerawork and overdubbing replacing the freestyle techniques favoured by earlier New
Wave advocates. For Chaffin-Quiray, these contradictions were minimised by the film's American
reception, which promoted the film as intrinsically French in (film) tone and its representation of
bourgeois/erotic experimentation as a form of sexual liberation.
In 'Black Sex, Bad Sex: Monstrous Ethnicity in the Black Emanuelle Films', Xavier Mendik
considers the Italian sex and death series which followed hot on the heels of the success of Jaeckin's
film. Mendik's consideration of the figute and films of Black Emanuelle is the first academic
discussion of one of the most contested series of films of the 1970s and 1980s. It combines issues
of sex, death and racial representation in order to reveal the extent to which the black body evokes
contradictory colonial tensions relating to Italy's past. In an innovative discussion of the locales
and settings of the Black Emanuelle films, which he labels 'travelogues of desire', this chapter shows
that these depictions of sexual and monstrous Otherness is, to a certain extent, invited by exotic
locations. As Mendik observes, the classical (white) Emmanuelle hardly manages to penetrate these
locations, always staying the outsider. Her sexual performances remain unfinished attempts, often
only satisfying a curiosity. The figure of Black Emanuelle however turns the out-of-the-ordinary
sexual activities into undesirable ones. Obviously, as Mendik is quick to acknowledge, such issues
of estranging indigenous features are not new, and he mentions the Mondo film as a prime example
of how it has been exploited before. But he goes beyond this by also considering the place and role
of Laura Gemser, the Indonesian actress playing Black Emanuelle, as constantly shifting between
accepted and unacceptable sexual desires, hence turning the usually fixed notion of monstrosity into
a dynamic one (local and temporal). As Mendik points out, this too can be traced back to the original
Emmanuelle series, for whenever a non-white local is involved in the sexual act, it is described as
'revolting' or 'impure'. The Black Emanuelle films make explicit that unease, and turn it into the
prime narrative and exploitative drive. As a result, Laura Gemser's persona almost becomes a primus
locus for sexual Otherness in the postcolonial era.
For many theorists writing in this volume, European trash and underground cinema represents a
unique fusion of the aesthetic sensibilities associated with the avant-garde and the visceral/erotic thrills
associated with the world of exploitation. It is this eclectic mixture of experimental style and 'explicit'

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