Eva Nera and Porno Esotic Love or The D’Amato Effect

One of the most famous concepts in film studies is the so-called Kuleshov Effect, discovered in the ‘experiment’ carried out by the soviet film theorist and maker Lev Kuleshov. In this experiment Kuleshov took the same image of the actor Mozhukin and juxtaposing it with images of a bowl of soup, a child and a body in a coffin, got his subjects to read in meanings that were not there. The combination of shots A and B produced a third meaning, C, which was greater than their sum.

I mention this no doubt over-simplistic summary not to be gratuitous – look everyone, I’ve done film studies 101 – but rather because it seems to offer a route into these Joe D’Amato films. For what they present is approximately 60 per cent of the same footage, rescored and recut to produce two different erotic potboilers that would stand up for themselves when not watched back-to-back as I did this afternoon.

Eva Nera was made first and itself incorporates some footage from Emanuelle Nera Orient Reportage if memory serves correct. Shot and set in Hong Kong, it sees D’Amato’s regular fetish star Laura Gemser play a exotic dancer whose speciality is performing with snakes. Gemser’s real-life husband and perennial co-star Gabriel Tinti plays the man who first hires her to try to lure his snake-obsessed brother out of depression and then out of jealousy kills her girlfriend with a poisonous snake; his brother is played by Jack Palance in one of those take the cheque and run type performances. Eventually Eva figures out what happened and extracts her revenge…

Porno Esotic Love was made later and features footage that later wound up in Les Déchaînements pervers de Manuela. Shot in the Dominican Republic around the same time as Porno Holocaust and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, it also sees Gemser play a snake dancer with lesbian proclivities. This time round it’s her girlfriend Annj Goren who falls in with some drug dealers and smugglers and in due course becomes hooked on heroin herself, with predictable consequences for all concerned…


The lesbian spectator as convenient surrogate for the male heterosexual?


The colonial gaze, embodied in the female?


Their subject

With almost exactly the same travelogue, exotic and softcore erotic footage, the real difference between the two films lies in the composition of the other 40 or so per cent of their footage. In Eva Nera it’s more plot and character focused, albeit of a decidedly rudimentary nature. Porno Esotic Love has actual hardcore footage with Goren pairing up with Mark Shanon and others; as ever Gemser’s participation remains limited to the softcore and pseudo-lesbian scenes.

D’Amato manages to make this grunt and grind material just about interesting, nicely moving his camera from the image to its reflection in a mirror or vice-versa. He also frequently captures a curious mixture of disgust and desperation in Goren’s face that seems to speak volumes in suggesting that her own motivation in these scenes may not have been that far from that of her character.

Though D’Amato sex-horror films might have self-consciously gone further in search of that attraction-repulsion dynamic, the image of Goren fellating Shanon, eyes closed in a cannot bear to look manner, are ultimately far more effective in making you question exactly why you are watching this and your own engagement with it. Put another way, it’s a fragment of the real, the thing itself rather than the allusions and illusions of montage.

Elsewhere, D’Amato’s juxtapositions and recontextualisations seem to almost humorously point to what more theoretically inclined types might well posit as the socially constructed and performative nature of sexual identity. Whereas in both films we get the same image of Gemser touching herself the fantasies intercut with it differ: in Eva Nera they are strictly of a lesbian girl-girl nature, while in Porno Esotic Love there are also somewhat incongruous images of Goren servicing and being serviced by two (black) men. Can we say return of the repressed?

Above all, however, the thing that binds the two films and the other D’Amato’s I’ve been watching recently together is the way that they use music. It doesn’t matter if it was composed by Nico Fidenco, Piero Umiliani, Alessandro Alessandroni or someone else, nor if it came from the library or was composed for the film, D’Amato always takes the same approach: layer it atop the scene, almost without regard for the audio-visual combinations which result.

It suggests an under-explored point of connection with Jess Franco’s more self-conscious jazz style improvisations, and makes me even more eager to see Les Déchaînements pervers de Manuela as a kind of Monk meets Coltrane meeting of these two giants of Eurotic horror…

It also perhaps highlights further connections between horror, porn and musical numbers awaiting exploration as far as less marginal critical practice goes...