Emanuelle in the Country / L'infermiera di campagna

Despite its alternate title this 1978 film has no real connection to the Emanuelle series other than the welcome presence of Laura Gemser and the inevitable nude and softcore scenes featuring her, along with the equally inevitable co-starring role given her real-life husband, Gabriele Tinti.

Gemser's character is Dottoressa Selenia Anselmi, who has recently been appointed as doctor in a small coastal town, Bolsena. Her arrival proves predictably disruptive as nearly every male in the place immediately falls for her, including Marco Rossi, the son of Communist candidate for mayor (Rossi being a common Italian surname, and also meaning red for an obvious political reference), who already in love with the daughter of the incumbent Christian Democrat mayor. Cue Romeo and Juliet(s) as a sex comedy all'italiana...

Gemser's role is much like that played by Edwige Fenech in the Schoolteacher and Nurse films made around the same time. However, whereas Fenech in these films displayed a talent for comedy, Gemser here is her usual blank, if beautiful, self. The notable difference between the two stars approaches is perhaps that whereas the Fenech comedy situation would see her undress for a shower scene, notice those watching her and then react, the comedy in its Gemser equivalent likely focuses on her observers, as she will likely neither notice them nor react.

Does the position of the window and the shot from within the bathroom correspond to the voyeur's POV? I suppose the target audience of the time would neither notice nor care.

The more damaging aspects of the film, however, are the general poverty of the production -- flat direction, clumsy editing and use of library music -- and several scenes of unattractive men and women groping and fumbling. Do you really want to see Aldo Sambrell getting it on, for instance?

 

A commentary on Italian politics of the time? -- the Communists and the Christian Democrats in a stand off

Perhaps the most telling presence here, however, is Mark Shannon/Manlio Certosino, later to appear alongside Gemser in Joe D'Amato's Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust. For director Alan W. Cool, a pseudonym for Mario Bianchi, would go on to establish himself as one of D'Amato's main rivals in the Italian hardcore porn cinema/video of the 1980s and 1990s.

Black Emanuelle UK quad

Just a little something I picked up on Ebay:



Note how it does not actually mention Laura Gemser, in contrast to later films in the series she appeared in.

Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne? / Emanuelle Around the World / Confessions of Emanuelle / The Degradation of Emanuelle

Like a number of the unofficial Emanuelle series, distinguished from the originals by the one M spelling of the character's name, this is known by a confusing plethora of titles, not all of which directly relate to translations of the original Italian, in this case Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne? or Emanuelle – why is there violence against women?

Admittedly it’s not the most alluring of titles, especially given the target audience demographic: Emanuelle Around the World, Confessions of Emanuelle and The Degradation of Emanuelle – as were used in various territories – were probably more appealing than something that sounded perilously close to being a feminist tract rather than an exploitation movie.

Then again one of the constants of the Black Emanuelle series is their particular exploitative take on feminism: What sort of red-blooded (i.e. heterosexual) male couldn’t love the character’s liberated ideology of guilt and consequence free casual sex any time, any place, any where with pretty much anyone who asks, male or female? Isn’t it post-feminism avant la lettre?

Story wise the film is, as one perceptive IMDB reviewer remarks, basically Emanuelle in America lite.

That is, it’s again an episodic narrative travelogue that gradually focuses in on one particular topic, a “white slavery”, rather than a snuff movie, ring.

This paradigmatic shift has an odd effect: On the one hand white slavery sounds distinctly passé for a 1970s film compared to the decidedly contemporairy phenomenon of snuff movies, with this quaintness further foregrounded by the fact that our protagonist isn’t even identified as white. On the other hand a simple change of terminology to “people trafficking” would give it a relevance to today’s tabloids.

Though there are again hardcore inserts, at least in the version under review (DVD distributor Severin has released both R and XXX type versions), there is nothing to compare to the fake but uncomfortably convincing snuff footage of Emanuelle in America.

Likewise while there is one scene which implies bestiality, as a snake is encouraged to explore one would-be prostitute’s vagina and a dog to mount another (shades of the contemporaneous US and French hardcore productions The Devil in Miss Jones and Exhibition perhaps) there is nothing to quite compare to the previous film’s more explicit horse masturbation scene.

Equally, however, the presence of this material also indicates that this is hardly the ideal Emanuelle film with which to introduce a Eurosleaze novice to the filone’s often dubious delights.

This is an impression enhanced by some of the curious intertextualities of the casting: Don Powell, who played Black Emanuelle’s father in the non-Gemser, non-D’Amato entry Black Emanuelle 2 here appears as chauffer and assistant to Ivan Rassimov, a UN official who basically plays what would otherwise be the Gabrielle Tinti role. Brigitte Petronio, who appears as a missionary girl in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals here plays a dissatisfied Roman member of an Indian guru’s cult. The guru himself is played by none other than George Eastman, who had earlier played the main villain in the D’Amato directed but non-Gemser entry Emanuelle's Revenge. Got all that?!

Put another way it’s the kind of film where you need the familiar strains of Nico Fidenco to sort of tie it all together.

Returning to the porn theme, one thing I hadn’t noticed on previous viewing was that the truck driver in the opening sequence is played by US hardcore performer turned director Paul Thomas.

Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2 / Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights / Emanuelle and the Porno Nights

You could be forgiven for getting confused here: the original Le Notti porno di mondo, also directed and edited by Bruno Mattei under his Jimmy Mathews pseudonym, featured Laura Gemser, but did not reference her Emanuelle character in its title.


Gemser's introductions / linkings have a certain something...

Regardless, the two films are pretty much interchangeable, featuring similar mondo-style supposedly from around the world but predominantly shot in the same Rome studios. Be it the USA, France or Germany the nightclubs and their audiences look the same, with bottles of J&B prominently placed on just about every table.

The first scenes here depicts a séance that segues into a black mass, complete with virgin deflowering in the name of Satan and one of those peculiarly sexless softcore orgy numbers.

Next we get a Parisian magician who specialises in making clothes disappear and doing the rising cloth routine with a detachable erection that may or may not belong to a nude dwarf who then runs through the audience; an adult version of Luna Park, where an on-leave soldier wins a blow-up sex doll and another person of restricted growth is triumphant with a kind of test your strength machine into which the men insert their penises; and a Lady Godiva routine that hints at a beauty and the bestiality scenario with her pony but doesn't go as far as Emanuelle in America nor La Bete.

This is followed by Ajita Wilson, photographing a lesbian sex show and addressing us straight to camera like Gemser; a Japanese penis transplant operation - here a male voice, purportedly that of a professor, is used to provide extra gravitas - and some New Guinea mating rituals of dubious authenticity as far as the virginity testing of the young women goes if not the stock footage of pigs being clubbed to death for a feast.


The usual mondo footage of animals qua meat

Dwarves are again the order of the day for the subsequent segment, a Biancaneve-themed routine, while detachable phalluses feature in the next, featuring a bodybuilder and his fan club of predominantly middle-aged women.


Biancaneve

Things are rounded off with a report from the making of a porn film; a couple of women wrestling in foam; a science-fiction themed dance routine cum strip show; an Italian stripping housewife TV program and footage from a US nudist event.

While all of the material has a certain historical and sociological interest - Is this what passed for shocking entertainment? What was with the fascination with dwarves? - it is this last sequence that is probably the most interesting precisely because of its status as actuality footage, albeit obviously edited by Mattei into something more interesting. The bodies on display aren't merely those of attractive young women, as predominate elsewhere within the film, but are more balanced between the sexes and across the age spectrum, imparting an appropriately grotesque and carnivalesque tone.

Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali / Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals / Emanuelle's Cannibal Adventure / Trap them and Kill Them

Whilst working undercover, posing as a patient in a mental hospital, Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is understandably shocked by the sight of a nurse running screaming into the corridor, blood gushing from where her right breast used to be.


Yeah, and Marlboro-smoking chimpanees might fly out my butt...

Investigating further, Emanuelle discovers that the nurse, whose habit of making unwanted lesbian advances towards her patients seemingly precludes much in the way of sympathy, was tending to an unidentified and mute patient who had been found in the Amazon rainforest.

Even more intriguing is the distinctive tattoo above the young woman's pubic region – a placement which naturally also allows for the a convenient bit of full-frontal female nudity – identified as the mark of a cannibal tribe believe to be extinct for the past half-century.


This time round Emanuelle conceals her camera in a giallo-style doll


D'Amato regular Dirce Funari appears as the white cannibal girl

Convicing her editor that this could be the scoop of the century, presumably thus trumping her earlier exposes of white slavers and snuff film producers, the ace reporter seeks out the assistance of Professor Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti), an expert on the subject of cannibalism, to mount an expedition into the Amazon.






A touch of the old mondo snuff footage as two African adulterers are punished for their sexual transgression

Arriving, Mark and Emauelle rendezvous with an old friend of the anthropologists, Wilkes (Geoffrey Coplestone) who knows the area and its tribes well. Though unable to accompany them, his daughter Isabelle (Monica Zanchi) and her tutor Sister Angela (Annamaria Clementi), whose convent lies upriver, join the expedition along with a couple of guides, Felipe and Manolo; that night Isabelle watches Emanuelle and Mark as they make love and masturbates, while later the two women wash each other in the river.

As the party pulls ashore to make camp for the night Emanuelle is attacked by a snake and is saved by the timely intervention of Donald McKenzie (Donal O'Brien), who invites them to join him at his camp inland, along with his wife Maggie (Susan Scott / Nieves Navarro) and their guide Salvatore (Percy Hogan).

Donald explains that he is on a hunting expedition but also proves to be a voyeur, looking in on Sister Angela and Isabelle as they sleep, half-naked. Meanwhile Maggie and Salvatore go off into the undergrowth for a tryst.

All the while none of the group notices none of the group notices that they are being watched from the undergrowth by the waiting cannibals...

The next morning one of the guides goes missing while the party's boats prove to have been cut loose from their moorings. Continuing on foot, they then discover the remains of one of the nuns from the convent...

One things about the cannibal filone which I'd never really thought about until watching Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals again was its unusual production pattern. Though enough films with cannibal themes were certainly made in the ten year period between 1972 and 1981 there doesn't seem to be any obvious rise and fall to their production, with a fairly steady flow of productions from the same few directors – Lenzi, Deodato, D'Amato – instead and only the occasional opportunistic interloper on the territory, most notably Sergio Martino with the at-times not dissimilar Mountain of the Cannibal God.

Seen in retrospect the thing that distinguishes D'Amato's forays into the filone, whether through the character of Emanuelle Nera as here or in his other pornotropic ventures without the character such as Papaya Love Goddess of the Caribbean and Orgasmo Nero, is his emphasis upon sex over violence and gore.


Is it just me or did anyone else half expect to see Captain Hagerty's zombie surfacing behind them here?

Thus, in addition to all the sexploitation material outlined above, the opening New York also sequences present Emanuelle fantasising about making love to Lester and saying farewell to her current boyfriend in her own special way, presumably for anyone in the audience who felt that only one display of Gemser's naked form every five minutes wasn't enough already.

This said, once the cannibals finally make an appearance in the final half-hour the nastiness quotient does increas significantly and, moreover, should not disappoint the horror audience – excepting those who are regrettably sufficiently jaded to need their random animal killings – with D'Amato also handling the shock moments well, using rapid cuts, zooms and stinger sounds to augment their effectiveness whilst also conveying something of the subjective experience of the characters.






Some of the gore

In his analysis of the Black Emanuelle films, Xavier Mendik suggests that they existed primarily to allow Italian audiences to see Emanuelle degraded and objectified on account of her monstrous non-whiteness. While a sophisticated theoretical analysis, it arguably downplays the extent to which the character is displayed as desirable – surely the main reason for the success of the franchise – and the way that the white / non-white boundaries are more complex than a simple attraction / repulsion dynamic would allow for.


Can we honestly say one of these women is presented as desirable and the other as monstrous?

It's hard to square the sheer popularity of the Emanuelle series and character with the idea that Italian audiences went to see these films primarily out of a perverse, sadistic desire to see Gemser and the other non-white characters humiliated, degraded and generally 'put in their place'.

Nevermind that Gemser's character is presented as a model of sexually liberated, desirable womanhood or that D'Amato seems to have regarded the actress with far greater respect than many of white Italian actresses he also worked with for her straightforwardness, professionalism and refusal to do hardcore material.

Indeed, if anything I would argue that a film like the actioner Tough to Kill, in which Percy Hogan's comedy negro Wabu evenually turns the tables on all the whites – nominal pretty boy hero Luc Merenda included – who have regarded him with outright contempt or benign indifference throughout, comes closer to being a joke at the expense of the white racist who has laughed along with them and at Wabu than anything else.

Though there's nothing quite so pronounced here, we do have Mackenzie's critique of African safaris of the sort represented in Africa Addio, as safe, predictable and inauthentic, as he stresses that knowing that there is genuine danger, that the hunter can become the hunted, is fundamental to the real experience.

Another interesting scene is that in which Maggie gazes on Salvatore and his phallic weapon whilst masturbating, before instructing him to come with her into the undergrowth for that one-on-one encounter. Salvatore is presented as being able to fulfil Maggie's needs in a way that her impotent husband cannot, without there being any obvious racist element to their mutual lovemaking scene. Though we might certainly question if Salvatore is really in a position to refuse Maggie's demands, there's no indication that she is out to humiliate him by playing slave mistress Mandingo type games.




Which of these female and male desiring gazes is barred?

Nor is either lover really punished for the act, such that is cannot be understood as any more transgressive than anything else on show for our delectation – with the notable exception of McKenzie's decidedly non-consensual mauling of Isabelle.

Basically, in D'Amato's pre-AIDS world the message seems to be that anything goes – except perhaps male homosexual activity, as the one type that still retained that element of “monstrousness” even in the work of more avowedly progressive directors – just so long as no-one gets hurt.

Likewise the very fact of having a white middle bourgeois woman as the active bearer of the gaze against an objectified black proletarian man here again challenges classical formulations of this theory and exposes some of their own unspoken assumptions and blind-spots. ('Let she who is without sin cast the first stone,' as it were.)

Though D'Amato's depiction of the cannibals themselves can no doubt be criticised from an ethnographic or anthropological perspective – as can the factual error of having an African chimpanzee in a supposedly South American rainforest – to do so omits the film's exploitation nature and that it is first an foremost a fiction intended to entertain.

It also arguably implies that the vast majority of fiction films should be likewise criticised for their factual inaccuracies or liberty taking or else the imposition of a double standard whereby excuses are conveniently found and made for those films whose politics and representations the critic agrees with. (Where are relativism and respect for the ways of the other here; does an “obvious” cinema also suggest that we would be better using obvious empirical material rather than theoretical sophistry to make sense of what it offers its implied audience it in the first instance?)

The acting, with all the members of the cast D'Amato regulars, is acceptable and in some cases – Navarro, O'Brien better than might be expected – the dubbing relatively poor and Nico Fidenco's engagingly trashy music present and correct.

Enough said, really...

Die Todesgöttin des Liebescamps / Love Camp

Okay, I know: this isn’t an Italian film. Rather it’s a West German/Greece co-production. But I felt it was worth writing about anyway for two reasons.

First, it could be construed as a borderline Black Emanuelle entry on account of having Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti up to their usual tricks.

Second, it’s just so amazingly bad that it’s worth an hour and a half of any Euro trash or cult fan’s time. We’re talking – in line with the film’s milieu and themes – transcendentally awful.

Gemser plays the leader of a vaguely Jim Jones /Children of God styled love cult (and as such the film might form a nice companion piece with Lenzi’s Eaten Alive, if the Italian trash fan needs any other reason for watching it) who takes full material advantage of her gullible young hippie followers.

The rules of the cult are simple: no exclusive relationships; everyone can have sex with everyone else; is expected to hook and recruit for the cult, and is apparently free to leave of their own free will whenever they like.

In fact, however, we soon learn that Gemser will brook no refusals and has her muscle-bound bodyguard and henchman Tanga covertly dispose of any apostates by throwing them down a crevasse.

A visiting US senator’s daughter comes to the attention of Gemser through her chief recruiter, Dorian, played by the film’s writer, director and composer Christian Anders.

Will true love win out, or will a tragedy ensue?

Really, who cares.

It’s all an excuse to showcase lots of nudity; some softcore heterosexual and lesbian fumblings; the odd bit of violence and sadism; some truly atrocious disco tunes and Hair-style production numbers; some free your booty and your mind will follow cod philosophising; a bit of ludicrous kung fu (courtesy of Anders, who also made similarly (non-)sterling contributions to the even more ludicrous sounding Kung Fu Emanuelle) and – most amusing of all – Tanga, permanently oiled and tensed up and looking as if he’s wandered off the set of a peplum.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, so in lieu of any more commentary here’s a few:


Christian Anders, whose fault it all is...


One of the camp followers, playing air guitar; his buddy looks like Tony Levin from King Crimson but unfortunately doesn't play air stick...


Tanga


And more Tanga...


Gemser thankfully spends more time out of costumes than in them...

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...