‘The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle’ Blu-ray Box Set Offers a Different Gaze at the Sexploitation Series’ Complicated Legacy
The panorama of bedfellows depicted in erotica, and erotic cinema (or “sexploitation”), is vast; even if it’s somebody else’s yuck, there’s likely at least one scene or movie that captures your particular yum. But capital-A art, and especially academia, doesn’t always take this work as seriously at it deserves — as part of film history, much less as sociopolitical commentary on the people, places and times in which stories are told. Severin Films hopes to remedy that in a big way with its new 15-disc, 24-film box set, “The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle.”
Enlisting as producer and curator Canadian filmmaker and programmer Kier-La Janisse, who directed the documentary “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror” and founded the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Severin produced the most ambitious and comprehensive chronicle ever assembled about the work of Laura Gemser, whose legacy in cinema as “Black Emanuelle” has heretofore existed largely as a footnote to the French film series starring the late Sylvia Kristel. To examine Gemser’s actual impact in this rarified (and often reductively-viewed) corner of cinema, Janisse worked with Severin to create more than 40 hours of special features including commentaries, video essays and documentaries, as well as a 356-page book, “The Black Emanuelle Bible,” featuring archival interviews with the actress and contemporaneous essays from film experts and scholars.
“I knew there were a lot of female fans of the ‘Black Emanuelle’ films, and I felt like they weren’t considered really with a lot of the either previous releases or writings about the ‘Black Emanuelle’ series,” Janisse tells Variety. “So it was really important to me to allow for more women’s voices in the set, either as commentators or experts or writers in the book.”
Originally written in 1959 and published in 1967 by Thai-French novelist Marayat Rollet-Andriane (though it was later claimed that her husband Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane was the real author), “Emmanuelle” (note the two m’s) told the story of the wife of a French engineer going on a journey of sexual self-discovery. Director Just Jaeckin adapted it in 1974 with Dutch actress Kristel in the title role, leading to two direct sequels and several dozen spinoffs; Francis Giacobetti, who helmed “Emmanuelle 2,” would cast Gemser as a masseuse just as she began starring in her own films as Black Emanuelle.
Given that the actor and model was born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, Gemser wasn’t Black, but her ethnicity was closer to that of the Thai-French author of the novel upon whose exploits it was supposedly based. It also made her character’s exploration of Eurasian communities in films like “Emanuelle in Bangkok” and “Black Cobra Woman” seem slightly less exploitative, even in the hands of filmmakers like Joe D’Amato, who preyed upon “Oriental” cliches and sensationalistic plotting to drive ticket sales. (The eponymous character in “Black Emanuelle 2” was played by Israeli actress Shulamith Lasri, suggesting that — like with so many Italian films of that era, whose names were often changed from region to region in order to exploit the popularity of current titles — geographic and ethnic accuracy was not a huge priority for the series’ producers.)
Suffice it to say that there’s much in these films that would not hold up to scrutiny by contemporary moviegoers — and Janisse faced occasional difficulty finding critics to even discuss, much less defend, some of their choices. “Trying to get anyone indigenous to talk about ‘Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals,’ that was something that we were not successful in doing because there’s a lot of colonial attitudes,” she says. But in putting together this repository of analysis of the “Black Emanuelle” films, Janisse unearthed some powerful insights about why and how they endure that isn’t simply tethered to their willingness to stage simulated (and in some cases explicit) sex scenes in so-called exotic locales.
“A lot of women did find her character really empowering and really unique for that time,” she says. “She’s also, I think, the first woman of color to have her own series in movies — that are intended for Western audiences, anyway. There’s 12 official ‘Black Emanuelle’ films before you get into the unofficial ones. That’s just huge on its own.”
As important as the reconsideration and re-framing of these movies is to the people who celebrate exploitation cinema as a Trojan horse for more progressive and complex ideas, Janisse says that late screenwriter Maria Pia Fusco, who wrote “Emanuelle in Bangkok,” “Emanuelle in America” and “Emanuelle Around the World,” baked into her entries exactly those kinds of ideas, even if they were couched in the window dressing of naked bodies and wild interactions. In an interview excerpted in video supplements but published in “The Black Emanuelle Bible,” “[Fusco] talks about writing the characters and how the character evolved, and it was 100% a feminist character.”
“She was writing a script with her friend about a woman who’s going around the world getting revenge on people who mistreated her. At the same time, she was working on the development of another script with a writer-director named Piero Vivarelli, who wanted to make a movie about the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who was a feminist, very fearsome interviewer. The producer of the movie also owned the rights to ‘Black Emanuelle’ and so he just put all these things together.”
Janisse says Fusco distinguished herself as a certain type of feminist: “She said, ‘back in those days feminists didn’t have a big sense of humor. So I felt like I got to let off steam a bit writing these movies because I would make things very silly and I would make things very outrageous.’” But even though Fusco ended up being responsible for several of the most outlandish sequences, including one in “Emanuelle in America” involving a horse, Janisse was especially gratified to see that her insights reinforced themes that female viewers identified in the series. For better or worse, a print interview with Gemser didn’t bear similar fruit: “She doesn’t look at the series the same way,” she says. “She just thinks it’s ridiculous.”
It’s because of these shifting, in some cases contradictory perspectives that Severin elected to include as much material from each film as possible, along with multiple ways to watch — or not watch — what aspects they want. On the films for which pornographic inserts (not involving Gemser or the principal cast) were shot, for example, viewers can select those scenes from each title’s selection of extras. Janisse recognizes the challenge many viewers may face to compartmentalize the aspects they enjoy, and the ones they don’t. “It’s very weird looking back at old cinema because there’s all kinds of values on screen that are not compatible with today’s values,” she says.
For those eager to get into the spirit of the series’ campier, jet-setting elements, the deluxe version of the set also includes a “travel-along passport,” a Siam Intercontinental ink pen, an airline bag, a magnetic fashion playset and a board game, the latter of which was again inspired very thoughtfully to anchor Black Emanuelle to the tradition of empowered, adventuresome women who preceded her.
“It’s based on a board game about Nellie Bly, a female journalist who was trying to challenge Jules Verne’s ‘Around The World In 80 Days,’ and see if she could beat it in real life,” Janisse says. “Looking at Black Emanuelle’s place in the history of female journalists, Nelly Bly was such a popular journalist that they made a Victorian board game based on her journey around the world.”
The end result, “The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle,” offers a fun odyssey for fans of the Black Emanuelle films, and for sexploitation in general, but it also sets a new bar in examining works whose artistic merit and cultural impact has gone long dismissed by traditional film critics and academics. Not the least of which because it factors into its creation the possibility that there are differing opinions about how legitimate, credible or impactful franchises like these are: “There was a lot of aspects to this series that had just not been really talked about in any serious way, and a lot of perspectives that had never been considered,” Janisse says.
“For me, it was, how do I get to address all these things while at the same time still having it for the traditionally acknowledged fans of the series that watch the films to see naked women? I wanted it to be able to function for people who look to the series for different things.”
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