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WORLD EROTICA INDEX
BLACK EMANUELLE (1975)
BSV DVD (region 0)
d. Bitto Albertini; pr. Mario Mariani; scr. Bitto Albertini, Ambrosio Molteni; ph. Carlo Carlini; m. Nico Fidenco; ed. Vincenzo Tomassi; prod d. Alberto Boccianti; cast. Laura Gemser, Karin Schubert, Gabriele Tinti, Angelo Infanti, Isabelle Marchall (94 mins)

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Opening the Floodgates for European Softcore Sexploitation

The release of Emmanuelle in the early 1970s popularized soft-core erotica as a new and vibrant means of mainstream popular entertainment.

 What was revolutionary about it was that although it featured abundant female nudity in the manner associated with men’s film entertainment, it had a developed story and, most importantly, a female protagonist of enough means to be independent from any social, cultural or sexual control by men.  It was this blend of naked woman as both erotic object and desiring subject that distinguished the soft-core film, eventually also influencing hardcore porn, albeit sometime later.  The success of Emmanuelle led to a number of sequels and imitations (which altered the spelling of the name to avoid copyright infringement) amongst the most successful of which was Black Emanuelle.

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Laura Gemser & the Beginnings of a Fascinating Erotic Film Franchise

In Black Emanuelle Laura Gemser plays the title lady, a dark-skinned photojournalist sent on assignment to Africa.

Her promiscuous freedom makes her a much desired sexual partner for rich and affluent men and women there as Gemser takes the opportunity to explore the region’s sexual culture, from lesbianism to a tribal orgy.  Finally she must choose between her freedom and monogamy.  Amidst her sexual adventures is a depiction of African sexual culture in the manner of an exotic travelogue, charting Africa’s primal sexual ancestry in juxtaposition to contemporary soft-core frolicking and nudity.

Women’s sexual independence is the issue underlying Black Emanuelle, a soft-core fantasy in which promiscuous sex is feminist self-empowerment in defiance of the Patriarchal traditional agenda of marital monogamy.  Beginning with an evocation of religious dedication as Gemser meets a missionary on a flight, the film then suggests that the feminist empowerment of the career woman is a worthier cause, and that such empowerment inherently demands sexual freedom.  Sexual freedom from religious, Patriarchal morality is celebrated in this film, hyper-aware as it is in exchanging point of view shots of the suppressed heterosexual desire that underlies gender politics.  Women’s freedom here is the control of the sexualizing gaze and as much as Gemser’s gorgeous physique is on display as erotic spectacle, it is her status as sexual subject as much as object that marks Black Emanuelle as a progressive piece of erotica.

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Celebrating Eros in the Freedom from all Christian Sexual Constraint

Uninhibited-ness and the freedom from all socialized sexual constraint (epitomized in the film’s treatment of miscegenation) are the values underlying much 1970s erotica in the wake of Just Jaeckin’s Emanuelle and it is these qualities that Black Emanuelle develops in an exotic, fun and lively travelogue narrative.

Loosely plotted, the film is more about the indulgent freedom of Eros in a world removed from religious constraint (unless the invading missionaries get their way and convert all to Christianity, which this film infers is a vile imposition upon a morally uncontamined, free society wherein women are as free as men to express themselves sexually and pursue their fantasies.  As a kind of fantasy about sexual tourism, the film has a carefree feeling but it lacks the thematic complexity that director Aristide Massacessi was able to bring to the many sequels also starring Laura Gemser, amongst them Emanuelle in Bangkok, Emanuelle Around the World and the controversial Emanuelle in America.

Sophisticated in look and texture, but superficial and glossy, Black Emanuelle is a superb example of European sexploitation, fully exploring the ramifications of women’s sexual independence post-feminism. 

The sex scenes, although erotic, are not as exciting or as provocative (or as censorable) as those in the sequels as the emphasis here is on documenting a carefree lifestyle usually reserved for the affluent and unattached.  That carefree feeling ultimately dates it (the film is clearly pre-AIDS African-set) but also endears it, making the film perhaps exemplary of soft-core’s innocence, its flowering as sophisticated entertainment in contrast to the seedy sex-show reputation that still greeted hardcore pornography, then being released from Christian-based censorship in Europe and America.  European in pace and tone, with an engagingly light musical score, Black Emanuelle is a superior slice of erotic entertainment and a highlight of the post-feminist sexual empowerment rationale that sought to transform erotica from an exclusively male concern into a universal form of gender empowerment fantasy: as such it is as valuable as it is entertainingly sexy.

Women initiate sex in this film, which results in Gemser being labelled by those men who resent her sexuality and would seek to control or regulate it, or worse – channel it into what this film considers as absolutely unnatural – monogamy (the one functioning marriage in this film is not monogamous, with both partners free to express themselves sexually as they choose, an ideal that Christians resented about the age of permissiveness and the erotic cinema that accompanied it).  Monogamy is the enemy of true freedom in Black Emanuelle and the film emerges a defiant celebration of permissive, non-Christian morality as offering true liberation for women in the wake of feminism: as women seek independence, free to be sexually as they please, Christian commitment is anathema to women’s liberation.

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