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 PvNew. “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.”
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.”
