Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 10
Jess Franco
Sadomasochism and the
subjugation of women is a
key ingredient in many of Jess
Franco’s films. David Flint dusts
off his whip and immerses
himself in Franco’s dark oeuvre
in an effort to explore this much
maligned and misunderstood
side of Franco’s psyche.
PAINFUL P
ou might think that by now, pretty much every aspect of Jess
Franco’s extensive and extraordinary career has been thoroughly
poured over. With several books about the man, more of his movies
readily available than you would ever imagined possible just a
decade or so ago and a wider appreciation and understanding of
his work, which for so long was dismissed out of hand by critics and fans alike
– including some of the critics and fans that are now hailing him as some sort
of outsider genius that they loved all along, honestly – it seems that Franco’s
work has been examined and dissected from every angle. And you’d be right.
There is little about his work that has not been explored in depth, from the
early gothic dramas of The Awful Dr Orloff through the surreal extremes of his
1970s work and the sex and violence years of cannibals and porn, to the final
days of weirdly personal zero budget indies. Franco’s work has been hailed by
lovers of outrageous cinema, praised for its trippy weirdness and reduced to
desperate levels of barrel-scraping analysis by academic bores desperate to
justify their new-found interest in his work by making fatuous claims about
how the films say something about whatever socio-political subject matter
that is currently flavour of the month. So what fresh analysis can we bring?
Perhaps none – but equally, perhaps we can shine a light into a side of Franco’s
work that, if not exactly ignored, has often been dismissed or misunderstood.
Much like the wider world of BDSM itself, Franco’s fascination with
domination, submission, bondage and general kink is something that is still
viewed with some suspicion and a great deal of misunderstanding, even by
people who will otherwise boast about their liberal attitudes towards sex and
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8/Salvation
their love of the great man’s work. In a world that is currently becoming ever
more prudish and panicky about sexual freedoms, from the moralising fears
of the new Right to the #MeToo-driven sexually uptight world of the Left,
it seems that a general fear of sexual freedom in general and sexual kink in
particular is on the rise again, with BDSM increasingly seen as inherently
abusive and non-consensual, no matter what participants might say. In Britain,
we’re seeing political movements to remove consent defences from court
cases involving BDSM, making any such relationship inherently risky even if
all precautions are taken to ensure safety, and many people are deliberately
blurring the lines between consensual kink and rape, adult activity and child
abuse. It should come as no surprise, then, that Franco - and other filmmakers
of his generation - are looked at with suspicion simply for making erotic films
in the first place. After all, where were the intimacy consultants on those sets?
Filmmakers like Franco took delight in regularly erasing the boundaries
between sex and violence in their narratives and that makes his work
continually, increasingly challenging for prudish modern audiences who
like to tut with purse-lipped disapproval at a mere nude scene.
ranco’s entire career is awash with such ‘problematic’ line-blurring,
something that is not exclusive to him – if we look at the films of
people like Joe D’Amato (a contemporary of Franco’s who was just
as widely critically dismissed during his peak years), we can see an
equal determination to mix sex and horror, nudity and gore. But
while those filmmakers were usually focusing entirely on outrage and bad
taste in the hope of increasing audiences at a time when sex and violence
F