Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 11
PLEASURES
not only sold but where seen as essential elements of any exploitation or
Euro horror film, Franco was doing something rather different. Sure, he
made those throwaway commercial films that mixed gratuitous nudity
and even more gratuitous gore (gratuitous, that is, if you believe that such
content isn’t inherently part of the narrative – or maybe the entire point –
of films like Cannibals and Devil Hunter) but more often, his work features
an overriding sense of the sensual and the erotic, often with a heavy BDSM
flavour. For Franco, eroticism in general and kink in particular were not
simply crowd-pleasing elements to sprinkle across his work in the hope of
pulling in a salacious audience – they were inherently important aspects of
the movies, hot-wired into the DNA of both the movies and their maker. It’s
hard to imagine Franco making films that were not layered to some extent
with fetishistic erotica because it was so much a part of him – unlike his
contemporaries, he wasn’t including this kind of content just to follow trends
or for box office appeal. Indeed, Franco’s approach to eroticism was more
often than not thoroughly uncommercial in style and while producers and
distributors could always sell the movies based on their salacious or horrific
content, the actual films were frequently a lot more esoteric and dream-like
in their approach. Even with his crudest films – work-for-hire assignments
aiming to cash in on current trends, like the aforementioned Devil Hunter
and Cannibals, psycho-slasher Bloody Moon and others that Franco admits
to having had no personal interest in – manage to have a weird sense of
perversity and deviance that sets them apart from similar movies of the
era. There is something recognisably unique about Franco’s work, even at
its most disposable. The films might not always be good but they are always
something that you can see as the work of a very singular individual. Indeed,
these films often seem removed from their contemporaries simply because
Franco’s own disinterest creates an off-kilter visual style that feels removed
from regular filmmaking.
is hardcore porn is a good case in point. It’s a genre that, despite
his fascination with erotica and his personal admiration for porn
directors like Andrew Blake (a director who, we might note, mixed
art, kink and narrative disintegration in fascinating and unique
styles), Franco did not feel an affinity with and his XXX movies are
strange, unfocused (in all aspects) and ignorant of the conventions of the format,
just as his cannibal and slasher movies seem to only be on nodding terms with
the established style of those movies.
Franco’s singular sexual vision seems especially true with his approach to
BDSM, which appears within his films as both fantasy and reality, consensual
and otherwise. Like the best sado-masochistic novelists, Franco knew the value
of dark fantasy, and while affirmed consent is all very well and a necessary
component in real-life sub-dom relationships, it tends to be something of a buzzkill in fictional works that are designed to speak to our innermost forbidden
desires. This understanding of breaking taboos is something that has peppered
BDSM fiction from De Sade through The Story of O and all the way to Fifty
Shades of Grey, with endless sleazy pulp novels along the way, and Franco’s
films have a similar vibe to them, where sexual violence is eroticised in ways
that those who have no understanding of sexual fantasy or belief that audiences
H
Salvation/9