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Jess Franco
adores women and sees them as powerful, sexual beings who know exactly
how to manipulate and control men. Yes, the women in his movies are often
sexual objects – but objects of adoration and adulation, worshipped by the
men that they control. Many of his films are Fem-Dom fantasies – yes, aimed
at a primarily male audience because that was seen – rightly or wrongly – the
audience for sexploitation, exploitation and horror at the time and because
Franco was, after all, a man and these films were as much an exploration of
his own sexual psyche as anything else. But his movies rarely show women as
inferior or helpless. Those critics who dismiss Franco as a misogynist – simply
because he makes erotic films, and erotica can only ever speak to the male gaze
apparently – clearly haven’t watched many of his films. Yes, his movies often
feature female victims falling foul of male monsters; but equally, the reverse
is often true. Of course, those critics and academics keen to make a point will
respond that the women in his films are either victims or monsters, which is –
as far as his horror movies go – a valid point. But we might respond by asking
just what else they WOULD be in a horror film? I suppose he could’ve cast them
as the heroic savant – but those characters rarely play much of a part in his
films and are always the least interesting characters in any horror movie.
ranco continually was fascinated by the inherent sexuality of women and
the power that their sexuality brought them – the ability to reduce men
to bumbling idiots and hapless fools who can be used in whatever way the
women wish. We can see this in the way his work is based around two
muses – the incomparable Soledad Miranda, who Franco almost singlehandedly reinvented from a bubble-headed lightweight actress into a seductive
and powerful vamp, and Lina Romay, his life partner and inspiration who
appeared in more or less every film he made after they met and whose roles went
far beyond merely appearing
on screen. Franco’s most
memorable movies feature
these two women in leading
roles as they dominate men
sexually and spiritually, dressed
to the nines in the height of
kinky fetish and exotic lingerie
apparel, highlighting their
sexual confidence and control.
To suggest that these actresses
and their characters somehow
represent female exploitation is
ludicrous. They are dominatrix
goddesses
and
Franco’s
camera – his dreamlike, trippy,
hallucinogenic visual style –
adores them. They are at the
centre of the strange eroticism
that pervades so much of his
work, even the work that is
not inherently or immediately
erotic.
Franco’s sexual tastes are written across his films, even if he never openly
admits them. We are left to wonder exactly where he sits on the BDSM spectrum
– is he a dom, a sub, a switch or simply a kinky voyeur? His work suggests all
these things at different times, sometimes within a single narrative. That Franco
understood the kink mindset instinctively is undeniable, though. His best work
appeared before the rise of the fetish club and kink culture – I wonder what
he might have made of clubs like Torture Garden had they been around in the
1970s? I wonder, in fact, what he made of such events decades later. Oddly, I
suspect that Franco’s own tastes did not run to such public displays, despite
being writ large across his movies. But that’s just a guess. I rather regret not
asking him about all that.
I don’t think that there has been another filmmaker quite as inherently
connected to BDSM than Franco was – perhaps some of the porn directors
who specialise in bondage movies, though even then their work seems obvious
and commercial, no matter how genuine their interest. Franco’s films were
somehow infused with kink in a way that none of his ‘rivals’ could match, at
least not continually. These are films that come from a deviant imagination and
are all the better for it. Awash as they are with nudity, bondage, domination
and sexual horror, these movies feel more out of time in the era of Generation
Prude than they ever did, and so more subversive and revolutionary. Not every
one is a masterpiece – or even good, for that matter – but they all feel like the
work of a singular, kinky imagination – and that has to count for something,
doesn’t it?
F
These are films
awash with
BDSM imagery bondage, torture,
degradation and
domination
above main, Alice Arno in a scene from
Tender and Perverse Emanuelle (1973),
above, Anne Libert being ‘comforted by Alberto Dalbes,
The Demons (1972)
clearly spoke to Franco on a deep level and you can see elements of the work
and the libertine ideas behind it scattered across his filmography.
is version of Venus in Furs, on the other hand, is a good movie
that bears little resemblance to the novel. With good reason, given
that it is an adaptation in name only, retitled by Towers to cash
in on both the loosening of censorship that allowed such works
to become wider known and the Massimo Dallamano adaptation
from around the same time. You can’t imagine Franco being as taken with
Sacher-Masoch as he was with De Sade, a writer who had a philosophical
fascination with dark sexuality and sexual libertarianism that the filmmaker
clearly shared. Certainly, a large number of Franco’s films could be taken as De
Sade adaptations in feel, if not directly taken from the novels.
A reductive view of Franco’s films is that they are inherently sexist because
of the levels of female nudity (though this ignores the rather extensive male
nudity that is also in the films) but nothing could be more wrong. Franco clearly
H
Salvation/11