You might think that by now, pretty much every aspect related to the extensive and extraordinary career of Jess Franco has been thoroughly poured over. With several books about the man, more of his movies readily available than you would have might have ever imagined possible just a decade or so ago and a wider critical 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, women in prison and hardcore to the final days of weirdly personal zero budget indies.
Jess Franco’s work has been hailed by lovers of outrageous cinema, praised for its trippy weirdness and sexual provocation, and finally 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, Jess 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 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 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 Jess Franco took delight in regularly erasing the boundaries between sex and violence in their narratives and that alone makes his work continually, increasingly challenging for prudish modern audiences who like to tut with purse-lipped disapproval at a mere nude scene.
Jess Franco’s entire career is awash with ‘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 not only sold but were 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 Jess Franco voluntarily 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, a world away from conventional sexploitation 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 there is always something that you can see as the work of a very singular individual.
Indeed, these more disposable films often seem removed from their contemporaries because Franco’s own disinterest creates an off-kilter visual style that feels removed from regular filmmaking. His 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 a creative 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. They don’t work as porn – but maybe that was his intention all along.
Jess 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 sadomasochistic 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 buzz-kill 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 can separate fiction and reality find difficult. It’s certainly why Franco remained a bête noire for the BBFC of James Ferman, where such blurring of the lines and the exploration of unspoken dark fantasy was seen as inherently dangerous. For censors like Ferman, it was a simple case of monkey see, monkey do; the idea that a consensually ambiguous sex scene could be in any way erotic was unthinkable because of what he thought – with little evidence to back it up – the effect would be on the great unwashed. That novels like The Story of O were read mostly by women – women who had no wish to be subjected to sexual assault in reality but who found the fantasy of such ideas arousing simply because it was forbidden – was lost on those who knew better. Just Jaekin’s film of Pauline Reage’s book was banned in Britain until 2000. In such a climate, Jess Franco was never going to be approved of.
If you look at Jess Franco’s Women in Prison films, for instance, you might see nothing more than crude misogynistic fantasies celebrating violence against women – and clearly, that’s exactly what a lot of people do see in those films – but much like their religious counterparts in the nunsploitation genre (a narrative that Franco was, of course, also drawn to several times), these are films awash with BDSM imagery – bondage, torture, degradation and domination, quite often by a female prison warden – because more often than not, these films were loved by submissive males who liked nothing more than a jack-booted dominatrix running the show. Franco was at the forefront of the genre with 99 Women in 1969, which essentially kick-started the genre as we know it and spawned such dubious offshoots as the Naziploitation movie during the 1970s (to show how closely connected these genres were, Franco’s own Greta the Mad Butcher was later retconned into the Ilsa series, retitled Ilsa the Wicked Warden thanks to the presence of Dyanne Thorne; while the original Ilsa films were outrageous, tasteless satires, Franco’s film was a darker affair altogether). There is no glamour in these films – and that’s why many of the people who admire his more openly erotic films have no interest in these movies. While there might be certain elements of BDSM inherent in the narrative, the films themselves are simply too grubby and ugly – not in their sexual content but simply aesthetically. These are films that are at the grottier, nastier end of Jess Franco’s fantasies about domination and submission, with little in the way of style beyond the jackboots and uniforms of the warders. They are certainly lacking the visual audacity of his other work, even though they are still works driven by a definite personal fascination. If we are to look for the signature imagery of Franco’s kinky imagination, we must look elsewhere.
Perhaps the most recognisable and repeated motif of Jess Franco’s erotic works can be found first in Succubus – at least, it is here where it becomes a defined, specific moment that feels inherently Franco, the sort of scene that you would expect anyone making a Franco pastiche to want to copy because it seems so completely unique to him. I’m talking about the nightclub floorshow where a BDSM fantasy is played out to a crowd of bored voyeurs. In one way, it’s the sort of nightclub act that litters movies of the 1960s, suggesting a glorious and long-lost time when a visit to a nightclub or even just a restaurant would involve spectacular performances from dancers and singers. But in Franco’s world, these cabaret acts involve flagellation and torture, striptease with a touch of sadism that is often initially presented as an actual moment of sadistic torture – with men as much or more likely to be in the submissive role – before we discover that it is all an act. Though we are never quite sure that it is all an act because the lines between truth and fiction are often blurred, as if Franco is teasing his censorial critics by playing on their worst fears about fantasy and reality bleeding into each other. Jess Franco repeats aspects of this throughout other films across his career in various ways, from The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein to The Sadist of Notre Dame, while the visual motifs and kinkily erotic moments run through much of his classic oeuvre – you can see aspects of BDSM roleplay, sensual dreams, performative erotica and sexual domination in everything from A Virgin Among the Living Dead to Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy, Female Vampire and beyond. Often dominant and sexually voracious women who take pleasure from inflicting pain and humiliation on hapless men, monsters who are desirable and mysterious.
Jess Franco’s most overt explorations of BDSM come in his adaptations of the literary erotic classics by De Sade, a fellow artist whose work has been misunderstood and demonised. His 1969 film Justine is, perversely, one of his most commercial ventures, made at a time when it seemed as though he was going to break through into the mainstream, with starry casts and reasonably lavish production values courtesy of Harry Alan Towers. The film follows the book – at least the tamest version of the book – quite closely, though you get the impression that Franco, like De Sade, is less than impressed with Justine’s virtuous nature and rather prefers her naughty sister Juliette. Over the years, he would return to De Sade – his version of Philosophy in the Boudoir, best known under the gloriously Sadean title of Eugenie – the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, is one of his finest and his other films that explore De Sade through either adaptation or inspiration are uniquely inspired. The Divine Marquis’ work 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.
His 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 of the novel from around the same time. You can’t imagine Jess 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 Jess 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 adores women and sees them as powerful, sexually dominant 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, they are aimed at a primarily male audience because that was seen – rightly or wrongly – as 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.
Jess Franco 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 could be used in whatever way the women wished. We can see this in the way that much of his work is based around two muses – the incomparable Soledad Miranda, who Franco almost single-handedly 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.
Jess 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 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 as Jess 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 films 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 of them is a masterpiece – not every one of them is 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?
DAVID FLINT
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