Journeys into Perversion: Vision, Desire and Economies of Transgression in the Films of Jess Franco (2025)

Mapping the Monstrous: The Horrific Female Body in the Films of the New French Extremism

Utilizing a series of films which arguably fall into the New French Extremist movement, this conference paper explores the particular fascination with, and revulsion toward, the physical female body as the space and site upon which the monstrous and horrific is expressed. By moving into conversation the theoretical framework of the abject, the rhetoric of home and motherland, constructions of biohorror, and the violent gaze, this paper attempts to uncover the impact of translating ideas of the monstrous both around, and through, the female body, and how this translation impacts future iterations of women in the horror film.

Mapping the monstrous: women’s horrific bodies in French extreme film = Cartografiando lo monstruoso: los terroríficos cuerpos de las mujeres en el nuevo extremismo francés

Estudios Humanísticos. Filología

New French extreme cinema combines existentialism with shock, hyper violence, and transgressions of women’s bodies. I contend such imagery is best understood as a representation of violence that enables enlightenment in and through the representation of women’s monstrosity and abjection. I examine this phenomenon through four films from New French Extremism’s inaugural cycle. El Nuevo Extremismo Francés combina el existencialismo con el shock, la hiperviolencia y las transgresiones de los cuerpos de las mujeres. En este artículo argumento que dicho imaginario se entiende mejor como una representación de la violencia que permite acceder al conocimiento mediante la representación de la monstruosidad y el abyecto de la mujer. Examino este fenómeno a través de cuatro películas de la primera ola de dicho movimiento.

‘“The film you are about to see is based on documented fact”: Italian Nazi Sexploitation Cinema’ in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik eds. Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema from 1945. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 19-31

The Erotic Lesbian in the Spanish Sexploitation Films of the 1970s

'New Adventures in Pornography' London Underground Film Festival Debate in One+One Journal Issue 10 February 2013

The transvestite figure and film noir: Pedro Almodóvar's transnational imaginary

Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre 2008 Isbn 978 0 7190 7775 3 Pags 157 178, 2008

Book review: Spanish Erotic Cinema, Ed. Santiago Fouz-Hernández (EUP 2017)

Studies in European Cinema (2019)

'Trust me, I'm a director: sex, sadomasochism and institutionalization in Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967)', in Studies in European Cinema, 1: 1 (2004), pp. 19-29.

Studies in European Cinema, 2004

This article offers a psychoanalytic rereading of a classic piece of European cinema, itself a cornerstone in the œuvre of a major European director. Argumentation starts from the idea that Buñuel's playful laying of interpretative red herrings is valuable as a cultural gesture, but dangerous as a platform for satisfying film criticism. Seeking to challenge the descriptive auteurism that often characterizes studies of both Buñuel and Belle de Jour, the proposition here is that critically informed textual analysis reveals that Belle's psycho-sexuality is more complex than existing studies suggest. In particular, discussion works towards answering a previously unasked question about Belle: traditionally, she is held to embody all the classic signs of masochism - and yet, in its conceptual origin, a masochist is also a sadist, so what does it mean to consider the representation and actions of Belle within the context of sadism? By responding to this question via the film's mise-en-scène - which is rich but often neglected by critics - the article reveals a new relationship between Belle, her fantasies and a set of male-orchestrated institutions. In turn, the piece is able to shed new light on the film's notoriously enigmatic ending.

Rape and sexual harassment in Spanish cinema during the early years of the Francoist regime

International Journal of Iberian Studies, 2010

This article analyses gender relations during the first two decades of the Francoist regime in Spain through the portrayal and treatment of sexual assault by filmmakers and censors. Based on the study of 200 films produced during the 1940s and 1950s, this article aims to discover the frequency, mode and utility with which sexual assaults are addressed in Francoist cinema, with a particular emphasis on the way in which these crimes affected the fictional female victims. This study aims to understand how these issues were addressed in a medium as popular and as seemingly innocent as cinema and to also have a better understanding of the conceptualization of women during this period in Spain.

A 'Flesh' New Start: The Transgressive Case of Torture Porn

Transgression and Its Limits, ed. by Matt Foley, Neil McRobert and Aspasia Stephanou, 2012

Transgression and Its Limits is a long overdue collection that reads the complex relationship between artistic transgressions and the limits of law and the subject. In mid-twentieth century theoretical understandings of transgressive culture, it is the existence of the limit that guarantees the possibility and success of the transgression. While the limit calls for obedience, it also tempts with the possibility of violation. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define them. However, this classical understanding of transgression may no longer apply under the conditions of post-modernity, late-capitalism, and the simulated or empty transgressions that this period of the simulacra encourages. Context becomes paramount in reading the myriad forms of transgression that encompass politics, aesthetics and the ethics of the obscene; while a range of theoretical perspectives are employed in order to elucidate the economies at work underneath the seemingly transgressive act. The essays selected include explorations of transgression in cinema, photography, art, law, music, philosophy, technology, and both classical and contemporary literature and drama. Professor Fred Botting’s (co-author of Bataille and The Tarantinian Ethics) analysis of transgression from Bataille, to Baudrillard and Ballard compliments the collection’s concerns about the status of transgression. Aside from fourteen critical essays on topics such as early-modern drama, George Bataille, J. G. Ballard, the female necrophilic, “torture-porn” cinema, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dali, there is also a new discussion of transgression between novelist Iain Banks and Professor Roderick Watson (Emeritus at the University of Stirling). With its focus on the paradoxical nature of the impulse to transgress, as well at its wide-ranging historical and artistic concerns, Transgression and Its Limits is a landmark book in a rapidly developing scholarly field.