‘The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle’ Blu-ray Box Set Offers a Different Gaze at the Sexploitation Series’ Complicated Legacy

variety.com:

Todd Gilchrist editor The panorama of bedfellows depicted in erotica, and erotic cinema (or “sexploitation”), is vast; even if it’s somebody else’s yuck, there’s likely at least one scene or movie that captures your particular yum.

But capital-A art, and especially academia, doesn’t always take this work as seriously at it deserves — as part of film history, much less as sociopolitical commentary on the people, places and times in which stories are told.

Severin Films hopes to remedy that in a big way with its new 15-disc, 24-film box set, “The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle.” Enlisting as producer and curator Canadian filmmaker and programmer Kier-La Janisse, who directed the documentary “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror” and founded the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Severin produced the most ambitious and comprehensive chronicle ever assembled about the work of Laura Gemser, whose legacy in cinema as “Black Emanuelle” has heretofore existed largely as a footnote to the French film series starring the late Sylvia Kristel.

To examine Gemser’s actual impact in this rarified (and often reductively-viewed) corner of cinema, Janisse worked with Severin to create more than 40 hours of special features including commentaries, video essays and documentaries, as well as a 356-page book, “The Black Emanuelle Bible,” featuring archival interviews with the actress and contemporaneous essays from film experts and scholars. “I knew there were a lot of female fans of the ‘Black Emanuelle’ films, and I felt like they weren’t considered really with a lot of the either previous releases or writings about the ‘Black Emanuelle’ series,” Janisse tells Variety. “So it was really important to me to