settled until 1973. The bulk of the unmemorable score is by genre stalwart Gianni Ferrio.
The transfer is from a decent- looking 35mm print with under- standable but mostly minor wear and tear. Italian sources claim an original running time of 105m but nothing seems obviously missing. On both standard and widescreen monitors, the 2.35:1 image appears slightly cropped on both sides; there is no crop- ping, however, when the disc is played on computer drive. This is annoying but bearable. The mono sound is clear, ten chap- ters are provided, and extras in- clude 24 images in a photo and poster art gallery. There are also a dozen trailers of variable qual- ity (running a total of almost 35m) for other Gemma vehicles, including nine Spaghetti West- erns and the Bond spoof KISS KISS-BANG BANG, but no trailer for the feature in question. This release, Volume 17 in Wild East’s Spaghetti Western Collection, is unlikely to convert casual view- ers but will be of interest to fans of the genre and of Gemma in particular.
LAURE
aka FOREVER EMMANUELLE 1976, Severin Films, DD-2.0/ 16:9/+, $29.95, 95m 51s, DVD-0 By Brad Stevens
Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane was a diplomat who spent much of the 1950s in Bangkok as a member of UNESCO’s French del- egation. But he will doubtless be more familiar to VW’s readers as the author of EMMANUELLE, a French novel about a woman’s sexual adventures in Bangkok. EMMANUELLE was initially sub- mitted to publisher Eric Losfeld as a single lengthy manuscript in 1957, distributed, clandestinely and anonymously, in two parts dur- ing 1959 and 1960 (the second
part, EMMANUELLE: L’ANTI- VIERGE [“Emmanuelle: The Anti- Virgin”], is available in English as THE FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF EMMANUELLE and EMMANUELLE II), then reprinted, again in two parts, during 1967/1968, this time with “Emmanuelle Arsan” credited as author.
The book was an enormous success, being filmed by Cesare Canevari in 1969 (as Io, Em- manuelle), remade by Just Jaeckin in 1974, and subse- quently spawning a seemingly endless series of cinematic se- quels and rip-offs. In a gesture that would surely have met with the approval of his character Mario, who insisted that “What counts is not the painting... but the painter’s bride,” Louis- Jacques reacted to the inevitable curiosity concerning Emmanuelle Arsan’s identity by claiming that the books were written by his wife, Marayat Bibidh, an actress who had appeared in Robert Wise’s THE SAND PEBBLES (1966) and a 1967 episode of THE BIG VALLEY (credited in both instances as Marayat Andriane). The deception was surprisingly successful (excerpts from EMMAN- UELLE appear in more than one anthology of erotica by women), and Louis-Jacques went on to write several works of “non- fiction”—including TOUTE EMMANUELLE (“All About Em- manuelle,” 1978, available in English as THE SECRETS OF EMMANUELLE), purportedly Marayat’s autobiographical re- flections on sexuality—and a series of novels, one of which, NÉA (1975), he dedicated to himself! (“To L.J.—This invol- untary reflection that distance has not obliterated from the mirror.”) NÉA was ostensibly filmed by Nelly Kaplan in 1976, though the film bears virtually no resemblance to the book.
Although Louis-Jacques’ out- put is something of a literary hoax, it is far from negligible, and belongs to that distinguished French tradition of combining eroticism with philosophy which includes the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and Pauline Réage, and is kept alive today by such filmmakers as Catherine Breillat and Jean- Claude Brisseau. Louis-Jacques’ 1976 novel LAURE is a work of quite astonishing seriousness and ambition, dealing with a group of ethnologists searching for the Mara, a tribe whose mem- bers undergo an annual cer- emony of forgetfulness, during which their memories are wiped clean. That contrast between the Lance Institute of Pacific Studies (LIPS), dedicated to preserving/ remembering the past, and the object of their studies, the Mara, dedicated to forgetting the past, is a splendidly concrete em- bodiment of the conflict be- tween repression and liberation, civilization and primitivism. The Mara represent that ideal of sexual freedom expressed by EMMANUELLE’s Mario, who in- sisted “What’s beautiful is to change, tirelessly. Because every change is an advance, every per- manence a grave... each human life that becomes frozen is a dead weight on our planet, and hinders the advance of our species.” But LIPS is itself presented as a hive of consequenceless sexual activ- ity in which all ties, even those of marriage, are viewed as provi- sional and all impulses indulged. In one sense, this adds to the book’s complexity, resisting schematism and preventing our viewing its central struggle in terms of a straightforward oppo- sition. Yet, in a much larger sense, it renders that struggle nonsensical: although we are clearly expected to see Laure’s eventual decision to join the Mara
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