Bawdy tales and veils: The exploitation of sex in post-war Italian cinema (1949--1979)

What was American sexploitation star Chesty Morgan doing in Fellini's Casanova (1976)?Initiated as an effort to explain the origins of and interactions between Italy's wide variety of high to low films from the post-war period, this dissertation (1) joins archival materials with cultural studies approaches to detail how Italy became the largest European producer and consumer of films from 1955 to 1975 (2) historicizes existing critical systems that have been delineated by boundaries of taste to (re)inscribe films that have been absent from existing histories, and (3) presents two case studies of filmic exploitations of sex, Medievalesque sex comedies and nun exploitation films, in which the genres were both symptoms of their historical contexts and participants in the production of discourses on sex, family, and the Church.The chapters trace how sexual Medieval women and nuns were "mobile signifiers" that could be recycled over several decades in low-budget works to international co-productions. The wide variety was the result of a decentralized post-war film industry in which cast and crew worked for both auteurs and sexploitation directors, and in which Chesty Morgan could work for Fellini. By contextualizing histories that have valued the canon over "trash" and auteurs over genres, I forge alternate systems of inclusion and exclusion that can better accommodate the mechanics of the industry and the intertextual relations between films, genres, actors, and publicity.By the 1970s when divorce, adultery, abortion, and censorship laws were challenged and changed, the Medievalesque films became one plane on which Italians could imagine a still ambiguous concept of "sexual liberation." Pasolini's Decameron and its sex comedy imitators showed frontal nudity, simulated sex, and Boccaccesque women enjoying premarital sex and adultery unrestrained by conventional taboos. The male viewers soon rejected such depictions of women cuckolding their husbands and embraced the following genre, "nunsploitation" films, which responded with narratives about the fantasy of putting women back under the dominating control of the family and the Church. The narratives enacted the repression/transgression fantasy in the institutionalized convent where women are made to confess---with their voices and their bodies---the truth about sex.