Boia, maschere, segreti: l'horror italiano degli anni sessanta Filming Locations

The documentary consists of footage from 12 erotic documentary films from the Sixties. A dynamic style of editing, sometimes almost hypnotic is accompanied by contemporary music created especially for the documentary by the music composer Federico Badaloni. The voice over of the author blends in perfectly with the music and the footage, showing a Sixties pop influence. At the beginning it starts like this: "Roland Barthes claimed that the real effect of striptease was desexualizing women, a ritual that triggers the idea of sex and at the same time is its catharsis. A sort of strategy to reveal sex and then deactivate it. Before being a proverbial seduction ritual, it is a form of exorcism of sex in which a body generates an appetite but then is devitalized". The documentary takes us on a journey delving into the world of strip-tease and nightlife of the Sixties in Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo and other exotic locations that evoke a prohibited universe of desire and nudity in people's imagination. Through the analysis and deconstruction of cultural stereotypes, ethnic discrimination, recurrent characters and visual clichés, the film, with testimonies from the experts, authors of the time, experts, authors of the time, critics and journalists, traces the distance that separates us from that cliché vision on feminine body and the way today it reverses dynamics and relationships that in the past seemed ingrained in the representation of sex. The documentary shows testimonies of cinematographic critics and essayists as Domenico Monetti and Antonio Tentori, and the people that took part in producing and directing the films of the time as Mino Loy, with the collaboration of journalists as Sabina Ambrogi, expert in relationships between media and representation of women and Luana De Vita, therapist, that tells us about the work she does on the use of the body and the seduction game of burlesque with groups of psycho-theatre with the testimony of the famous international performer of burlesque, Albadoro Gala. The ending of the film has a touch of unexpected originality of expressive language, which is created by artists Gianluca Abbate and Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri with computer generated images creating intriguing animations by reworking the stock footage.