WHAT IS EUROSPY?

EUROSPY?

The term "Eurospy" is not widely known. It describes spy films made in Europe in the 1960s. This was the golden age of the spy film, social conditions being just right for the fine tuning of the genre. The cold war, sexual liberation, pop art, nuclear paranoia, co-production tax breaks and musical revolution were the ingredients for the cocktail.

In the mid 1960s, Europe was at the centre of a global explosion in spy film production. Between1964 and 1969, 371 spy films were made in Western Europe alone. Such was the scale of output that viewers only saw a handful of this "spy - wave". Competition was fierce with many titles only playing in the territories that financed them.

The craze was exhausted by the end of the decade. Such had been the volume of genre product that some of the more wildly experimental titles such as "L'Inconnue de Shandigor", "Hypnos - Follia di un Massacro" and "Da Istanbul Ordine di Uccidere" disappeared after their initial outing and haven't been seen since.

James Bond 007, whilst being pivotal to the genre, has cast an obscuring shadow across Eurospy for fifty years, especially at home. The numerous Eurospy titles Britain produced are now as obscure as their continental counterparts.

Britain participated very little in European co-productions. Only a handful of dubbed foreign spy films were distributed in the UK; a fraction of the number America bought for drive-ins and TV. The majority of continental Eurospy titles have never been released in the UK in any form.

The American cult cinema enthusiasts who coined the phrase "Eurospy" identified the films by their "European-ness". The iconography of France, Italy, Spain, West Germany and the UK is fore-grounded in the films by narrative motifs, European actors and geographical locations. (Depicting identifiable national icons was often a pre-requisite in obtaining subsidies for films made under EEC co-production agreements.) As such these films exhibit a tangible and cohesive European flavour.

A long standing critical and theoretical rebuff has kept the Eurospy genre in the shadows. The films have long been perceived as being repetitive, poorly dubbed, cheap and nasty. These are complex cultural artefacts. Women are presented as both victims and as emancipated equals in the spy game. Both men and women are depicted as sex objects. The gun is ever present. Conspicuous consumption and moral ambiguity rage throughout. It's probably a lot easier to just not go there.


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