Nazisploitation!

The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture

Daniel H. Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, Daniel H. Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, Kristin T. Vander Lugt

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441175021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Nazisploitation! examines past intersections of National Socialism and popular cinema and the recent reemergence of this imagery in contemporary visual culture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, films such as Love Camp 7 and

Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS introduced and reinforced the image of Nazis as master paradigms of evil in what film theorists deem the 'sleaze' film. More recently, Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, as well as video games such as Call of Duty: World at War, have reinvented this iconography for new audiences. In these works, the violent Nazi becomes the hyperbolic caricature of the "monstrous feminine" or the masculine sadist. Power-hungry scientists seek to clone the Führer, and Nazi zombies rise from the grave.

The history, aesthetic strategies, and political implications of such translations of National Socialism into the realm of commercial, low brow, and 'sleaze' visual culture are the focus of this book. The contributors examine when and why the Nazisploitation genre emerged as it did, how it establishes and violates taboos, and why this iconography resonates with contemporary audiences.

1

Cinema beyond Good and Evil? Nazi Exploitation in the Cinema of the 1970s and its Heritage

Marcus Stiglegger

Holocaust Cinema and the Sadiconazista Cycle

To reflect on historical, social and political events could be considered one possible ‘duty’ of the audiovisual media, in particular narrative television and cinema. The great success, as well as the influence, of TV programs and films such as Holocaust (1979)1 and Schindler’s List (1993) on public opinion about historical events — especially in Germany — strongly suggests that the worldwide audience is more open to fictionalized history than to more challenging essayistic work such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). This realization invites the question: Has cinema reached the status of an historical archive for some audiences? If so, it would behoove film studies scholars to analyze the specific value of such representations, especially in the case of a phenomenon as significant as the Holocaust, which Lanzmann claims is not a suitable subject of fiction.2 The findings of such an analysis, however, may well demonstrate that cinema trivializes rather than represents history.

Significantly, it was not historians who made the decisive contribution to the long-term establishment of the problematic term ‘Holocaust’ — and the crimes connected with it — in both the European and the North American collective consciousness and memory. Historians may have critically researched sources, documented their findings, published textbooks and produced documentaries on the topic, but when compared to the effect created by one television melodrama, a family saga set against the backdrop of vicious Nazi war crimes, suddenly historians’ efforts seem to have little value other than to confirm the historical accuracy of the scenes of persecution and extermination of ‘imaginary’ figures. The four-part television miniseries Holocaust, followed by around 100 million viewers in the United States, was seen in West Germany one year later by an audience of 16 million. From a media-historic perspective, the television event Holocaust represents a decisive point in the social role of television as a medium of mass communication. German film scholar Knut Hickethier comments on the effects the series had on the formatting of public television as follows: ‘The defining television event at the end of the 1970s was the transmission of the American series Holocaust […] which showed the murder of European Jews by the Germans. In setting its focus not on social criticism and resolving the past, but rather on fictionalization and entertainment, this film marks a turning point […]. The success was considerable, and uncontested. The series was accused of emotionalizing, trivializing and falsifying history.’3 In Germany, Holocaust left a lasting — one could almost say the first — and very deep impression, especially on the sons and daughters of the perpetrator generation. The fact that one can trace this shift in public consciousness back to a commercial television miniseries that intentionally slipped through the customary filter of distanced impartiality is an important indicator of a strong change in the social and media handling of history in general and the history of the Holocaust in particular. From then on, the mass extermination practised under the Nazi regime had a name that everyone knew.

The lasting effect of this phenomenon can still be seen today, especially in the many ‘made-for-box-office’ films of the 1980s that attempted to cash in on the success of Holocaust. The change in the televisual handling of this sensitive topic coincided with a general change in attitude towards the subject in cinema. Films were now produced purely on the basis of commercial and aesthetic considerations (dramaturgy, imagery, casting in conjunction with Hollywood’s star system) as opposed to later and earlier attempts at very personal accounts such as Pasażerka (The Passenger, 1962) by Andrzej Munk or The Grey Zone (2001) by Tim Blake Nelson. The fact that among these films were also productions that, by means of a complex narrative, left television far behind, can be seen in films such as Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982). However, these more demanding films also fueled the debate that today still questions the legitimacy of an ‘artistic’ processing of the Nazi genocide. According to literary scholar Matías Martínez, art cannot possibly ignore the largest crime of the twentieth century, yet at the same time such art is essentially impossible, ‘[…] because in the opinion of many, the Holocaust defies aesthetic portrayal, in a special, perhaps even unique, way.’4 In this respect Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List marks a turning point. Here, the questionable symbiosis between commercial and ethical production was widely acknowledged by both the public and by critics to have been a success. ‘Unlike Marvin Chomsky and Gerald Green’s Holocaust, the Hollywood film seemed, in the opinion of the critics, to have resolved the conflict between popular reception, aesthetic content and appropriate thematic.’5

Schindler’s List can also be seen as a turning point in another respect. If one looks at the film as a social phenomenon (which it unquestionably was and still is), various modes of interpretation present themselves. First, one can speculate that Schindler’s List marked a provisional climax of a trend that began in the 1970s with the miniseries Holocaust: little by little, a culture of remembrance, which attempted to find access to the events and atmosphere of Nazi terror by way of fictional film and always searched anew for defining methods of staging, established itself next to that of the immediate witnesses of the concentration camp terror, the victims and the perpetrators. Since the 1990s, however, as the witnesses now increasingly withdraw from public life, both new and old films need to be critically analyzed regarding intention and principle. Second, the arrival of Schindler’s List made clear the importance of film as an archive, whose influence on identity formation (for contemporary Jews in this case) in present-day culture is ever growing. If we accept that film, as an archive, exists as a threshold between the cultural and the communicative consciousness, then only by way of critical reflection on the part of the viewer can film be taken seriously as an archive.

Beyond its status as cinematic archive and as a marker of a waning ‘culture of remembrance’, there is a third interesting aspect of Schindler’s List: especially in two sequences, Spielberg’s direction refers directly to a cinematic tradition of presenting Nazi characters as a direct sexual threat to the Jewish victims. In fact, SS men were themselves threatened by harsh punishment if they committed such an act of Rassenschande (‘racial disgrace’) as the Nazis put it. Amon Goeth, played by the undeniably attractive and cultivated character actor Ralph Fiennes, appears in one scene practising his shooting skills. He randomly aims at resting people in the camp. With his naked chest, his breeches and boots, he presents this performance as a morning ‘workout’ or routine, included with his first cigarette. When he returns inside, his naked lover is unnerved, and he walks into the bathroom. Physical presence, uniform fetish and inhuman acts of random killing are presented here simultaneously. In a later sequence, Goeth walks into the basement flat of his beautiful Jewish housekeeper during a party. First he seems to adore her beauty — she is half naked, her breasts shimmer through her wet clothing — but his monologue transforms into a cynical parody of Shylock’s defense speech in The Merchant of Venice. He provocatively asks her: ‘Are these the eyes of a rat?’ Although she seems frozen in fear and keeps quiet, he accuses her of trying to seduce him, and then he beats her. Both scenes maintain a certain sexual tension that adds to the violent threat. In both scenes Amon Goeth appears as an ambiguous and darkly attractive tyrant. Spielberg is well aware of the morbid appeal of ambiguous Nazi characters, for he often used them in his films before — especially in the Indiana Jones cycle (beginning in 1981). At the same time, he must have been aware that the sexually attractive yet cruel and cynical SS commander appears almost as a stereotype derived directly from the tradition of the Italian sadiconazista cycle of the 1970s. ‘Sadiconazista’ is a neologism referring to fictional Nazi exploitation pulp literature and cinema between the 1960s and the 1980s composed of the terms ‘sadism,’ ‘con’ (with) and ‘Nazism’. Although marginal during these decades, the influence of sadiconazista stereotypes has proven highly influential in international cinema and pop culture up to today.6

From Arthouse Drama to Nazisploitation

The 1970s proved an extremely productive decade for many national cinemas: the seeds of former revolutionary years began to grow and brought forth astounding film productions in America (New Hollywood), Germany (New German Cinema) and in Japan (New Wave), to name just a few. Together with this new progressive tendency and the simultaneous relaxing of censorship came an enormous wave of exploitation films, which began to push the boundaries of what can be portrayed in the interest of sensationalist entertainment. This exploitative trend did not shy away from the Holocaust theme: the pornographers Robert Lee Frost and Don Edmonds brought their own versions of sadiconazista to the cinema with the Canadian productions Love Camp 7 (1968) and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974). These films take a voyeuristic look into the concentration camp brothel and a pseudo-medical experimentation center. Although this exploitative use of Holocaust motifs caused some controversy, these films are still extremely successful in the form of home media.7 The Ilsa film, starring Playboy model Dyanne Thorne, even spawned a number of direct and indirect sequels.8

Italian cinema also experimented with the connections between sexuality, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• Bibliography
• Selected Filmography
• Notes on Contributors
• eCopyright Page