Nazisploitation!: The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture
Daniel H. Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1441183590
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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
with existential and sexual nightmares. Yet, as far away as the exploitative scenarios of the sadiconazista cycle may be from the National Socialist reality, it may still be possible to recognize a sequence of standardized scenes based on historically documented situations. These scenes recur in all the thematically relevant films: the arrival of the concentration camp prisoners and the selection on the platform; the roll call on the open areas between the barracks; the actions in the brothel
most important thing is to be on the winning side!’ — is clearly the director’s indictment of the apparent moral glaciation of the bourgeoisie in the rise of Nazism. It also seems a fitting motto for Brass’s cinematic vacillation between the intentional exposure of the neodecadent film strategy and the simultaneous exploitation of it for box office success. Like the subversive indication of the female students’ erotic fascination with the black man’s corpse, the film’s most thoughtfully
more likely, due to its popularity — Bob Fosse’s Cabaret of 1972 may have served as inspiration. While orgies in these movies are indispensable elements in their plots and character psychology of violence, power and sex, EAG’s orgy is but a nod to less sinister sexploitation movie standards. Copying the setting of an unleashed Götterdämmerung à la Visconti with this naïve voyeuristic illustration results again in an unintended satiric effect. A striptease in front of a draped swastika flag and a
Porter rehearses innumerable stereotypes that embody certain types of National Socialist evil or power acting in secret. On the one hand, we find National Socialist perpetrators, that is to say representatives of the National Socialist leadership elite. Foremost among these are the erstwhile Gestapo man Klaus and Professor Vogler. On the other hand, we encounter co-perpetrators and bystanders, members of the general public who later nonetheless energetically take part in the hunt for Lucia and