Page 212 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

as a means of aestheticising the horrific actuality of industrialized genocide. Both the documentary
tradition instituted by Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and the concertedly anti-Semitic,
anti-communist Hetzfilms such as Jud Suss (1940) or The Eternal Jew (1940) had thus counterpoised
the essentially wholesome, healthy and beautiful world of National Socialism to the hideously
bestialised sexual threat that was the Jew or the communist. And repeated viewing of such materials
obviously naturalised the binarism, printed it upon the national unconscious, de-sensitised the
audience to the aestheticisation of the political upon which the Final Solution rested. What Buttgereit
appears to be proposing, in his insistent looking upon the dead and what may or may not be done
with them, is a radical de-aestheticisation of that past. This represents a form of truthful looking that
not only cuts through the de-sensitisations of revisionist history and lays the cotpse of the past bare,
but which points to the strategies of control implicit in all acts of cinematic viewing.
In both Nekromantik movies Buttgereit is keen to expose the highly manipulative nature of the
medium - specifically in the second film's depiction of heterosexual pornography and the first's
re-creation of the slasher horror genre. Mark, the hero of Nekromantik II, may see nothing wrong
with his job — providing voice-overs for foreign porn movies. But the fact that Buttgereit depicts his
employment in ways remarkably visually redolent of the scenes from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom
(I960) when the sexually dysfunctional hero, also called Mark, repeatedly views the footage he has
shot whilst murdering women, would seem to point to a certain matrix of concerns. Specifically,
these are the highly fetishistic reduction of the pornographic subject to 'dicks and cunts up close', the
encoding of discourses of power at the heart of the gaze and the potentially murderous consequences
of such encoding.
In Nekromantik's rake on the slasher movie, we find ourselves in classic stalker territory, with
audience point-of-view neatly matched to that of the knife-wielding monsrer. Here, we see his
victim's hands above her head, we trace his knife from her shoe, up her stockinged leg into her
mouth as she stands, breasts exposed, screaming and moaning in terror and, it seems, ecstasy. The
sufficiently de-sensitised audience, which includes Buttgereit in left foreground, are predictably
boted by such objectifying shenanigans, kissing, fondling each other, eating, talking — but never
actually looking at the misogynistic drive that, for Buttgereit, clearly underscores such images. For as
Monika the necrophiliac cries in Nekromantik II, it is no more perverse, for Buttgereit, to watch the
dismemberment of animals for pleasure than it is to look at heterosexual pornography's reduction of
people to their genitalia. It is simply more socially acceptable. The audience has become de-sensitised
to the nastiness of such images, even whilst it is unable to look with any degree of clarity or good faith
at the genuine horrors of the historic past. At the heart of Buttgereit's oeuvre, it seems, is an awareness
of the politically problematic dimensions of visual pleasure, the uses to which that pleasure has been
placed in the past and the linkage of that past to the present. There is no easy moralising here, none of
the knee-jerk-will-to-censorship of the Autonome Szene, contemporary political activists whom Franz
Rodenkirchen has deemed practitioners of'fascism from the left'.12
If Buttgereit displays a consistent interest in the relationship between technologies of looking and
the perpetuation of oppressive ideologies then, like Roland Barthes, he also appears to associate the act
of photographing or filming an object with death itself. Using Super-8, 8mm, 16mm and 32mm film,
video, polaroids, stills-photography and television pictures in the construction of his representations

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