Page 34 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

imitations and downright rip-offs of other European and American films. A film will emerge that
seems to take the national box-office, or at least receives the media's attention, and then very quickly,
often before the original has reached the Italian cinema screens itself, a whole slew of imitators
emerges.2 One of the questions this chapter asks is what sparked off the cycle of Nazi sexploitation
films (predominantly Italian in origin), which emerged over a brief period, 1975-77, after which the
cycle quickly petered out?
One of the aspects that emerges in a study of this kind of cinema is a devolutionary trajectory
running from a 'high' or artistically informed culture (which is de facto bourgeois) to a more vernacular
cinema that 'reduces' the artistic and intellectual complexities of the antecedents into base forms of
exploitation. Following from that, however, when these films are placed within a cinematic historio-
graphie context,3 a different discourse opens revealing how the Nazi sexploitation cinema engages with
the historical period it exploits.
Omayra Cruz, one of the few scholars to have written on these films, notes:

Although within the context of the Italian movie experience these films make perfect sense,
a general outcry usually condemns them for commercialising and exploiting a 'serious' issue.
How could anyone stoop so low as to bastardise the terror and tragedy of the Nazi experience
for profit?4

Cruz identifies Il portiere di notte {The Night Porter, Italy, 1974, Liliana Cavani) as the first of these
films. Or rather, that based on this one film's success, a cycle emerged which quickly degenerated
into exploitation fare.5 But in his consideration of these films, Cruz neglects Salo o le 120 giornate di
Sodoma {Salo, Italy, 1 975, Pier Paolo Pasolini) as being another 'high-art' precursor, particularly in
its depiction of Sadean sexuality, a theme that is picked up in many of these later films. Within the
same tradition, one could equally include Salon Kitty (Italy, 1975, Tinto Brass; and released the same
year as Salo), which depicts a Nazi-era bordello and the decadence of the Third Reich. Salon Kitty,
however, owes more than just a little of its mise-en-scene to La Caduta degli dei {The Damned, Italy,
1969, Luchino Visconti).
What emerges from a study of these films' influences and precursors is a genetic/generic code that
moves downward from 'art' films like Visconti's through Brass's glossy but salacious re-working, into
the Nazi sexploitation period proper. This particular thread, from La Caduta degli dei to Salon Kitty,
gives way to what can be called the 'Nazi Bordello' film: high-art prototypes such as La Caduta degli
dei and perhaps II portiere di notte give way to the extreme exploitation films Casa private per le SS
(literally 'Private House of the SS' but known in English as SS Girls, Italy, 1977, Bruno Mattei) and Le
Lunghe notti della Gestapo {Red Nights of the Gestapo, Italy, 1977, Fabio De Agostini), with Salon Kitty
holding a more ambivalent middle place between high- and low-cultural product. What gets picked
up from La Caduta degli dei is the former film's decadent visual style and its emphasis on Weimar
decadence and exoticism. Of course this is a superficial reading of Visconti's film, but it is the reading
which Mattei and De Agostini pick up on to exploit in their films. Likewise in Brass's Salon Kitty,
the bordello setting changes from Weimar decadence to a Nazi-era house of spies, wherein suspected
enemies of the state are able to expose their treachery while in the arms of Berlin's most desirable

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