Page 35 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

FIGURE 2 Exploitation or an extension oř art-house concerns? Fascist/erotic imagery became the motif of Nazi sexploitation cinema:
Gestapo's Last Orgy (1976)

Aryan prostitutes. In Mattei and De Agostini's films, while the setting remains the Nazi bordello and
the shadows of Weimar decadence are still in evidence, the films are more concerned with staging
explicit sexuality. This is but one thread of the Nazi sexploitation film.
Another thread in Italian Nazi sexploitation cinema, and one which seems to cross a definite
'taste' line, as Luther-Smith noted above, situates the action within the concentration camp; although
none of the films specifically identify their location as either a 'concentration' or 'death' camp, nor
have they been given any historically authentic names such as Auschwitz, Belsen or Treblinka. The
camps that are the setting for many of these films are often identified by the incongruous title of 'love
camp'. 'Love Camps' are Nazi bordellos, bur unlike the 'Nazi Bordello' thread, these films privilege
the spectacles of rape and sexual humiliation. Frequently the films feature a group of captive and
imprisoned women, forced into prostitution against their will. With the 'Nazi Bordello' films, the
women are presented as more 'complicit' in their sexual exploitation. In the 'Love Camp' thread, the
women, like the young people in Salo, have been taken by force.
The first cinematic reference to women in any kind of Nazi camp sequestered over to bordello-
duty to satisfy the desires of either the camp's guards or soldiers arriving on furlough, appears to be The
Pawnbroker (USA, 1964, Sidney Lumet). Here, in a flashback to his experiences in a concentration
camp, Sol Nazerman accidentally discovers his wife held in such a bordello against her will. It is this
experience in particular, the film argues, that finally destroyed Nazerman's humanity and partially

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