Page 36 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

explains his current alienation. As with the Nazi bordello films, we see a devolutionary trajectory
from high-minded films like The Pawnbroker, into the more exploitation arena of Love Camp 7 (USA,
1969, Lee Frost), really the first Nazi sexploitation film (albeit an American one). This presents, for
our voyeuristic pleasures, the idea that the Nazis set up these bordellos for the entertainment of their
soldiers on leave. Although both The Pawnbroker and Love Camp 7 are American, yet very different
kinds of films, the same idea of sexually assaulted women prisoners is in both, and this is a theme taken
up by the Italian films that are the major focus of this chapter.
The difference between films about sexual exploitation and sexual exploitation films is largely in
evidence through one obvious point of comparison: L'Ultima orgia del III Reich (Gestapo's Last Orgy,
Italy, 1976, Cesare Canevari) directly reworks the narrative framing device of Cavani's Il portiere di
notte: in both films a dual timeframe is demonstrated between a Nazi/concentration camp past and
a present tense set a decade or so later. In Il portiere di notte Cavani explores the sado-masochistic
relationship between Max and Lucia, a former concentration camp commandant and a young Jewish
woman prisoner, both during the war and after in Vienna when their paths accidentally cross again.

FIGURE 3 Despite their frequent definition as love camps, nazi sexploitation films reveal spectacles of sexual humiliation- Gestapo's
Last Orgy (1976)

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