Page 45 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

instead the primary focus of textual attention. It is in this respect that the paracinematic
aesthetic is closely linked to the concept of excess'.22
In the Nazi sexploitation film, it is those moments of excess', the extreme 'numbers' depicting sex,
rape and torture, which are 'the prime focus of textual attention' (in Sconce's terms). But these films
do more than just offer sadomasochistic voyeuristic pleasure, for their historic specificity requires
some kind of discursive consideration about the nature of their representation of the Holocaust.
Clearly these films have different agendas to more 'respectable' Holocaust narrative films - Schindler's
List or La vita e bella (Life is Beautiful, Italy, 1998, Roberto Benigni), for example - specifically in
how they simplify and create their own 'composite' narratives, but the processes of reduction and
explication are not dissimilar.
Space does not allow a fuller exploration of the contrast between American and European cinema
- at the level of exploitation (i.e. Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS contrasted with L'ultima orgia) or art-cinema
(i.e. The Pawnbroker contrasted with IIportiere di notte), or even within middle-brow, popular cinema
(i.e. Schindler's List contrasted with La vita e bella). Any of those comparisons would reveal, I believe,
less a direct contrast than a spectrum reflecting degrees of 'composites' between European and
American exploitations of the past. Be that as it may, and to return the discussion to where it began,
what emerges from studies like this is an alternative discourse to that offered by Sconce (and echoed by
Hawkins). 2 3 Exploitation cinema is not necessarily 'alternative' or 'paracinematic' art, but a discourse
of address which needs to be approached at its own level of articulation. The Italian Nazi sexploitation
cycle may in fact be 'the most distasteful example of exploitation ever committed to film' - but it is
also infinitely curious too, despite its disavowal to the discourses of'art'.

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