Page 58 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Confessions also explicitly structute other vignettes in the second film, from Monika and Emi
whose story is presented to us as they turn themselves in to the police, to Elke who repeats the story
of her lost virginity to the 'psychologist'. In the ninth Schoolgirl Report, two police offers read to each
other the sworn confessions of a group of teens who are brought in after suffering a near-fatal car
crash. Each vignette recounts what (sexual acts) brought each student to the party that concluded with
the ill-fated drag race. All of the episodes are based on someone - a parent, the psychologist, a police
officer, the girls themselves - sharing a story about a girl's experimenrarion wirh illicit sex.
Of course, erotic confessional literature goes back to the seventeenth century and beyond, and
the confession would appear to be a mainstay of the soft-core film genre. From Chu Hong's Intimate
Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Hong Kong, 1972) to Ohara's Wet Rope Confession (Japan, 1979),
the mere inclusion of the word in the title promises the viewer that she will be made privy to salacious
secrets. Yet rarely do such films depict the act of disclosure itself. Even Hofbauer's 1970 Confessions of
a Sixthform Virgin has little recourse to an actual confession. The very fact that such films include this
word in the title speaks to the allure of a confession; that the Schoolgirl Reports are obsessed with, and
organised around the act, however, reveals something more.
As a story and as history, the confession constitutes its teller as a social subject. It returns us to
the moment when a girl loses her sexual innocence, an instant that can be avowed but not altered.
In confessing, she provides the contours and causality for her story and gains a sense of herself as
someone with a recognised and recognisable past. Though psychologists in the series emphasise that
adolescent and even pre-pubescent sexuality is normal, the problems arise when girls move from
natural, libidinal life into codified social roles of daughters, students, mothers, plaintiffs and victims
for whom such acts have moral and legal consequences. The Reports dramatise a girl's confrontation
with her past where sex is often a gateway to other offences including blackmail, drug use, shoplifting,
perjury and the like - past acts for which these girls can only atone through the act of disclosure. In
sum, sex as marked by the confession, by auto-narration, is an initiation into the responsibilities and
limitations of adult citizenship.

SEXUAL AND HISTORICAL AWAKENINGS

The confession is also an engagement with the causes and effects of history. As Benedict Anderson
muses, individual identity, 'because it cannot be "remembered", must be narrated'. Biographies of
individuals and of nations are always negotiating the suppression and inclusion of events necessary to
produce a narrative palatable to the self and to the citizenry. While the individual has one birth and
one death, the nation overwhelms the timeline of a single life. In order to fold our life into a narrative
of nation, traumatic episodes (deaths, holocausts, wars, martyrs, assassinations) 'must be remembered/
forgotten as "our own'". 1 3 Knowingly or not, Hofbauer gestures to this historical mandate at the end
of the second report, in a vignette which conspicuously includes no pornographic scenes. Eighteen-
year-old Barbara, who decides ro bear a child out of wedlock much to her parents' stern disapproval,
discovers that her parents were married some months after her birth. Not only is the parental reproof
exposed as a hypocritical suppression of their own wayward past, but the daughter's radicalism is
actually reproducing (as opposed to defying) her parent's history.

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