Page 60 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Halfway through the film we meet sixteen-year-old Barbara and her eighteen-year-old brother
Wolfgang, who not only attend the same school but, due to their parents' modest incomes, share
the same bedroom. As a result of these living arrangements, Batbara has become erotically fixated on
her brother, particularly after she spies him having sex with another girl. Racked with guilt over her
incestuous desire, Barbara has a psychedelic dream. First her father, who is constantly ordering the
siblings to get undressed and go to bed oblivious that they are no longer children, commands Barbara
in her dream to strip, threatening her with a kebab skewer. Pinned under her father's heaving body
and on the brink of orgasm, Barbara's dream shifts. She now finds herself naked before a military
tribunal where she stands accused of brotherly love. Next to her, wearing a nun's habit, is her brother's
girlfriend who, judged guilty, is executed. As the soldiers fire, the wounded girl disrobes, smears her
own blood across her body, and falls dead in ecstatic pleasure.
Not incidentally, the dream iconography we recognise from the decor of Barbara and Wolfgang's
bedroom includes a sexy nun poster, an antique sword that hangs next to the dresser and an anti-
war poster in which a solider is reeling from a bullet in a mock-up of the famous Spanish Civil War
photo. We know that Barbara, a virgin, is both fixated on and scared of having sex. It thus stands to
reason that she conflates the shower of bullets and blood with the girlfriend's orgasmic pleasure. But
this is more than just a virgin's nightmare after falling asleep in a room filled with a phantasmagoria
of objects. In Batbara's dream her father's poor judgement metamorphoses into a disturbing Oedipal
scenario, one that is literally and figuratively shot through with sins of the past. In insisting that they
share a room and undress for bed, the father abets this incest fantasy. Forced to have sex with her

FIGURE 7 Barbara stands before a firing squad, condemned for brotherly love: The Schoolgirl Reports, Part Four: What Drives Parents to
Despair (1972)

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