Page 64 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Students made their parents into political subjects in order to separate themselves from the
family ties that bound them to a damning history, so that they, like their parents, might cut off the
affective bridges to the past. The anti-authoritarian revolution and the politics of memory, however
diffused they may have become by the 1980s, threatened to drive a permanent wedge between the
generations.
If the 'sixty-eighters' had politicised their parents to the point of eviscerating family ties, and if,
in some cases, politics deflected the post-traumatic dysfunctionality that plagued many middle-class
homes, the Schoolgirl Reports recast post-war politics and family conflict in terms of adolescent sex.
Read conservatively, Hofbauer's series exposes for pornographic enjoyment the sexual misdeeds
of a post-war generation that was proclaiming its innocence. By displacing onto the daughters the
shame and guilt more aptly associated with their fathers, these films sexually objectify their subjects
and reverse the terms of familial alienation. It is not the parents whose criminal pasts make them
strange and unfamiliar, but the daughters and sons who become alien the moment their pasts are
revealed. So often in the series, mischievous girls are shown at the dinner table with their parents
and siblings, playing the daughter role. This series puts German youth on trial revealing, and in this
way containing, the politics of a more radical revolution. If older German men were the principle
viewers of these films, such scenarios would have not only pornographic appeal, but would assure
viewers that even self-righteous youths have something to hide. The sexually liberated body, mostly
the girl body, is not delivered from German history or returned to a time before Auschwitz but
is guilty of dangerous desire. Such a reading, however, presumes a homogenous audience. (Even
Thomas Elsaesser writes that the youth audience - along with the guest workers - was attracted
to exploitation productions. And Georg Seesslen notes that by the late 1970s, women accounted
for up to 40 per cent of the audience for pornographic features.)24 Thus, it may be more fruitful
to consider how this series is mediating rather than simply foreclosing the generational and sexual
politics of the 1970s.

THE RHETORICS OF SOFT-CORE PORNOGRAPHY

Genre cinema has long been understood as a form of cultural problem - solving in that it takes
up irreconcilable conflicts in society and offers improbable but satisfactory resolutions, very often
delimiting problems and their solutions to those dominant culture is able to address.25 Linda
Williams' groundbreaking study of hard-core reveals that in these narratives, sex is the problem for
which more, good sex is the solution. Yet, as with the musical, it is very often the other problems that
are mapped on to the field of sexual difference, pleasure and displeasure that good sex serves to resolve.
As Williams explains, pornography is often below the radar of film criticism, because we assume the
natural fact of sex but fail to consider its rhetorical function within the film. Though pornography,
like orher mainstream genres, avoids the systemic roots of conflict, this genre more than others lays
bare the power dynamics between the sexes from where questions of age, class and racial difference

may be negotiated.26
As soft-core pornography, the Schoolgirl Reports are elusive about the fact of sex, but devote far
more screen time to the discussion, assessment and judgement of problems related to good and bad

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