Page 66 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

These films and television broadcasts, however, effected a transformation in their viewers 'from a
pursuit of memory to a pursuit of history'. Geyer's argument suggests that the German reconciliation
with history did not necessary involve actual acts of repentance; guilt and its absolution can circulate
abstractly in a media-saturated image world where the popular turn to German history produced a
vaguely sentimental, feminised 'culture of shame'.
Conversely, the Schoolgirl Reports work out the implications of the act of confessing without
explicit reference to Germany's past and, in this way, participate in the post-war therapeutic public
sphere. As genre-based, soft-core, trash cinema, these films negotiate in important and unassuming
ways not the historical facts, but the affective and arousing process of remembering. In dramatising
the pleasure and release that comes with the articulation of past transgressions, these films go one step
further. They expose and putatively resolve and naturalise not only an erotics of guilt, but the guilty
pleasure that comes with remembering one's own illicit history.

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