While we’re talking about Lenny Burtman, here’s a few clips from a film he produced, Satan in High Heels (1962).
Jun 252012
Jun 132012
Researching the previous post led me to the Klaw Archives, focused on the Irving Klaw’s 1940s-1950s bondage photosets and short films.
Mar 112012
House of Self-Indulgence has a summary of another Nazi-exploitation film, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy, which by its description sounds like a take on The Night Porter. The framing story is two people walking around an abandoned concentration camp, years after the war.
Of course, I’m not saying it should be taken seriously as an accurate account of daily life at your average concentration camp during World War II. However, it’s way more honest and straightforward than the majority of the pro-war propaganda Hollywood has been warping minds with over the past seventy years. Your typical war film, especially the ones that are set during the post-war era, seem to glamourize armed combat, which I find tasteless and obscene. On the other hand, the films that make up the Naziploitation genre have a purity about them. The sole purpose of these films is to shock and offend all those who lack the common sense to stir clear of their wicked glow, and the good ones do so with no apologies.
The driving force of this film seems to be frustrated sadism.
Even though he was eyeballing her while she was being examined by the camp’s doctor and during the slideshow/rape orgy, it’s at the end of the cannibal dinner party that Conrad, and his trusty Luger P08 pistol, finally become acquainted with Lise Cohen and her dogged brand of spiritual fortitude. Frustrated by the fact Lise won’t flinch after repeated attempts to unnerve her (he does everything his drunken Nazi mind can think of to scare her), Conrad decides right then and there that his new mission in life is to make her scream for mercy.
This reminds of earlier discussions about the difference between genuine sadists and “bureaucrats of torture” in totalitarian societies. A bureaucrat just doesn’t care about the other person’s subjective experience. A sadist needs to know he or she is having an impact.
Sadomasochism in Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” and “A Dangerous Method”
Celluloid Dungeon
Comments Off on Sadomasochism in Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” and “A Dangerous Method”
Jan 192012
I tend to cringe at depictions of BDSM in mainstream media, as it is usually flubbed in one way or another. Sometimes, however, a good (not necessarily “positive”) depiction appears in unexpected spots. For example, look at two films by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
Dec 032011
This is a joke, right?
Don’t you get the point of this? It’s to turn people on. I get the sexy little schoolgirl. I even get the helpless mental patient, right? That can be hot.
But what is this? Lobotomized vegetable?
How about something a little more commercial, for God’s sake?
Sweet Pea, Sucker Punch, 2011, w./d. Zack Snyder
Searching “‘sucker punch’ snyder misogyny” on Google returns about 225,000 hits. I don’t think any film has been judged so harshly by being misunderstood.
Sucker Punch does present a confusing and at times incoherent story, but I don’t think it is operating on fundamentally bad faith with the audience. (The previously discussed Goodbye Uncle Tom, which likewise mixes exploitation imagery with pro-social messages, is a counter-example of a film in bad faith.)
Punish Me. A film by Angelina Maccarone
Celluloid Dungeon
Comments Off on Punish Me. A film by Angelina Maccarone
Nov 082011
Ranai’s blog has an interesting discussion of the German BDSM film Verfolgt (meaning “Hounded” in German), released as Punish Me in English. (IMDB) Briefly, a young male criminal and his older female probation officer begin a sadomasochistic relationship, with her on top. (I haven’t seen it so I can’t discuss the film itself in detail.)
There’s a lot of food for thought here, about the nature of male submission and female submission, its depiction in media (both mainstream and pornographic), and the influence of the commercial BDSM scene on the non-commercial. Fashion choices are only the most obvious form of this influence.
Elsa doesn’t need a costume. Inside subcultures, dictates of commercialisation and sexism still cause a good deal of female hetero beginners to ask ‘I want to dominate my man for the first time. What should I wear?’. This does not refer to people who actually have clothing fetishes themselves, but to people being collectively or individually pressured into costumes. It is immensely pleasant to see a female character simply going right ahead. Costume? What costume?
Jan and Elsa don’t buy and sell their interaction. They are in a personal relationship. Most people don’t get told by pervasive cultural narratives that the default of their sexuality is sex work. Heterosexual dominant women and submissive men get told just that. Our culture still overwhelmingly frames a man submitting to a woman as a commercial service which a man buys from a woman he is not otherwise in a relationship with. To the point of casting dominant and sadistic women as sex workers by default, and submissive and masochistic men as clients by default. To the point of pressuring many women into imitating prodoms and porn performers in their personal lives, and to the point of causing many men to act as if they were clients even in non-commercial, personal contexts (client mentality). To the point of, in the wider culture and in many sadomasochistic subcultures, effectively erasing and repelling women who happen to be sadistic and/or dominant in their personal lives. It is gloriously refreshing to see a story of a submissive man and a dominant woman doing their own sadomasochistic stuff inside a personal relationship.
A malesub-femdom love story would be so against the grain of culture’s rules about love, sexuality and gender that it might be illegible as a love story. People would look at it and scratch their heads, unable to understand it.
Aug 232011
The Mondo 70 film blog has an interesting series of posts (from 2009) on exploitation classic (?) Goodbye Uncle Tom (I previously discussed the Italian director’s cut), including one that directly addresses the depiction of sexuality in this film.
I’ve described Tom as an attempt to show compassion toward the victims of slavery. But someone might well question whether it’s compassionate to stare at someone’s absolute subjugation and humiliation — or to have people re-enact the subjugation and humiliation of their ancestors. After all, as some racists believe, the Bible relates that Noah cursed Ham and his son Canaan, turning their descendants black, because Ham stared at Noah’s drunken nakedness. [Filmmakers] Jacopetti & Prosperi’s reading of scripture raises the stakes even further. They have a white preacher state that Ham and Canaan were cursed for castrating Noah. This may have been another, even more subconscious warning to the audience about the implications of what they would see in Tom.
…
The sensuality and sexuality is an important part of the story of slavery as told by Jacopetti & Prosperi. Slavery as practiced on the plantations had an inevitably sexual aspect because of the intimacy shared by slaves and masters. Tom makes the controversial and perhaps unacceptable suggestion that sex was not only a way for masters to dominate slaves, but also a way for slaves to negotiate their standing with masters. We see a heavy-footed Mammy castigating a girl for going to bed with Massa while still a virgin, and a supposed 13 year old girl urging the man behind the camera (in the Director’s Cut this is supposed to be a historical person relating an actual experience, but in the American version it may be one of our time-travelling narrators) to take her maidenhead. She helpfully offers the man a whip in case he needs that to get into the right frame of mind.
Goodbye Uncle Tom seems to fall into the same pit as other, 19th century attempts to humanize slaves by showing them as capable of suffering, but neglects to show them as capable of any other response to their conditions. The flipside of suffering is rage (masochism to sadism) and the film suggests that those are the only two responses for blacks, and it is only a matter of time until 300 years of pent-up rage explodes in helter-skelter.
Aug 162011
Continuing my discussion of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the function of violence, here’s the Room 101 scene from the American 1956 film version.
Note that the story pretty closely follows the book and the other two film versions: the electric shocks, the “How many fingers?” routine, Winston seeing his degraded self in the mirror. You can see how much of a perverse initiator O’Brien is (called O’Connor in this adaptation), guiding Winston room to room, preparing him for each stage of his descent into hell.
Jul 282011
The Secret History of Rock has a post and clips on the influence of the sword-and-sorcery (known as peplum) films, both European and American, and their aesthetic, contrasted with the stodginess of the 50s and 60s.
The formula was simple- an American muscleman playing a mythic hero (usually Hercules or one of his equivalents), an evil king or queen, a scheming priesthood bent on human sacrifice, a virtuous maiden in need of rescue and lots and lots of exposed Mediterranean flesh for every possible taste. To an America stuck in the corporate monotony of the Cold War, these films were like an explosion of pure id, an atavistic knife to the heart of a denatured West.
I would add a lot of slavery-type imagery: women imprisoned and auctioned, virtue in distress. This of course went into the Frank Frazetta-Boris Vallejo school of paperback cover art and heavy metal album covers, etc, etc.
Jul 272011
Back in 2004, German novelist Thor Kunkel claimed that he had discovered a secret chapter in the secrets-filled history of pornography: porn produced in Nazi Germany. From UK newspaper The Guardian:
Before submitting his manuscript to his publisher last summer, Kunkel had researched long and hard into one of the most subterranean aspects of the Nazi era – a series of erotic home movies known as the Sachsenwald films, shot secretly in 1941. Officially, pornography was forbidden under the Nazis; in reality, however, the films were not only screened privately for the amusement of senior Nazi figures, but were also traded in north Africa for insect repellent and other commodities.
Kunkel discovered two of the black and white films – the pastoral Desire in the Woods and The Trapper. In one of them, a man ties a naked woman to a tree. Incredibly, Kunkel tracked down the actress some 60 years after her woodland nude scene, living in an old people’s home outside Hamburg. “I found her via a photographer who had known her since she was 14, when she posed for nude photographs,” Kunkel says.
The 83-year-old was slightly taken aback by the novelist’s visit, but agreed to help. She could recall only two “polite, charming men” who approached her outside a tobacconist’s kiosk in Berlin. The men had driven her and her sister in a black Opel Admiral – the saloon car favoured by the Gestapo – to the woods outside Hamburg. There she had disrobed.
“She told me she and her sister had had a threesome with a man. I found this a bit surprising,” Kunkel says. The novelist never did discover who the director of the film was, but he used the movies as the framework for his 622-page manuscript, which his publisher, Rowohlt, had originally lauded as a “packed, minutely researched portrait of morbid Nazi society … and the demise of the Third Reich.”
Kunkel also interviewed 57 elderly German soldiers who had served with Erwin Rommel in north Africa, where much of the novel is set. They confirmed what he already suspected – that during the second world war, the German military traded Nazi pornography with the locals. The Sachsenwald films even ended up in the hands of the Bey of Tunis, a regent with a legendary collection of pornography. “It was the thing the locals were most interested in. In return, the soldiers got food, water and supplies,” Kunkel says.
There seems to be very little about these films, at least in English, and this whole thing might turn out to be a fabrication or exaggeration.
