Title: Gendered Viewing Strategies: A Critique Of .
Title: Gendered Viewing Strategies: A Critique of Holocaust-related Films thatEroticize, Monsterize and Fetishize the Female Body.First Author: Dr Stacy BanwellCo-author: Dr Michael FiddlerIntroductionIn her chapter ‘Patriarchy, Objectification, and Violence against Women inSchindler's List and Angry Harvest’, Shapiro considers Schweickart’s essay on‘Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading.’1 In this essaySchweickart talks about androcentric reading strategies. This approach identifies textsthat reproduce gender hierarchies, ascribing agency to men while objectifying andimmascualting women. Drawing upon this work, Shapiro apples this to twoHolocaust-related films: Spielberg’s (1993) Schindler’s List and Holland’s (1985)Angry Harvest. In her analysis of these films, Shapiro comes to the conclusion that inSchindler’s List the feminization of the objectified female ‘Other’ is taken for grantedand therefore rendered invisible.2 This is in contrast to Angry Harvest – where theaudience is asked to consider how violence is caused by gender inequalities and theobjectification of women.This process of objectification and immasculation is illustrated in a sequencein Schindler’s List, where the Commandant of the Plaszow Forced Labor Camp,Amon Goeth (as played by Ralph Fiennes), bare-chested, aims his rifle at his nakedJewish mistress whilst she lies on his bed. Horowitz suggests that this scene equatesmasculinity with killing. The rifle here represents the penis. Further, as Goeth doesnot discharge his rifle and shoot her, but rather he moves past and urinates, this“ sequence equalizes the acts of shooting, fornication, and urination.” It “asserts anequivalence among Jews, his mistress, and the toilet, all repositories of Nazi effluvia.”Here we witness “[a]trocity enacted with semen, urine, or gunshot.” 3 It is possibleto view this equation as a critique of Nazism, patriarchy and male sexuality.Ultimately, however, Horowitz finds this critique unpersuasive as the film “ simplyabsorbs and reproduces these images of women and violence, without knowinglyinterrupting or interrogating their production.” 4 Similarly, referring to a later scene inwhich Goeth sadistically beats his Jewish maid Helen, Picart and Frank argue that this“seduction-turned-torture scene does not, ironically, destabilize Goeth’shypermasculinized depiction of masculinity (set against his hyperfeminized other,Helen) but simply replicates it.”5As they suggest, the position of the camera tells us1
exactly whose point of view is privileged.Our interpretive strategy here is to interrogate this privileged gaze upon theeroticized and brutalized female body within the wider ‘Nazisploitation’ genre andassociated ‘filone.’ The films to be discussed are Love Camp 7 (1967 dir RL Frost),The Night Porter (1974 dir Liliana Cavani), Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, (1975 dir DonEdmonds) and Schindler's List (1994, dir Steven Spielberg). These films can beplaced within three broad categories: Nazisploitation/sexploitation cinema of the1960s and 1970s (Love Camp 7 and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS); Italian art-house cinemaof the same period (The Night Porter) and mainstream cinema (Schindler's List).6Magilow identifies Nazisploitation cinema as “ sexually perverted, calculating andsadistic.”7 Love Camp 7 was the first film to take the ‘women-in-prison’ genre andmarry it to the ‘roughie’ sex film, whilst wrapping the whole within a potent veneer ofNazi iconography. The later Italian films of the 1970s followed on from LuchinoVisconti’s (1969) The Damned. They were part of a ‘filone’ that followed Visconti’sexploration of an aristocratic German family’s descent set against the backdrop of therise of National Socialism. The term filone refers to a series of cheaply made‘copycat’ pictures that were rushed into production. They typically shared plots, setsand actors. The Nazisploitation filone were set in prisoner-of-war camps, Nazi-runbordellos or a combination of the two. They often incorporated medicalexperimentation and forced prostitution, and tended to conclude with a third actprisoner revolt. As Hake states, “all sexual acts are performed under conditions ofinequality and coercion.” These lead to scenes “ of horror, violence, torture anddeath.” 8Love Camp 7 pre-dated the Italian skein of the genre, but the Canadianproduction Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS can be considered an English language response.It too drew upon the “carnivalesque mixture of historical settings [ ] sadisticviolence, moments of repulsion and fetishistic use of costumes and simulated sex” 9of its Italian exploitation contemporaries. At its most broad, exploitation cinemadelivers seemingly guilt-free spectacles of suffering and humiliation in which thefemale body is fetishized and used as a vessel upon which sadistic violence isexercised.10 What we see in Cavani’s (1974) The Night Porter is a confusion of theseelements. Cavani came from a documentary making background, producing work on– amongst other subjects – Nazi Germany for the Italian state-owned televisionnetwork RAI. Her feature films can be placed alongside the politically-charged workof Pasolini as an attempt to capture the post-68 ‘moment’. Salò (1975, P Pasolini) and2
The Night Porter attempt to deal with a particular European history of fascistviolence. In Marrone’s forceful phrasing, Cavani “denounces the human debacle ofhierarchical orders of power.”11 Yet, as Hake puts it, it is worth considering the extentto which art films “profited from the visceral pleasures” of the ‘low’ cultureexploitation films.12 Indeed, it is the central sexual relationship of the The NightPorter that allows Cavani to explore questions of guilt, memory and trauma. And, inSchindler’s List, there is a further blurring of boundaries and form. Spielberg’s 1993film, an adaptation of the historical fiction novel Schindler’s Ark by ThomasKeneally, was a major studio release that grossed 321 million internationally. Yet, inparts, it employs the leering gaze familiar from sexploitation, but which is then alliedwith a stark cinematography that echoes a documentary filmmaking tradition. It wasthis blurring of boundaries that informed our film selection here. It is an attempt tocapture the ‘high and low and in between’ put forward by Betz. There are rhizomicthreads running through this selection. Strands that cross throughout the low-budgetNazisploitation filone spill out and into the art house and mainstream. The genreboundaries become fluid. This has informed the films that we have chosen to discusshere. Our task in this paper is to outline the viewing strategies used to unpack thedepictions of sexual violence in each of these examples. We aim to extend Shapiro’sanalysis of Schindler’s List by reading backwards and locating it within the broaderNazisploitation genre. We can trace the ways in which the voyeuristic look uponbrutalized female bodies in Schindler’s List finds form in Love Camp 7, Ilsa and TheNight Porter. In so doing, we can reframe Schweickart’s reading strategies.Aim of the Article.We apply Schweickart’s thesis to those viewing strategies employed when watchingHolocaust-related films that eroticize the female body. This piece extends Shaprio’sanalysis and applies Schweickart’s thesis to the aforementioned Holocaust films thatfeature rape and sexual violence. The categories of analysis are: the eroticization offascism,13 voyeurism and the male gaze,14 as well as sadomasochism, referred to hereas S/M.15 Responding to Brown’s suggestion in this journal, that more research needsto be undertaken on how female perpetrators are judged and represented in Holocaustrelated films,16 and using the categories of analysis listed above, we examinerepresentations of both the female Nazi and the female Jewish victim.3
In a similar vein to Picart and Frank, we consider the audience response tosuch films, their interpretive strategies. Following Meiri, “[c]inematic visualization islinked here to the act of seeing and looking (signifying cinematic representation),which in turn is connected with recognizing, identifying, knowing, acknowledgingand accepting.”17 We analyze such visualization from a feminist perspective, placinggender at the forefront of the analysis. As Waterhouse-Watson and Brown argue,gender rarely features as a major concern in Holocaust films across Europe and in theUS.18 Based on broader gendered analyses of the Holocaust, Banwell and others havewritten about the unique experiences of women during the Holocaust.19 This researchdemonstrates that:[W]omen were vulnerable to abuse in a number of ways: rape, forcedabortion, forced sterilization, sexual abuse, pregnancy, childbirth andthe killing of their newborns. Most of these are uniquely femaleexperiences and women suffered them as women and as Jews.20Coerced sexual activities, prostitution, and sex for survival also formed part ofwomen’s gendered experience of the Holocaust. Research on women’s involvement asperpetrators in the Nazi genocide has been less forthcoming.21 A notable exception isWendy Lover’s Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. This bookdocuments the involvement of 13 ‘ordinary’ women (nurses, teachers, secretaries andwives of SS members) as witnesses, accomplices and killers of Nazi genocide.However, compared to the copious amount of published work on the role of men (seefor example Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men), there is little on the role offemale perpetrators or female camp guards in particular.22 This lack of informationmay be due to limited available data about female perpetrators: the number of womeninterrogated after the war was minimal, and so the kind of material that was gatheredabout men does not exist for women.23 Ten percent of camp employees were femaleand women were only partial members of the SS, serving as doctors, nurses and officepersonnel. They did not run camps, but worked as guards in those that had women’sdivisions: Stutthof, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.They assisted with the killing programme and played key roles, for example, inselection processes and participating in various punishments.24 Some engaged in theviolent abuse of prisoners involving torture and sexual brutality.254
It is against this backdrop that we consider cinematic representations of rapeand sexual violence in Holocaust-related films. These are analyzed for the way inwhich they portray the sexed positions of men and women. As Schweickart argues,for the male, texts, regardless of whether they approximate the particularities of hisown experience, equate maleness with humanity. As such, the male feels affinity withthe universal. Females, on the other hand, are taught to renounce their own identityand identify with the universal male.26 As Fetterley points out, they are taught toaccept a male system of values as normal and legitimate, which leads to theirimmasculation. This immasculation, she argues, doubles women’s oppression. Firstlywoman is rendered powerless from not seeing her own experiences represented andlegitimized in art. In short, she is rendered invisible. Secondly, this powerlessness“results from endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocationto identify as male while being reminded that to be male - to be universal - is to benot female.”27Fetterley states that aside from “the castrating bitch stereotype” (most notablyrelating to the eponymous Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS) where men are emasculated “thecultural reality is not the emasculation of men by women, but the immasculation ofwomen by men ”28 Put simply, within androcentric texts, patriarchal understandingsof gender are reproduced: being male/masculine is valorized, while beingfemale/feminine is devalued and denied agency. This leads to woman’s repressionand powerlessness. We are presented with a curious duality within the cinematicrepresentations discussed here: as Subjects, women (through their identification withthe male) are invisible. As Objects, their suffering, either through eroticization orfetishization, is focused upon with an exacting (male) gaze. This will be unpacked aswe discuss the films.Our task here is to explore how gender and sexual agency are coded,performed and represented in these films. We will be asking whether genderhierarchies and, by extension, gender inequalities are addressed and reproduced inthese films. We do so by unpacking the three categories of analysis outlined aboveand by drawing upon various theoretical perspectives. The overarching theme of ourdiscussion is Caldwell’s notion of simulacra gender code and power simulacra, usedto describe gender processes and consequences.29 Focusing on the issue of gender5
‘realness,’ and drawing upon the work of Jean Baudrillard and Judith Butler, Caldwellacknowledges that gender is at once categorically a simulacra in construction, but alsoreal in its consequences.30For Baudrillard, “[s]imulation is no longer that of territory,a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real withoutorigin or reality: a hyperreal.”31 In other words, “[i]n a hyperreality, “reality” itselfhas collapsed, and only image, illustration, or simulation is left.”32 Thus, forBaudrillard, “[i]t is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even ofparody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.” 33Following on from this, Caldwell argues that in a postmodern culture,‘realness’ is about the grasping of hyperreal tags of identity, such as those relating togender. In this context, identity is something to be consumed, produced andperformed. These hyperreal tags of gender identity have been socially constructed asthe correct way of categorizing and understanding our gendered experiences. As weknow, gender is understood relationally and hierarchically. The (normative) binarypair relations - male/female masculine/feminine – ascribe agency and power to men,while objectifying the female. As Caldwell points out, “the power behind thesegender tags is that they function as simulacra gender code.”34 Based on Baudrillard’snotion of simulation, simulacra gender code, Caldwell argues, is “the postmoderntheory of gender ‘realness’ - or ‘power simulacra’ in that they are based on aconstruction of gender identity, informed by a cultural ‘code’ for conception, andbacked by this cultural conception for their very image-reality.”35 Using the exampleof the American military, Caldwell explains that gender has been constructed in sucha way that masculinity functions as the dominant power-simulacra with regards togender hierarchy. Gender value is constructed as ‘masculine’ and this masculinisttaxonomy functions as the ‘real’ to which all gendered expression are measured andjudged. To paraphrase Caldwell, the dominant simulacrum of gender has beenconceptualized within the military as masculine and this is its hyperreality.36Various writers have argued that Holocaust-related films reproduce patriarchalunderstandings of Nazi genocide. Furthermore, reminiscent of Schweickart’s thesis,these films reaffirm the universality of man whilst reifying gender stereotypes offemale passivity and vulnerability.37 These films emphasize heroic masculineindividualism or heroism that embodies “dominative masculinity.”38 Following on6
from Caldwell’s analysis, we can argue that there has been a general tendency forHolocaust-related films to present masculinity as the dominant power-simulacra withregards to gender hierarchy. Our aim here is to decide whether these filmsproblematize the simulacra gender code. Or, ultimately, are they folded back within amasculinized hyperreality. We map out this discussion across three overlappingdiscussions. Firstly, we look to the framing of the female body. Our focus then drawsback to consider the ways in which the female-as-object is regarded by the male gaze.Finally, we see how the S/M relationship of The Night Porter confuses and plays withthese established power dynamics, visual codes and narratives.It is important to note that this piece is not a commentary on Naziploitaiton cinemaper se, nor the wider debates about art, representation and the Holocaust.39 Rather thispiece deals explicitly with the spectacle of a “sexually saturated female body” 40 or, touse Mulvey’s phrase, the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the female body/sexuality. It iswithin this framework that we consider the eroticization of the female Jewish victimand the female guard.The Eroticization of Fascism through the Framing of the Female BodyThe ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of the Jewish female body is played with in Cavani’s TheNight Porter. Indeed, the eroticization of fascism is a common trope of Holocaustfilms.41 The Night Porter has been praised for its depiction of women's uniquevulnerability to rape and sexual violence in the concentration camps, in addition to thelong-term effects of their victimization. Yet, the film has also been criticized for itsvoyeuristic portrayal of Lucia “as undoubtedly erotic and even complicit in her ownvictimization.”42Here we focus on the following scenes that are explicit in their framing of thefemale body. In an early flashback, Max recalls the first time he sees Lucia. Or,rather, there is the recollection of framing her through the lens of his camera. Lucia isstood, naked, in line upon her arrival at the concentration camp. Max films the newarrivals as they wait. The camera’s light shines directly in Lucia’s face. She is blindedand looks away. Her vulnerability in the scene is self-evident. Yet, we are formallyaligned with Max’s ‘look.’ We see her as he sees her. She is framed by Max. We see anaked young woman, blinded, turning away from our ‘look.’ The audience is7
distanced from her vulnerability. The lens of the camera acts as an intermediary andboth distances us and draws us into a voyeuristic relationship between the pair.43During later flashbacks we witness Max take turns in comforting andhumiliating his ‘little girl.’ Max is shown tending to Lucia when she is unwell, kissingand wiping her wounds. Yet, in another scene we see a naked and terrified Lucia, herhead shaved, running away from Max as he shoots at her. Where Horowitz collapsesGoeth’s gun and penis in Schindler’s List,44 in this instance we might see a comingling with the camera. Their first encounter, as described above, is marked by his‘shooting’ of her as she stands naked. Max’s impotence should also be consideredwithin this triad and we will return to that later.In another flashback we witness an older Lucia entertaining a group of maleNazis whilst wearing a partial Nazi uniform. It is the film’s iconic image: she istopless, but wearing suspenders, a peaked cap and leather gloves. She has croppedhair and her body is emaciated. Her bare breasts are the only reminder of herfemininity. As Valentine argues, her vulnerability is laid bare.45 Both of these scenesinvoke a voyeuristic interest – a to-be-looked-at-ness - of a helpless young woman. Inthe former, we see Lucia through Max’s camera lens. His is the preeminent positionof power and authority. We are forced to identify with his character. As Valentineputs it, “[t]he camera represents both the power of a gun and of the phallus,symbolizing the prescient colonization of her body and mind.”46 In the latter, theaudience, Copeland suggests, feels as though they are witnesses to a private eroticdance.47 Again, we see Lucia, albeit in a fetishized manner. Yet, now the gaze isaligned with that of the male guards.It is useful to juxtapose Max’s ‘look’, mediated through his handheldcamerawork, with that of the documentary-aping style of Schindler’s List. StevenSpielberg has been similarly criticized for his “fetishistic and sadistic portrayal of thenaked (female) victim” 48 most notably during the gas chamber/shower scene. Thissequence sees the female characters led into a shower room with the forek
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