You Will Love in Love Camp 7: Genocidal Violence, Verisimilitude and the Poetics of Space

• In Event: Improper Place: A Criminological Investigation of the Problematics of Space

Abstract

Emerging from the ‘Women in Prison’ genre of exploitation cinema, ‘Nazisploitation’ or ‘sadiconazista’ films of the late 1960s and 1970s utilized the backdrop of the Nazi concentration camps to tell eroticized stories of genocidal violence. In transforming human victimization into voyeuristic spectacle - whilst making simultaneous claims to verisimilitude - these films problematized notions of representation and entertainment. In this paper, we will unpack how the space of the concentration camp within this sub-genre is framed so as to privilege the scopophilic male gaze and the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the female body (Mulvey, 1992). Broadening our focus to the contemporaneous ‘art house’ depictions of fascistic violence in Salò (1976) and The Night Porter (1974), we see how similar tropes are used to prompt ‘unpleasure’ in the audience. In attempting to represent the unrepresentable, we consider whether each of these films – be they ‘high’ art or ‘low’ culture - simply reproduce Schweickart’s (1986) notion of androcentric reading strategies.

Authors

• Stacy Banwell, University of Greenwich

• Michael Fiddler, University of Greenwich