October 2001 |
When it was released, Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) was such a
huge box office success that it inspired the so-called Nazi-porn genre, which
included films like The Last Orgy of the Third Reich and Camp of Love (Liehm 259).
But as acclaimed as the film was in Europe, "inept advertising" led to its
resounding critical failure in America. Many critics derided the film as a
pornographic combination of Deep Throat and Last Tango In Paris, and many
feminists refused to even see the film, even though it was made by a woman (De
Lauretis 35). Based on number of nude and sex scenes alone, The Night Porter
hardly seems pornographic-- less than a third of the film displays explicit nudity
or sex. To discover why this film was labeled as pornography in many circles
and if it deserved this label, this essay will examine several definitions of
pornography, test if The Night Porter fits any of these definitions, and analyze
whether The Night Porter holds together as a meaningful film beyond the
definition of pornography.
In his article "On Pornography," John Ellis puts forth three broad
definitions of pornography from three broad-based groups in late 1970's London
Ellis 83). The first is the conservative right wing. According to this group,
pornography is a category of representations concerned with sex or violence
without their social or moral context. These representations aim to titillate the
viewer. They stimulate anti-social behavior, and are a symptom as well as a
cause of a general decline in social values.
Like the conservative definition, the prevailing feminist definition of
pornography includes depictions of violence and sex deprived of social
significance. But as far as the roots of pornography are concerned, the feminist
definition is broader, for it perceives pornography as a result of general
antipathy between the sexes. Men are the subjects (audience) of pornography,
while women are the objects of it. This perception sets up a wide range of
material that may be considered pornographic, from television commercials to
hard-core pornography in the usual sense.
The liberal approach to pornography classifies representations as
pornographic according to their function (to arouse the audience sexually) and
content (explicit representations of sexual material). The liberal definition
maintains an aesthetic distance from the majority of these representations, and it
makes a rigid separation between the realms of the public and private. There
should be as little limitation on the private as possible, and should be legal in
public as long as no strong evidence exists of a causal link between pornographic
material and anti-social acts. The liberal definition, though, makes a great effort
to refute the conservatives' link between pornography and particular acts of
violence.
Does The Night Porter fit into any of these definitions? The narrative of The
Night Porter is not your usual pornographic fare: fifteen-year-old Lucia(Charlotte
Rampling) arrives at a concentration camp and soon enters into a
sadomasochistic relationship with Max, her Nazi torturer (Dirk Bogarde). When
the two meet fifteen years later in 1957-- Max is a night porter at a Vienna hotel,
Lucia is the wife of a famous conductor staying at the hotel-- Lucia leaves her
husband and resumes her relationship with her first lover. In the meantime, Max
is part of an informal tribunal of ex-Nazis who put on false trials to absolve
themselves of guilt and complicity. The tribunal pressures Max to give Lucia up
so she can be "eliminated" as a witness. Max refuses, so the tribunal places him
and Lucia under unofficial house arrest, where the lovers continue their affair.
When Lucia and Max try to leave Max's apartment, they are shot.
Most definitions of pornography include the element of
titillation-- through explicit images, pornography is meant to superficially excite
the viewer. But with the clinical cinema vŽritŽ of its flashback sequences (where
much of the film's sex and all of its nudity is conveyed), The Night Porter's
sexuality is more grotesquely melancholic than titillating. The most grotesque of
the film's sexual scenes is the cabaret flashback where Lucia dances topless for a
group of Nazis. Max, who is narrating this flashback, constructs it as a "biblical"
story-- he promises Lucia to transfer Johann, another prisoner that had been
torturing her, if she would dance for him. Lucia performs to a Marlene Dietrich
song, but instead of transferring the other prisoner, Max has Johann decapitated
and presents Lucia with the head.
Of all of the scenes in The Night Porter, the cabaret scene is the one that
borderlines the most on being pornographic. The pre-WWII Weimar cabarets
were meant to be as titillating as they were sophisticated. In The Night Porter, the
Nazi's parody on the cabaret shows men exhibiting behavior that the right wing
and feminists warn against: they are exploiting a teenage girl in a way that is
both anti-social and anti-civilization. In presenting Lucia with a man's head, Max
is shown as even more depraved. Nevertheless, Cavani's treatment of the
scene-- from Max's somber narration, to the bleak colors of the set, to the
decapitated head is never shown in detail (edges of it are shown on the screen),
and especially to Lucia's mutely horrified reaction-- makes it clear that while
Cavani sympathizes with Max, she does not sanction this action. But Cavani
includes this scene in the film, not to be titillating or exploitive, but to show the
extent of the sexual dysfunction that took place in the concentration camps. Both
Max and Lucia were forced to participate in this dysfunction.
With its serious treatment of a potentially titillating scenario, the cabaret
scene gives a clue as to why The Night Porter was labeled as pornography. The
concept of pornography is commonly tied to the concept of obscenity-- that
which is lewd or morally indecent. Looking at the film's central sadomasochistic
relationship in the setting of the Holocaust, even The Night Porter's most liberal
proponents admit that the film's subject matter is doubly obscene. With this in
mind, I expected a level of matching polemics in the film's treatment of obscene
material. I was surprised to watch the film and find that Cavani spends as much
time placing Max and Lucia in a social and moral context-- that of the hotel, the
tribunal, the city of Vienna-- as she does on the lovers' relationship. I was later
surprised to read one New York Times critic Vincent Canby's response to the film,
which said that "Miss Cavani is less interested in the banality of evil or its
psychology than in what she tries to picture as the eroticism of it" (Pullicino). For
me, the film is so tied to its social setting that it turned out to be more of a
complex meditation on power than a simplistic eroticization of the concentration
camps (Michalczyk 101).
Ellis's "On Pornography" and Lesley Stern's "The Body as Evidence" both
put forth the idea for a new conceptualization of the sexual cinema. Ellis suggests
that filmmakers need to look beyond fetishism into the actual nature of sexual
passion (Ellis 100). Stern suggests that female fantasy needs to be explored as an
alternative to male fantasy (Stern 59). Both argue that fantasy, in being repetitive
and pleasurable if not always completely satisfactory, has something to say
about the elusive nature of desire. We fetishize because we are unfulfilled, and
cinema, in showing the condition of desire rather than the nature of it-- how it
works rather than why it works-- perpetuates fetishism, particularly male
fetishism of the female.
On the level of explicit representation, The Night Porter is not as sexual as
Deep Throat or even Last Tango in Paris. Nevertheless, it advances the maturation
of the sexual cinema by examining the nature of desire in both a feminist and a
larger social context. At its broadest societal level, The Night Porter examines
sexual fantasy in a totalitarian system. In a political system where the strong treat
the weak as slaves and objects, fetishism is much more likely. Women like Lucia
are fetishized, but when Lucia and other prisoners watch a fellow prisoner
tortured by sodomy, Cavani makes it clear that men are nearly as vulnerable to
fetishism.
Though Max fetishizes Lucia (particularly in the cabaret scene), Cavani
takes care not to fetishize Max or Lucia. Her approach to both characters is
extremely subjective, but it is still a dialectic-- Max and Lucia's relationship is
made to be an understandable outcome of an illogical, monstrous system. Their
affair is an unsparing metaphor on the condition between men and women (De
Lauretis 37). On the surface, one figure is an oppressor while the other figure is a
victim, but on deeper levels, both are victims and oppressors who alternately
propagate and fight against a cycle of cruelty and guilt.
Part of how Cavani carries out her subjective, non-objectifying treatment
of Max and Lucia is to place them both in a space generally reserved for women:
the domestic interior, where both willingly surrender their power. Setting rather
than character is where Cavani's subjective voice often emerges the most. In an
interview with Claire Clouzot, Cavani remarks:
Beginning with The Night Porter, the true facts, and the actors within the
scenes, are not a reality. My point of view is beyond time, beyond realism. The
atmosphere of a place, a room, a road is transformed. My desire is to interpret them into
a space of fantasy. They are mood provoking. In order to achieve this, I break the rules of
cinematography; for example, I place lights to imply windows where there are none. This
strategy evokes places beyond phenomenological reality, which make up my own reality,
as dreams (Marrone 82-83).
Privileging the interior space over the exterior space and putting her
protagonists into this space, Cavani puts her characters-- particularly the male
character of Max-- into a "subject-position that is more classically Ômasculine'
than feminine" (Silverman 119). This is an unusual way of making a feminist
statement, for it does not take the usual approach of feminist resistance to male
oppression. Lucia is oppressed by Max, but Max is also in a submissive position,
for in sequestering Lucia and himself in his small apartment, he renounces the
power that the informal Nazi tribune is on the verge of giving him.
The submissive positions of both Lucia and Max reflect a theme that is
prevalent through much of Cavani's work: the symbiosis between good and evil
(Marrone 84). To Cavani, evil prevails over virtue to the point that it subsumes
it-- in each person, there is no separation between good and evil, there is only
separation between right and wrong. Cavani formed this perspective from her
work as a documentary filmmaker. In 1965, when she was commissioned to
make a documentary on women in the resistance, Cavani interviewed a
Holocaust survivor: "She could not forgive the Nazis for making her aware of
people's capacity for evil. But she gave me no details; she only told me not to
expect a victim to be always innocent because a victim too is a person" (Liehm
263). This does not mean that victims are as evil as their oppressors or that
oppressors are free from guilt, but Cavani's perspective invites are more wide-
reaching examination of the systematic effects of oppression on both women and
men.
The Night Porter is commonly compared to Last Tango in Paris, and De
Lauretis argues that the film's non-objectifying treatment of Max and Lucia make
it a feminist counterpoint to Tango's treatment of Paul as a tortured man and
Jeanne as the exotic Other (De Lauretis 38). Neither viewpoint is more valid than
the other since both exist, though it could be argued that Bertolucci's viewpoint
was easier for critics to digest since for both men and women, it is more
commonly held, examined, and exposed. Nonetheless, all artists have the right to
create material that advances the narrative of her work, whether they are
producing a masterpiece of art of a simplistic piece of sexual titillation. Ellis
makes the point that many of the filmmakers in the pornography industry are
somewhat mute on this subject; instead, pornography's most vocal defendants
are liberals that argue for artists' rights.
As much as I am a proponent of artist's rights, I do not think that free
rights always perpetuates valuable art-- the nature of the capitalistic marketplace
frequently inhibits the diverse exposure that free rights may allow. As the
musicologist William Osborne said, "Interest in the arts doesn't just happen on
its own. It requires an effort, a level of intelligence, commitment, and human
dignity that societies must cultivate" (Osborne). In fact, I think Ellis's point
implies that many pornographic filmmakers are first and foremost of the
marketplace-- since their films are often manufactured products, very little
thought is given to "advancing the narrative," or at least a narrative that is
repetitive and derivative.
Many liberals, feminists, and critics missed a great opportunity with The
Night Porter, for it takes an insightful, fresh approach to a highly original
narrative that is all the more important for its polemicsm. There was no doubt
that The Night Porter would offend many in the right wing, but perhaps part of
the reason why the film was deemed offensive to the left wing is that it takes an
unsparing, look at Nazism and its impact on men and women. In order for
societies to learn from its mistakes, this kind of rigor is necessary. Cavani takes
this approach that is at once deeply unromantic, deeply humane,
and-- surprisingly-- deeply feminine.
Works Cited
De Lauretis, Teresa. "Cavani's Night Porter: A Woman's Film?" in Film Quarterly,
30:2, Winter 1976/77, pp 35-38.
Ellis, John. "On Pornography." in Screen, 21:1, Spring 1980, pp 81-108.
Liehm, Mira. Passsion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984.
Marrone, Gaetana. The Gaze and Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Michalczyk, John. The Italian Political Filmmakers. Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 1986.
Osborne, William. Personal e-mail to the International Alliance of Women In
Music. 5 September 2001.
Pullicino, Paul. "Lena Wertmuller and Liliana Cavani: Knee-jerk Anger and Slow
Understanding for the Black Sheep of Italian Feminist Film. (Italian
contemporary women film-makers 1973-1976)." Part of Personal
Homepage. 19 October 2001.
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Stern, Lesley. "The Body As Evidence." in Screen, 23:5, November/December
1982, pp. 39-60.