Nazi Chic & the Dark Side of the Sexual Revolution

Fabio De Agostini´s Le lunghe notte della gestapo is a direct ersatz from Salon Kitty, as Mario Caiano´s La svastica nel ventre (Nazi Love Camp 27, 1976) which follows the Jewish Sirpa Lane who becomes the lover of the sado-masochist commandant of the camp and runs a SS brothel for him before receiving a gruesome final punishment. Some French co-productions for Eurociné followed in 1978 et 1979, pastiches like Fraulein Kitty or Alain Payet´s revision of Ilsa in Helga louve de Stillberg, Nathalie rescapée de l'enfer or Train spécial pour SS, that could be read, in the light of the collective amnesia that surrounds the trauma of Vichy and Collaboration, as illustrating the same ambiguous coming to terms with the past as happened with Italian porno-fascism. Then the infamous subgenre vanished as it had appeared, spreading its iconography in other media like the rock Nazi chic illustrated by Serge Gainsbourg’s Nazi rock, Iggy Pop’s My Nazi Girlfriend, punk Gestapo leather jackets or Nazi armbands (Sex Pistols, etc), already analyzed by D. Hebdige as pure signifiers “exploited for an empty effect” (Subculture: the Meaning of Style, Routledge, 1979, p. 117).

Symmetrical opposite of the women in cages, the women on rampage films presented also the dominatrix menace figure “catered to the masochistic male thirst to see women on top” , starting with the gang girls feminization of biker films –who already featured white slavery- (The cycle savages, 1969, Angels wild women, Al Adamson 1972 or Ted V. Mikels´ Doll’s Squad 1973 and the “ultra low-budget gem of girl gang sado-masochism” The Dirty Dolls from 1974) to western (5 Bloody Graves, 1969 or Western Ride a Wild Stud, 1969) and the mini-genre of Amazon films, evolved from Euro jungle films of the fifties (Warrior Queen or The Battle of the Amazons, both from 1973, presenting an “all-female society of sturdy women devoted to subjugating men”) that spawned in pre-historical fantasies like Creatures the World forgot (1971) while Mondo S&M exoticism derived in “cannibal sex”, haunted by a sense of a decaying colonial past against the background of Third World upheaval (U. Lenzi El Paese del Sesso selvagio 1972; Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali 1977, Blue Holocaust 1979).

In a sense, those thousand of films lovingly reviewed in Psychotronic Encyclopedia, Slimetime, Sleazoid Express or the myriad of WebPages devoted to them, constitute the dark side of the Seventies’ sexual revolution. This soft-core adults-only sexploitation S&M invasion was clearly opposed to mainstream erotic cinema with its emphasis on "free love" and sex as a means of self-discovery, designed to appeal to audiences of both sexes. It was also distinct, in its insistence on violence and cruelty, from the light-hearted approach of sexy comedies and from the sexual libertarianism of West Coast porn and its apologetic depiction of “utopian sexual plenitude”. Yet transitions between both hyper-genres were still numerous at the time. Thus, at the crossroads between soft and hard-porn S&M psychodramas like Raphael Nussbaum’s Pets (1974) captured the Bizarre iconography in film popularizing Eric Stanton’s or Bill Ward’s fantasies, inserting peep booth loops in loose narratives. On the other hand the emerging porno boom also cashed in the S&M undercurrent, from G. Damiano’s Story of Joanna (1975) to J. Davian’s House of De Sade (1975) or A. de Renzy Femmes de Sade (1975), often inspired by the blood sexy genre to the hardcore Avon films like Taming of Rebecca (1979) or Kneel Before Me (1983). The same directors went from one genre to the other, from Jess Franco to David Durston who drawed the same vivid connection between sex and violence that distinguishes I Drink Your Blood to a gay hardcore porn Boy-Napped (1975), subverting pornutopian naïveté from (no pun intended) the inside.

Erosvastika

As an unexpected response to Sontag’s analysis, the genre of Nazi exploitation would become particularly big in Italy, following the high culture success of Liliana Cavani’s 1972 depiction of a S&M relationship between Lucia and her ancient torturer Max in Il portiere di notte divided the audience was divided between disgust towards what looked as an apology for sado-masochism and Nazi nostalgia and the intellectuals that defended it as a dignified appendix to Visconti’s La caduta degli dei. Haunted by the fascist past and the political turmoil of the present Italian cinema was fascinated by Nazi S&M, culminating in Pasolini’s political adaptation of Sade Salo that explored the debate on the totalitarian dimensions of the Marquis pornotopia.

Popular culture appropriated itself of the trend in violent erotic fumetti like Hessa and the mini-genre alternatively designated as nazi-porno, sadico-nazista porno-svastica or eros-svastica, or yet simply nazi-movie. The genre can be in fact divided between those features that emphasize sex and others where gore and horror predominates.

Following closely high culture precedents Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty (1975) was intended to attack Power itself as a corruptive force, basing itself on a historical book on the infamous brothel run by the SS. Sex becomes the hallucinatory symbol of power’s aberration and the Salon the emblem of the general battleground not only of World War II but of human destiny, a theatrum mundi akin to Jean Genet’s Balcony. Focusing on sexploitative elements Bruno Mattei shoots one year later La casa privata delle SS (SS_Girls), collage of incoherent scenes depicting forced bestiality of disfigurations. His following KZ9 extermination camp was a real horror film, one of the most outrageous of the genre.

In the obscure Liebes lager de Enzo Gicca Pilli Kieran Canter, future hero of necrophiliac Blue Holocaust, is an SS who masturbates the female prisoners before the routine general revolt of the camp and the ensuing massacre. Gli ultimi giorni delle SS is more of a war film mixed with erotic scenes like that of Lea Lander being whipped to orgasm, whereas Sergio Garrone’s cheap Kommandatur SS (« the cheapest eros-svastica ever shot ») only presents the poor originality of a scene of clinical transplant of testicles that the commandant hopes will improve his sexual potency. With Le deportate della sezione speciale SS Rino Di Silvestro (1976) manages the biggest Italian hit of the genre, less sexploitative and more atmospheric than its counterparts.

Fascinating Fascism

The very same year of Ilsa’s first appearance Susan Sontag’s classic essay on Fascinating Fascism adressed the growing fad of Nazi pornography, asking how Nazi Germany, “which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic”. Beyond the strange contradiction by which “extreme right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface”, showing predilection for highly sexual metaphors (“The leader makes the crowd come”), Fascist aesthetics

“flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of things and grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets. (…) Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death”.

Most deeply, it is theatricality that unites fascism (“fascism is theater," quoting Jean Genet) and sadomasochistic sexuality:

“When sexuality depends so much on its being "staged," sex (like politics) becomes choreography. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are expert costumers and choreographers; they are performers in the professional sense. And in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people. (…). It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before in history was the relation of masters and slaves realized with so consciously artistic a design. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death”.

Ilsa Superstar

Fetish expert Bob Cresse inaugurated the new genre in his 1969’s ironically titled Love Camp 7 (1969) depicting a Nazi torture concentration camp with a sadistic commandant who encouraged sexual depravity. One year after the “Summer of Love” the unspeakable and un-representable Shoah had become a theatrical stage for S&M private fantasies in what could be called the most obscene recuperation of collective suffering. All the scandal of the sado-masochistic twist of seventies’ psychotronia would be embedded in this pushing of the ultimate limits for profit and fun, appealing to an audience eager of watching the unwatchable. This ultimate sacrilege was a creepy confirmation of Bataillian eroticism as affirmation of live against death itself, reapropriation of the Unbearable and ultimate transgression.

Producer David Friedman and director Don Edmonds followed that transgressive path with Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) who rocketed the subgenre. “Aware of the intrinsic commercial value of Nazi fetish films, Friedman would marry their sadomasochistic sexploitation elements with the gore genre he’d innovated” (B. Landis &M. Clifford, op cit, p.218) . Loosely based on real-life war criminal Ilsa Koch the movie follows the Super-Sadean Dyanne Thorne in what became the ultimate dominatrix fantasy. Like a religious mantis she disposes of his male slaves after having sexually abused them, while making comparative experiences so as to prove that “a well-trained woman can withstand pain longer than a man”. Horror ingredients alternate with porn acrobatics against the background of Nazi medical experiments in the death camps. Supersadist Isla is also, in a significant phallocratical pattern, a super-masochist waiting to be tamed by a super-phallic “sex machine”, an Americanized Aryan to which the male audience is invited to identify.

Ilsa –murdered by the nazi general to erase evidence of the torture camp for the Allies to find, at the end of the film- would return the following year as Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheks, showing the versatility of the women in prison genre –as of the Man’s Adventure magazines that presented Nazi bitchs along Vietcong sadists- and the supernatural anti-heroic status of Ilsa, new myth that would even confront Bruce Lee in one specially psychotronic project (ads for Ilsa meets Bruce Lee in the Devils Triangle date from 1976). Dyanne worked for Jesse Franco in Ilsa, the Wicked Warden, as the evil director of a South American prison-clinic for women and would return in the last installment of the series, Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia (1977), this time running a Soviet gulag.

Nazixploitation

The Women In Prison genre evolved with different varieties such as Asylum horrors (Don’t look in the basement 1973; House of Insane women, House of the Whipcord 1974) or slave plantations (Sweet Sugar, 1972), culminating in one of the most extreme subgenres of the decade, Nazi exploitation. Because of its extremism this subgenre deserves a special attention from the cultural historian. The association of Nazism with sado-masochism was, quite surprisingly, one of the first attempts to come to terms with the horrors of the Shoa. B. D’Astorg’s 1946 article on the Marquis de Sade and the “concentration camp universe” (Introduction au monde de la Terreur)was seminal to that approach, being also one of the first texts to adress the unspeakable (B. d’Astorg, Paris, Seuil).

Against the apologetic “misreading” of the Marquis by prewar Surrealism, the comparison between Sadean dystopias –specially the Shilling Castle from 120 Days of Sodom- and the camps was hotly debated by existentialist discourse: Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir deconstructed sadean eugenics and misogyny in the shadow of the gaz chambers while Jean Genet was adressing Nazi eroticism in Pompes funèbres (1947), presenting a provocative and dark epiphany:

« Je note encore qu'au centre du tourbillon qui précède - et enveloppe presque - l'instant de la jouissance, tourbillon plus enivrant quelquefois que la jouissance elle-même, la plus belle image érotique, la plus grave, celle vers quoi tout tendait, préparée par une sorte de fête intérieure, m'était offerte par un beau soldat allemand en costume noir du tankiste » (Editions Gallimard, 1953, p. 134) .

Thus the second “Sadean revival” of the fifties and sixties would, despite apparent similarities, strongly differ from Surrealist enchantment.

Ilan Avisar, in Screening the Holocaust, traces the cinematic connection of Nazism and “sexual deviance” to Rossellini’s Open City that portrayed Nazis as “perverted/sadistic/homosexual”, distorted mirror of the anguished hypermasculinization of the Nietzschean Übermensch (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 134) . Following Kristeva´s dynamics of abjection, those images soon triggered ambivalent emotional reactions of disgust and fascination, shifting identifications of spectators and refiguring Holocaust as a sexual practice in Nazi erotica of Men’s Adventure magazines of the fifties and sixties, where routine propaganda evolved towards a troublesome sado-masochist fascination –the Nazis evolving towards female dominatrix. Exploring “the fladge market” G. Freeman remarks that “there is scarcely an issue without a cover illustration with a swastika”, worn by female dominatrix or lecherous generals. “Scream for my Kisses Amerikaner Soldat!” (Men Today), “Soft Flesh for the Nazi Fanged Doom” (Men), “I blasted Hitler’s super sin and spy brothel” or “Hideous secrets of the Nazi Torture Cult” are only some of the “countless stories of young girls enduring floggings and tortures at the hands of camp commandants, illustrated with lurid drawings” (G. Freeman, op cit, p. 102) . Books like Gerda, the Bestial Wardress of Belsen cashed in the fad while the S&M subculture of the motorbike gangs started using Nazi paraphernalia as the ultimate outsider icon, as shown in Keneth Anger’s lyrical delirium Scorpio Rising.

Women In Prison

Nunsploitation movies were in fact close to the Women in prison films that cashed in the exploitation of sado-masochism content in Men’s Adventure magazines. “The WIP genre was born from the 8mm hardcore kink loops shown at quarter peep booths. Produced by P.O box companies with cryptic names these loops depicted women receiving punishment as well as dishing it out” (B. Landis &M. Clifford, op cit, p. 242) . After early attempts to feminize the prison film (Reform School Girl of 57, etc.), S&M emerged in Franco’s 99 Women (1969) and its depiction of whippings, lesbianism and collective showers that would remain the iconic topoï of the genre. Jack Hill systematized the generic prototype in Big Doll House (1971), where brutal torture sessions that include whippings and sweatboxes succeed each other until the final and violent bust-out. Like a living set of S&M stills, the picture established lifelong personae for its cast members, opposing busty sadist Pam Grier to her masochistic foil Roberta Collins in a combination that would immediately return in Gerardo de Leon’s Women in Cages (1972) and in Hill’s The Big Bird Cage . The film’s raison d’être is to show the women put to forced labor in rice paddies or in the title contraption. “Everyone is outfitted in halter tops, cutoffs, or torn clothing. Footwear is nonexistent. The hostile S&M template of ugly, sexually disgusting men tormenting abundantly sexy, idealized, unattainable women is set up. The male oppressors are either incapable of having sex with women or are borderline rapist or homosexual (…). The vicious warden is a caricature of the decayed, impotent sadist who in real life would be buying Olga stills at Movie Star News” (B. Landis &M. Clifford, op cit, p. 245).

While the genre was wildly popularized by Jonathan Demme's first feature Caged Heat (1974), made for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, the S&M trend was increasingly present, as shown in Franco’s Slaves in Cages (1974) that became an instant classic in the growing subculture, following a bitch-training ritual before private live shows of extreme bondage, intercut with scenes of supersadist Sideburns’ daily routine. Metafictional as Franco’s best works, the film confronts the voyeur with his own pleasure in a concise and blunt presentation of erotic wish fulfillment. Franco would go on with Barbed Wire Dolls (1976) and its famous electroshock torture of Lina Romay that rings like a disturbing echo of fascist South-American regimes a year after the other Franco’s death. Beyond generic iconicity and political symbolism it’s also “the director’s own perverted, impassioned cinema verité document of his daily job: framing his wife in torture tableaux” (id, p. 182) .

The film’s entire raison d’être is “to show the women put to forced labor in rice paddies or in the title contraption. Everyone is outfitted in halter tops, cutoffs, or torn clothing. Footwear is nonexistent. The hostile S&M template of ugly, sexually disgusting men tormenting abundantly sexy, idealized, unattainable women is set up. The male oppressors are either incapable of having sex with women or are borderline rapist or homosexual” (id, p. 245). In a typical Franco metafictional hint the vicious warden becomes “a caricature of the decayed, impotent sadist who in real life would be buying Olga stills at Movie Star News” (id, ibid).

From roughies to nunsploitation

S&M iconography also invaded “female roughies” like the Ginger sequel The Abductors (1972) where thugs kidnap 3 cheerleaders and deliver them to a high-class white slave organization, standard “generator” that goes on in hard-boiled sot-porn as The Candy Snatchers (1974). Rape was an absolute obsession of the times, from westerns and detective movies to the “rape and revenge” subgenre or utter sexploitation like German Cry Rape (1974) or the Greek The Rape Killer (1976). Misogyny exploded in its most basic form, getting rid of the constitutive theatricality of S&M rituals but showing the brutality of male fantasies, eerily reminiscent of those studied by Thiewellert through the Nazi Freierkorps intimate journals.

The alternate subgenre of withcraft, reminiscent of Enlightenment and Romantic pornography, would bring a mini-genre of Italian possessions Un angelo per Satana, la Sorella de Satana and the “nasty witch-hunting” subgenre of Adrian Hoven’s Hexen bis aufs Blut Gequaelt and Hexen Geschandet und zu Tode Gequaelet (1969). “Rather than explore the links between sexuality, sadism and cinema as a spectacle, these films simply deploy gross brutality in a fantasy regime that poses emaciated and broken female bodies as ideal images of women and the rippling muscles of the “macho” man as the ideal of masculinity” (P. Hardy, op cit, p. 255).

The trend melted with the other S&M subgenre of Nunsploitation, as in Franco’s Les possédées du diable (1974) or Bernardo Aria’s El Inquisidor (1975) and the “heretic” cycle (Alucarda, Flavia la Monaca, La monaca che uccide, etc.) before incorporating elements of the Satanist revival (Riti Magie Nere, Satan’s Slave, To the Devil a Daughter; L’ossessa/sexorcist and Franco’s pornographic Sexorcismes) . Interestingly enough, Ed Wood's final film was the low-budget, occult porn (or 'smut') film Necromania (1971), subtitled “A Tale of Weird Love”, shot in less than a week in two versions (soft-core and hard-core). It told the story of Danny and Shirley, a young couple who visited a mysterious necromancer named Madame Heles (in her sex clinic and funeral parlor) to solve the couple's sexual problems. The hands-on lessons they were taught in the simplistic, weird film involved a coven of witches, simulated sex with painted skulls, topless chanting and spells, and an extended sex scene in a coffin.

Anticlerical in the line of classical libertine erotica and Gothicism, those films claim to show the hard-edge of Western de-Christianization but are in fact delighted by the Christian iconography of transgression, sadism and torture (Le couvent infernal, Bacchanales infernales or Mario Mercier’s La papesse ).

Terminal Sadism

In tune with Warhol and Morrissey’s iconoclast intake on “monster movies”, Euro trash revamped them in an erotic S&M rampage from Jess Franco’s Mrs Hyde to his Experiences Erotiques de Frankestein before the hilarious spoof Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sci-Fi also introduced sexploitative S&M scenarios like in the sex-exhaustive Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) that spiced up the theme of Invasion of the star creatures (1962). Zombies themselves were sexualised in the necrophilia fantasy-world of Le Notte Erotiche dei Morti Viventi… But it was cinematographic psychopathology that really triumphed over Gothic traditional S&M elements, incorporating more and more sexual violence (Scream and die), with more and more extreme giallo from Umberto Lenzi’s Paranoia (1969) to the notoriously sadistic Girl in Room 2A (1974) or Di Leo’s shocking and misogynist morality tale Being Twenty (1979). Hallmark produced Last House on the Left (1972), “an exercise in terminal sadism” supposed to be “a reaction to the violence around us, specifically to the Vietnam war” (1). The sado-masochist reversal of victim to torturer and back that structures the film is one of the basic sexploitative tropes. Six years later Jerry Gross’s I Spit on Your Grave would yet radicalize the graphic depiction of the hunt, capture and rape of a woman by four louts followed by her brutal revenge. “In a cynical sense commercial films got to cater to the large male audience that enjoyed seeing women tortured, brutalized and murdered”, taking advantage of the publicity made by feminist’s critiques (2). Literally hundreds of movies competed in a Sadean rush to reach the “comble” of sexual horror, ending in disturbing psychopathic oeuvres like porno chic Roger Watkin’s Last House on Dead End Street “where evisceration is a metaphor for the sex act”, though allegedly “motivated by a hate of pornography and the swingers who create it” (3).

(1) W. Craven in P. Hardy, op cit, p. 257
(2) B. Landis &M. Clifford, op cit, p. 137
(3) Id, p. 148

Sadean Superwoman

Simultaneously the Seventies sexploitation brings to a climax the previous influences of psychotronia, creating a real “counter-cultural” universe with its own temples and rituals in Paris, London or New York, reverently evoked by Landis and Clifford in Sleazoid Express. The sex and horror subgenre was one of the main platforms of this shift towards explicit sado-masochism, turning “even weirder and wilder in order to compete with the explicit attractions of porno” (1). Following the Jean Rollin cycle of lyrical sadean poems (Le viol du vampire, 1967 ; La vampire nue 1969, Le frisson des vampires 1970) and the Hammer reinvention of sex vampires (Vampire Lovers and Lust for the Vampire, 1970) Eurosleaze horror followed, specially Spanish: Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos 1970 and Les Avaleuses 1973, José Larraz’s Vampyres 1974, “the ultimate aggressive Eurosex movie, with terminal sex central to its mix”(2). The female vampire ruled, obsession of the Decadent femme fatale as a male anguished reaction to the feminist emancipation of the seventies but also echo of the deep masochistic appeal to the maternal figure of the dominatrix.

The Sadean superwoman (Juliette, as opposed to the super-victim Justine) had many figures, from countess Bathory in La comtesse perverse (J. Franco 1973), in Walerian Borowcyzk’s episode from Immoral Tales (1974) and in Jorge Grau’s Ceremonia Sangrienta (The Female Butcher aka Countess Dracula, 1972) to literary adaptations of Sacher-Masoch’s Wanda in Venus in Furs, shot in 1967 (J. Manzano) then in 1969 by Franco. The sexy horror genre also characterized the psychotronic cult of Sade that emerged in biopics (starting with 1969’s De Sade), explicit adaptations of his work (specially Franco who shot Justine twice, first in 1969 and in a more explicitly hardcore fashion, integrating Klaus Kinski as the fantasizing Marquis himself, in 1975) or implicit references (Franco’s Eugénie, etc.). Departing from the super-villain persona of The Skull (1965), de Sade was becoming “the fitting icon for the hedonism of the new liberalism” (3).

(1) C. Tohill et P. Tombs, Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984, Primitive Press, 1994, p. 5
(2) B. Landis &M. Clifford, op cit, p. 188
(3) T. Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, London: Wallflower Press, 2006: 198

Les Pornocrates

High culture went through a second Sadean revival, following the studies of P. Klossowski, M. Blanchot, R. Barthes or P. Sollers and the porno chic wave of the French “pornocrates”, a curious mix of hardcore intellectuals and renegades from the fantasy and horror cinema. Literary adaptations of the great erotic tradition, from Sade to Sacher-Masoch, Louys or Réage legitimized the new genre despite the right-wing criticism of “moral decline” and the left-wing accusation of “bourgeois exploitation” and “misogyny”. Landmarks in this invasion of fetishist S&M imagery, often embedded in a highly literate rite de passage/initiation narrative format and sustained by a deliberately foregrounded “arty” aestheticism (soft-focus lenses, carefully staged sets, dreamy music and glamourous locations), include Robbe-Grillet’s Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1973), Just Jaeckin’s History of O and The Perils of Gwendoline, P. A. Jolivet’s La punition (1972), R. Metzger’s L’Image (script by Catherine Robbe Grillet, 75) or the film commix of Guido Crepax Baba Yaga (73). Combined with the “hipification” of the underground tradition and its own strain of S&M subcultural elements (as in the extreme body art activism of Otto Muehl’s Sodoma, 69), Western intelligentsia was turning Sadean to the core. The “Tradition of Transgression” had become the norm of the “cultural field” in opposition to post-war Moral Order, now fueled by a rhetoric of liberation that went from prolet-kult activism to the “new libertinism”.

The Depraved

The transition from pop imagery to sexual subculture and back is adamant. In 1966 American sadomasochists adopt some terms from John Norman’s sci-fi trash epics Tarnsman of Gor, illustrated by cult fantasy artist Boris Vallejo. The same year Andy Warhol and musicians Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker found the group The Velvet Underground, named after the S&M novel by Michael Leigh. In dark contrast to the Flower Power movement, the group performs in black leather, delivering songs loaded with S&M context, the best known being the explicit "Venus in Furs". Some of the more explicit underground films, often incorporating S&M iconography (K. Anger’s Scorpio Rising or Warhol’s My Hustler) crossed over into the commercial sexploitation arena by playing Times Square adult houses. Andy Milligan’s career highlights this transitional area, his sexploitation films prolonging the underground post-beatnik, pre-freak, off-Broadway theater experience of the Caffé Cino where he had staged Jean Genet’s The Maids. As Warhol and Morrissey Milligan understood he could subversively vent his sexual concerns using the horror genre. In The Ghastly Ones (1968) the murder scenes have heavy sadomasochistic undertones as the victims are intricately bound, gagged and hanged before being pitchforxed, disemboweled, dismembered and decapitated, (the image of a woman’s head in a salad bowl reinvents the traditional Isabella and the Basil-Pot motif) while The Depraved directly incorporated elementary bondage sex.

Increasingly exploiting the image of the emerging SM subcultures within the frame of a problematized “male gaze”, sexploitation triumphed in yet another stage, following the disappearance of the Hays Code during the “Summer of Love” and competing with the arrival of hardcore films. It suddenly seemed as if sado-masochism encompassed the whole of psychotronic productions, being the main force behind them and their massive consumption. The extent of this boom still challenges conventional narratives about the “sexual revolution” and the “golden age of heterosexuality”. Not since the Naughty Nineties had the pleasures of pain, sexual phobia and anguished misogyny –to the point of gynecidal imaginary violence- dominated high and low culture to such extent. Following the logic of “proliferation of perversions” that characterizes the micro-powers of a disciplinary society in crisis new subgenres arouse illustrating the sado-masochistic paradigm, from nunsploitation to Nazi exploitation, gang girls on rampage to women in prison, rape and revenge to cannibal sex and soft-porn sadean fantasies.

Sadistic Thrills

Like gay iconicity, camp culture of the sixties was to increasingly exploit the image of S&M, from leather-clad agent Mrs. Emma Peel to Bondian femmes fatales. Echoing its Romantic sexual persona, the vampire became one of the dominant figures of the increasingly explicit fusion of sex and cruelty that ironically accompanied the Sexual Liberation. Starting with R. Polselli’s L’Amante del vampiro (1960) and Vadim’s high culture Et mourir de plaisir it was a mythical counterpart of the new figure of the psycho-killer, often obsessed with S&M sexual motifs. Following Peeping Tom and Psycho, this figure determined the giallo subgenre in Bava’s Sei donne per l’assassino (1964), being the ultimate construction of the medical and legal micro-powers (“a madness that would be a crime, a crime that would be madness” according to Foucault’s famous analysis (1)). It combined with earlier Sadean prototypes as the mad doctor or the deranged and sublime artist (from Corman’s humorous Bucket of Blood of 1959 to Jack Hill’s cheap and crude Blood Bath in 1966).

The traditional Sadean imagery was also revived through figures as the beautiful women tortured by lecherous priests in Andy Milligan’s Naked Witch (1961) while more modern iconography was being introduced from men’s adventure magazines. Exotic sadism was introduced by the Mondo films, promising “authentic catalogs of cruelty” like Sadismo (1967) that combined newsreel footage of Nazi atrocities with a lengthy medieval torture chamber sequence. S&M sexploiters Bob Cresse and R. L. Frost indulged in their own variants of the genre, Mondo Bizarro and Mondo Freudo while Stan Borden repackaged his Olga trilogy as Mondo Obscenita (66).

Representation of S&M iconography and constitution of a distinct subculture run in parallel. While the London rubber fetish magazine Pussy Cat was published in 1964, the first European gay leather club, Sixty-Nine Club, was founded in London two years later. The pornographic “undergowth of literature” studied by G. Freeman in 1967 was literally invaded by S&M from Two Spanking Teenagers or Teenage Thrashing to The Duchess of Pain or My Naughty Wife. “Women are pounded to a bloody pulp under the hooves of horses ridden by other women who are themselves constricted by harnesses which cut the flesh; monks and nuns perform medieval cruelties on young girls, tramps rape the bleeding bodies of women trapped in the cellars of old houses; prison wardresses in boots with spiked heels stamp under the faces of bound men”, summarizes Freeman in his cult essay on The undergrowth of literature (2). The major trends and genres of sexploitation are already recognizable in this literature derived from earlier Spicy pulps

“It came as something of a shock, says Freeman, to find that almost all the pornography available in England must be centred round sadism. 90% of pornographic books imported are sado-masochistic” (p. 79). Ten years earlier, in his seminal cultural study of working-class Uses of Literacy, R. Hoggart signaled the rise of novels “in which sex seems to be regarded as thrilling only when it is sadistic” (London, Penguin, 1957, p. 260). The massive presence of English vice sub-literature was a constant trait of British erotica since the Victorian era but its exclusivity at the end of the sixties is in itself an important symptom, as analized at the very same time by I. Gibson in his classic study The English Vice, Beating, Sex, and Shame in Victorian England and After (Duckworth, 1978).

(1) M. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, 1988, 135-6
(2) The undergowth of literature, Londres, Panther Books, 1967, p.111

Satan in High Heels

In the United States it was also from the peripheries of the classical system that this major shift towards “sexploitation” occurred, coinciding with the end of roadhouse exploitation in 1959 (1). In grindhouses -often burlesque strip joints-, films started assimilating different aspects of bondage subculture in a complex web of subversion and enactment of the “productive repression” underlined by M. Foucault.

From the Bettie Page trilogy, icon of the bondage subculture revolving around Irving Klaw’s publications, to jungle-quest or “goona goonas”, native 'documentaries' featuring grotesque rituals and scenes of human perversity –like xenophobic Naked Africa (1957) or Pagan Island (1960), populated only by beautiful man-hating semi-naked women-, the “nudie cuties” shown at 'men’s-only' stag parties were introducing violent elements that would eventually bring Russ Meyer towards sexploitative violence with his “roughie” rape-revenge rural sex film Lorna (1964) and H. Gordon Lewis to the creation of the “gore” subgenre (with the overtly “gynecidal” Blood Feast of 1963, followed by 2000 Maniacs in 1964). Grand-Guignol horror mixed with sex while S&M imagery added to the eeriness of the whole (Ramses whips a brunette with a cat-o’nine-tails bellowing “give yourself up to the goddess!”). A new trend, appropriately called “pornoviolence” by Tom Wolfe, was born: “in the new pornography the theme is not sex. The new pornography depicts practitioners acting out another murkier drive: people staving teeth in, ripping guts open, blowing brains out” (Esquire, July 1967).

It is highly symptomatic that many of the key directors who made innovations in the blood horror genre had gotten their start in sexploitation filmmaking, illustrating the millennial Western connection between sex, guilt and body horror that Christianity took on from late Greco-Roman pessimism (2). Symptomatically this boom of the “sex-and-gore” subgenre emerged from the same American erotic underground that was harvesting S&M subculture. In 1960 fetish producers Burtman and Himmel released Satan in High Heels, infused with references to female domination, being the first mass-produced film to employ explicit American Fetish imagery that would haunt such cult classics as the murderous desert rampage of Tura Satana’s go-go dancers in Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965).

Productive Repression

Illustrating Foucault’s “productive repression” hypothesis a subculture actually grew responding to this normative classification, springing from the traditional whipping brothels and flagellant’s clubs that were so characteristic of the “English vice”. From 1918 to 1941, the fetish magazine London Life published extensive correspondence about corsetry, high-heels, piercing, corporal punishment, rubber fetishism, pony play and similar themes while American bondage comics proliferated and “fledge literature” literally invaded Parisian pornographic bookshops, becoming the dominant trend between the Fin de Siècle and the Roaring Twenties (Aimé de Rod, Dr. Claqueret, Jean de Villiot, Mac Orlan’s Sady Blackeyes, etc.). This extremely ritualized iconography directly mirrored mainstream popular culture like women in distress serials or The Boy’s Own Paper and its endless sadistic acts carried out on “natives” or heroes. In 1946 John Willie would edit the first issue of the iconic bondage magazine Bizarre, soon featuring the mythic serial Sweet Gwendoline which epitomizes the sado-masochistic undercurrent of most Men’s Adventure Magazines of the time.

The next stage of the psychotronic construction of sado-masochism, after the formalization of the Hays Codes and the triumph of Hollywood puritanical order, would be the emergence of a “cinema of cruelty” (André Bazin, Flammarion, 1975), situated “in the shadow of the Divine Marquis” (Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, Oxford University Press, 1978 [1933]) and on the peripheries of the classical studio system. Amplifying the sado-masochist overtones of sublimated and heavily censored mainstream cinema, studied in G. De Coulteray’s classic Sadism in Cinema (1964), a marginal cinema, mainly conditioned the use of “shock value” in order to compete, marketing-wise, with major productions, emerged, creating a specific “niche” that delimitated the possibilities of transgression in the evolving standards of a perplexed and anguished society.

It was the birth of the “immoral tales” of European sex and horror movies studied by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs. While Pauline Reage’s Story of O reinvented sado-masochist high culture imagery (1954) Mario Bava explored their sublimated version in the Gothic tradition, Italianized and at the same time literalized with Sadean and Swinburnean echoes as reveals the title La Fusta e il Corpo (1963), followed by a host of productions like Massimo Pupillo’s Il Boia scarlatto (aka Bloody Pit of Horror, 1965). Closely related to this reinvention of Gothic sexuality Italian fumetti neri redefined the comic-book genre with such S&M icons as Angiolini’s Isabella (1966) or Leone Frollo’s Maghella.

British S&M Gothic was not left behind, starting with Sadean early movies like The Hellfire Club (1960) or John Gilling’s Flesh and the Fiends (id). The subgenre of “sex and sadism” was also receiving a Goyaesque touch in Jess Franco´s early productions where tortured women were the dark side of sex-symbols, “scream queens” of an increasingly sado-masochistic imagery that goes from Miss Muerte (1965) to the sleazy Necronomicon (1967). Nourished by the French fantastique tradition, Franco’s cinema blended romanticism and the decadent tradition with buñuelesque surrealism, spicy pulps and old serials, comic strips and jazzy improvisation. Other peripheral cinematographies were willing to cash-in with the new trend, as pathologically macho Mexican horror (Federico Curiel’s El Imperio de Dracula, 1966), Filipino sex monsters of Brides of Blood (1968), Brazilian necrophilia rituals of Zé do Caixao or, more explicitly, Japan extreme S&M thrillers like Jigokuben (1969) or Moju (1969), leading to the idiosyncratic subgenre of sexual tortures –oscillating between ars erotica and scientia sexualis- illustrated by Sejun Suzuki’s Nikoti No Mura (1963), Wakamatsu´s and Teruo Ishii´s oeuvre or Akira Inoue’s Hiroku Onna-ro of 1967.

The narrative excuse used for the film’s non-stop sexual violence "is the imprisonment of a young woman (Yasuda) in the 18th century on suspicion of murder. The film dwells on her painful experiences and graphically portrays her stepfather being tortured to death. As an added twist, her main tormentor in prison is later revealed to be her long-lost sister. Unlike American sex-and-gore movie-makers, Japanese practitioners rarely slip into the torture-for-fun-and-profit attitude (….) avoiding the cultural conservatism what refuses to take responsibility for the unpalatable fantasies they exploit” (P. Hardy, The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror, London: Aurum, 1993, p. 189).

Happiness through Suffering

Simultaneously sado-masochism was being constructed by medical and legal sexology discourses as the ultimate model of what Foucault termed the “proliferation of perversions” that defined the bourgeois disciplinary society and its “medicalization of sin” (1). Combining the attraction of the disciplined body that pervaded schools, armies, hospitals and factories with laicization of Puritan rituals of expiation, sado-masochism was the epitome of the abnormal and the “perverted”, therefore redefining guilt-ridden sexuality. Krafft-Ebing`s study of “sadism” (lust for murder and related appearances up to cannibalism) and its strange counterpart, “masochism” in his Psychopathia sexualis (1886) presented them as polar opposites, often linked to fantasy and involving very specific scenarios that involved some sort of fetishism.

S. Freud´s Three Essays on the Theory of Sex (1905) took on this polarity and described both “disorders” of the libido as a result from an incorrect development in the early childhood psyche, the child’s sadistic (non-sexual) impulses being too severely censored and leading to feelings of guilt and shame that turn into self-harm and an introjection of the aggressive energy. Through the sexualization process of the Oedipus, this impulses became charged with sexual energy often leading to active fantasizing or transmutation into symbolic forms around fear of punishment for acting out sexual desires. In this early model the psyche is inherently sado-masochist, whereas in “A child is being beaten”, sadomasochism is related to a gender divide that makes sadism (a sexual “turning out” of masochism) a Darwinian male attribute, the perverse coupling of both poles being a regression in the face of castration anxiety (2).

Freud uncovers three phases in the genesis of what he labels a feminine fantasy. The first phase, non-sexual, expresses the wish that her father would beat another child of whom the subject was jealous (siblings, etc). In the second phase, entirely unconscious, this wish has been changed into the fantasy of being beaten by the father, accompanied by masochistic pleasure. In the third, conscious phase the father has been replaced by a teacher or person of similar standing and the child being beaten is now a stranger (often a boy because of the subject’s repression of the incestuous wishes). The beating is both a punishment (for the incestuous genital wishes) and a regressive sexual substitute (for those wishes). (3)

In later theory (“The economic problem of masochism”) the infantile sexuality model is reversed as sadomasochism comes to protect the individual from the death instinct by diverting it outward (sadism) or binding it either internally or to a pregenital object through cathexis (masochism). On a more general level it has been signaled that Freud’s topography of the mind is constructed around relationships of domination and submission. While Havelock Ellis definitely popularized the binomial structure of S&M, the gender divide was further widened by Austrian psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch who explores Feminine masochism and its correlation with frigidity (1930), defining masochism, narcissism and passivity as the three vital tendencies in the sexual life of a woman. As in the Spicy Horror magazines and “monster features” this natural female sexual masochism was the ideal counterpart of the “brutalization” of the sadist male.

That same year Erich Fromm published his Studies on Authority and Family, equating Freud with Marx in order to understand the rise of Nazism and describing the “authoritative-masochistic character” as a “special case of a much more common mental mindset” produced by the economic structure of authoritative society (anticipating the disciplinary model of Foucault), softening fears by leaning against a mightier power and the absorption in this power. Against this idea of S&M as “fear of freedom” and symptom of a social illness, mildly equated with homosexuality, the masochist and psychoanalyst Theodor Reik defended Happiness through Suffering (1940), seeing “social masochism” as a “normal” development phase that helps to keep aggressive und anti-social drives under control.

(1) M. Foucault La volonté de savoir, Histoire de la sexualité, v. 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1976).
(2) Freud, S. "Sadism and Masochism." The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Ed. A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library, 1938. 569-71).
(3) See also On Freud's "a Child Is Being Beaten", International Psycho-Analytical Association, Yale University Press, 1997

Trapped by the Mormons

In opposition to high culture’s alleged flight from sensationalism, modern popular culture has been institutionally delimitated and defined by its conjoined exploitation of sexuality and violence, from XIXth century penny dreadfuls and romans-feuilleton to Grand-Guignol theater or the “spicy” torture-chambers of the “pulp era”. Fueled by the fin de siècle “sadomania” that united in similar wet dreams elitist products of the Decadents and fledge porn for the working classes, the marriage of pleasure and pain has been the latent energy of mass production and mass consumption of popular fiction, heroes and heroines being violently abused in extreme sadistic fantasies being the common denominator of dozens of narrative sub-genres, from the western to the “hard-boiled”, from horror to science-fiction and from jungle adventures to historic romances. Situated “in the shadow of the Divine Marquis” as Mario Praz so admirably remarked in his Romantic Agony, these productions present themselves as denegation and apotheosis of cruel sexuality, claiming to disqualify it as a symptom of the perversity of the villains (from the mad scientists to the uncountable ethnic Others that threaten the -Western- world) and altogether making it the centre of attention and the trademark of the product itself, quite physically so in the paratextual paraphernalia, starting with the titillating covers, inevitably presenting the same sado-masochistic scenario that will fuel the reader’s desire so often frustrated by the actual content of the texts themselves.

This legacy was reworked by cinema since its beginnings as massive popular entertainment with such sexploitation subgenres as “vice films” initiated with Traffic in Souls (1913) and followed with The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913) or roadshow S&M epic Trapped by the Mormons (1922) that enacted sadistic sexual subtexts through the same denying strategy, presenting themselves as exposures of the "shocking truth” about the world of the slums. Soon contained by the Hays' 1927 list of eleven "Don'ts" that excluded depiction of sexual perversion, white slavery, rape, profanity, suggestive nudity, use of illegal drugs, miscegenation or executions, the new media found in the horror subgenre a specific and elusive niche of exploring sado-masochism, arguably the main drive of the Gothic tradition. Less lurid than the contemporary Spicy Horror illustrations, horror cinema became embedded with violent sexual fantasies, from bestiality (a topos of Romantic porn like Musset’s Gamiani reinvented in dozens of ape abductors movies that culminate with King Kong) to the “supersadism” of the mad doctors directly imported from Grand Guignol and blooming in Esper and Steadie’s 1934 Maniac. Like a distorted mirror, exploitation was emerging as a direct product of the Code, forming a lucrative fringe enterprise based on all that was to be repressed from classical Hollywood, including “white slavery” and incidental S&M like the anonymous An English story, showing explicit bondage.

The Psychotronic Construction of Sadomasochism 1

Until recently unnoticed or discarded by many cultural historians pyschotronia (in the all-encompassing sense given to the term by pioneer Michael J. Weldon (1)) presents a particular interest for the archeologist of modern and post-modern constructions of sexualities. Beyond the canonical debate on popular versus high culture and the sociology of taste and distinction psychotronia constitutes a “new frontier” of genre analysis and film theory, confronting us with a world of paradoxes. Paradox of a non-genre that displays an hypertrophy of genre-jamming, hybridazitions and constant proliferation of sub-genres, pushing the cinematic genre construction to its limits, paradox of the creators (from formulaic cash-in of precedent trends to wild originality, from outcasts to mainstream and back), of the audiences (from teen-age rednecks to urbanite fandom, cultism and institutional recuperation), of the products themselves (different versions according to different markets and different collages and revamping of previous footages producing loose narratives that become the sign of primitivist and “authentic” creation), of their position in the cultural field (outside of the mainstream but constantly mirroring it, pushing its cynical exploitative dynamics) and their reception (rejected as trash but legitimized by the post-surrealist apology of “bad” art’s subversive potential), paradox, at last, of an alternative and off-beat but often profound and sometimes premonitory take on the major shifts of collective mentalities.

The psychotronic construction of sexuality specially illustrates this last point, being at the cross-roads of the different forces that shape the overall cultural engineering of sex and yet creating a specific vision by its massive emphasis on the interplay of Eros and Thanatos or of cruelty and sexual arousal. Evolving through the different “sexual revolutions” of the so-called “century of sex” this often disturbing vision mirrors, but often differs from other narratives and discourses, specially the medical and legal construction of sado-masochism itself. It is this “différance” that we would like to address here, dividing different “stages” of its progress and finally concentrating on a major shift both in psychotronia and in cultural history, that of the “rise and fall of sexploitation”.


1 The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Ballantine Books, 1987.

The Psychotronic Construction of Sadomasochism

ABSTRACT
From fin de siècle “sadomania” to the “spicy” torture-chambers of the “pulp era”, popular culture has been defined by its conjoined exploitation of sexuality and violence. Heroes and heroines being violently abused in extreme sadistic fantasies are the common denominator of dozens of narrative sub-genres, from western to hard-boiled, from horror to science-fiction and from jungle adventures to historic romances. This legacy was reworked by cinema since its beginnings as massive popular entertainment with such exploitation subgenres as “vice films” or “monster features” that enacted sadistic sexual subtexts. From this initial “cinema of cruelty” emerged, outside of the increasingly puritanical Hollywood system, the sexploitation films of the 'grindhouses', assimilating different aspects of bondage subcultures in a complex web of subversion and enactment of the “repressive hypothesis” underlined by M. Foucault. “Nudie cuties” introduced violent elements that would bring to the creation of the “gore” subgenre and the boom of sexploitative violence that must be read against the other currents of the sixties “sexual revolution” more overtly publicized. Increasingly exploiting the image of the emerging SM subcultures within the frame of a problematized “male gaze”, sexploitation triumphed from the American underground to Iberian “sex and sadism”, Italian giallo, French sex-vampires or German “nasty witch-hunting”, from Brazilian psychotronia and Mexican macho horror to Japanese sexual tortures. Following the “proliferation of perversion” that characterizes the micro-powers of a disciplinary society in crisis new subgenres arise illustrating the sado-masochistic paradigm, from nunsploitation to nazi exploitation, gang girls on rampage to women in prison, rape and revenge to cannibal sex and soft-porn sadean fantasies. We will try to explain this “global epidemic” of SM imagery as a deliberate cultural “construction” that reflects the inflationary reaction of symbolic powers under stress as well as the corroding creativity of fringe subcultures liberated by a massive paradigm shift.