Following the Second World War, and the downfall of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Italian filmmakers turned their eyes to immediate post-War problems -- social, economic, familial -- which their society now faced. Their films, however, seldom dealt with the actual events of the war itself, though it was always a presence, just offscreen. Neo-realism flourished, as did the Italian film industry, but towards the end of the 60’s more fanciful and phantasmagorical movies were also being produced. The 70’s saw a return by Italian filmmakers to social, economic and familial problems, but also to psychological and sexual ones, that were part of Italy’s inheritance from the war years. These films differed, however, from earlier ones in that they directly depicted Nazis and the Nazi era, (movies dealing with the Fascists did exist in Italy but were less common -- perhaps due to the fact that Nazis had, as a result of their attempted genocide of the Jews and other marginalized communities, become instantly recognizable icons of ‘evil’).

It seems no coincidence that a handful of what are now considered the most "violent", "cruel" and "depraved" movies ever made surfaced in the Italy of this period. One film forgotten by few who saw it was The Night Porter (1974) in which a woman visiting Austria checks into a hotel whose night porter happens to be the ex-Nazi officer who sexually and sadomasochistically abused her in a concentration camp. Director Liliana Cavani not only opened the woman’s psychological wounds, but also delved into humankind’s propensity for intensely cruel behaviour. Before long, (with the strange irrationality that we have come to recognize as a constituent element of human behaviour), the woman and the ex-Nazi officer settle into the same pattern of sexual cruelty and abuse that marked their encounters in the camp. BDSM and Nazism are intimately interwoven in Italian films and in the minds of Italian filmmakers: both are metaphors of power and control; both are subjects surrounded by taboos; both give filmmakers an opportunity to look at areas of the human psyche and human behaviour that the majority of people would rather ignore or conjure into nothingness by dismissively characterizing them as abonormalities.

The exploration of ‘deviant’ and ‘abnormal’ aspects of human nature was taken up by other Italian filmmakers in two main ways: some transplanted the thematic elements of ‘deviancy’ and ‘inherent evil’ to different genres, such as the cannibal film -- others preferred to isolate more iconic elements and use them to create a heady mixture sadism, sleaze and the SS, that could drawn in audiences with a taste for the outrageous, the shocking, and the lurid, (there was even a sub-sub-genre of "Nazi Brothel" films, with equally garish titles, such as Red Nights of the Gestapo [1977] -- the R18+ rated Australian video release of this film deletes approximately 20 minutes of footage -- that were, for a short while, quite popular). From this second group of movies which kept the more iconic elements, S.S. Hell Camp (directed by Luigi Batzella under the pseudonym Ivan Kathansky) has gained a well-deserved reputation as one of the sicker and more extreme examples, a movie which critics have used to exemplify everything "deplorable" and "despicable" about Naziploitation cinema.

I’d heard of S.S. Hell Camp long before I had a chance to view it. Many of the reviews I read on the Net held forth at some length on its status as moral filth of the lowest level, (critiques which are quite justifiable except perhaps for the length of their moralizings). Some charged that the movie trivializes Hitler’s Final Solution and cheapens the suffering of survivors -- so when I sat down to watch this film, I had very little idea of what to expect. Despite what the title, and the DVD’s garish cover art for that matter, may lead viewers to believe, S.S. Hell Camp does not deal with concentration camps or Hitler’s genocide of European Jewry. It deals with Nazis’ in much the same way that comic books deal with them: as uniformed accented personifications of evil. In this respect, the Nazis of S.S. Hell Camp can be tentatively put on the same plane as the all-singing all-dancing Nazis of Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968), and the monocle-wearing Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971). Though S.S. Hell Camp’s Nazis are substantially more violent and more unpleasant than the abovementioned examples, they are nonetheless, representations of deranged figures of ridicule that should be taken no more seriously than Klink or Brooks’ swastika’d buffoons.

S.S. Hell Camp begins by introducing Dr Ellen Kratsch, played by beautiful but severe-looking German actress Macha Magall, one of the few people involved in this film not hiding under a pseudonym. Kratsch plays a deranged Nazi scientist who has created a ‘beast’ with whom she conducts countless experiments in a secret underground lab -- experiments which involve little more than the sacrifice of naked screaming virgins to the creature who rapes them to death. Kratsch believes, (and this could be seen as her own particular fascist delusion), that her ‘beast’ represents a scientific breakthrough that will bring acclaim within the international scientific community. She also believes, (the delusions of the Nazis are endless), that this ‘beast’ will be able to help Herr Hitler win the war. How exactly -- her creature is a fat naked hairy man who makes periodic grunts -- is beyond my comprehension and, as it seems, beyond the comprehension of the filmmakers, who offer no hint as to how Kratsch conceives of her beast’s broader strategic role. Not to worry. This is not a film that attempts to engage seriously with intellectual conundrums. Every time the plot begins to lag, the filmmakers happily cut to Kratsch’s laboratory and yet another poor girl being ravished by the beast who seems to be in a state of perpetual heat, (terribly acted by Salvatore Baccaro under the pseudonym Sal Boris, and who seems barely able to contain his glee every time he gets to fondle another naked actress...)

I was somewhat surprised when this film began to tell the story of Italian partisans, fighting a guerilla war from the hills against an encroaching German army. There was no mention of these partisans in any of the reviews I had read -- yet they seem to be onscreen for a good half of the film’s running time, perhaps more. This strand of the story, in stark contrast to the vigorous attempts to titillate in the Kratsch segments, invests at least some time in depicting the lives and emotions of the men, women, (and in a token tug at the heart stings), innocent children, who are forced to fight to stay alive and protect their families. At times it seems as if the makers of S.S. Hell Camp, faced with a rather ordinary tale of the human spirit being whittled down under the duress of war, decided that they could improve it with a heavy-handed dose of sex, sleaze and sadism. From this perspective, Kratsch and Co. seem to have been grafted onto the film -- and then rejected by the host body -- as these more pornographic scenes tend of float in a sort of limbo between the partisan segments of the film. And although the Kratsch-plot and the partisan-plot invariably intersect, nevertheless, when characters move from one to the other, there is a sense that they seem to be acting not only in a different film, but seem to have entered a completely different cinematic universe.

It is possible to view this schizophrenic narrative split as working expressively. For the most part, Kratsch and Co. are seen indoors, and mostly in what appears to be underground labs or torture chambers, whilst the villagers are seen in the hills, outdoors in the sun, or wandering through their village. This could be seen as reflecting the schizophrenic situation that the partisans find themselves caught in: their lives move back-and-forth between their pre-war existence and the violence and mental unrest of a war zone. It is also possible to view this schism as working mythically by effectively dividing the film into an upper and lower realm: in the upper world of sunlight people lead ordinary everyday lives; the lower world is inhabited by a devouring Nazi beast that emerges from hellish underground labs to spread misery in its wake before being pushed back into its native darkness once more. Then again, it is possible to view the film’s narrative split simply as a piece of poor narrative construction in which the two halves of the story have been so badly stitched together that they are forever coming undone.

S.S. Hell Camp treats the demise of its characters in the random manner typical of many Italian films of this era: some good-hearted characters are killed, some thoroughly-rotten characters are spared, and others meet a variety of fates. This isn’t the moral righteousness of a Hollywood backlot where only those who have ‘sinned’ or wronged another die; (nor is it the idealized sentimentalism of Billy Joel’s song Only the Good Die Young -- Joel’s title says it all). The only thing these characters’ can control, at least in the universe that this film constructs, is whether or not they are corrupted by evil, that is, by the Nazis they encounter. Some give in to temptation, (for example, the villagers who decide to save their own skins by exchanging information as to the whereabouts of partisans for money and freedom), some resist and risk death to protect others.

(This struggle and this choice between good and evil is rather pertinent to the cinematic world at the moment, as one of the most famous contemporary representations of this struggle will play out on our screens in only a month’s time. Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith [2005] will, fans hope, chronicle Anakin Skywalker’s capitulation to the Dark Side, and will hopefully offer some reasons as to why. The young Anakin will finally don the famous black metallic skeletal Vader helmet, and will make the choices that lead him to become the scourge of the galaxy seen in Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope [1977]. Who in our fashion conscious world of metrosexuals and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy could blame him? Anakin’s transformation into Vader could be viewed as a decision to swap the coarse cloth of the Jedi with its humble earthy ascetic overtones for glamorous classic black, cut as sleekly as any Hugo Boss suit. And if this constitutes a trivialization of Anakin Skywalker’s self-inversion, I plead guilty as charged. In the Empire, in any Empire, evil insists on being stylish.)

It seems, and not only in the movies, that the bad guys are always the best-dressed. More often than not cinemagoers remember their outfits. Hitler was and is still instantly associated with his, then very fashionable, moustache, and Nazi villains in general are still associated with and recognized by their uniforms: knee-high shiny black boots, bright belt buckles, and blood-red Swastika armbands. Uniforms are important for movie villains not only because they can so easily express imperiousness or conceit, and inspire fear, but equally because they can express the opposite. Filmmakers can use a uniform to mock and undermine a villain’s power and authority. It is something which allows them to show evil as little more than a façade which easily crumbles. (If we, for one more moment, consider Star Wars and turn our attention to Episode VI -- Return of the Jedi [1983] we will remember that in the film’s climax, after Luke has destroyed the cancerous-looking Emperor, and Vader has been turned once again to the Good Side of the Force, his imposing black helmet is removed revealing a short, pale, bald, sickly-looking and not-very-threatening man).

This use of clothing to undermine (and mock) evil characters finds humorous, almost slapstick expression in S.S. Hell Camp. A Nazi commander, in bed with an Italian prostitute, is interrupted by an urgent and angry phone call ordering him to marshal his troops against the pesky partisans. He jumps up, pulls on his pants, and grabs the phone in one hand while holding his trousers up with the other. When he is obligated to raise his spare hand to ‘Sieg Heil’, his pants fall to his ankles presenting a comic spectacle that undermines his personal menace and authority in particular, and undermines the menace and power of the Nazis in general.

It is not unusual in Italian cinema to find this kind of almost-slapstick humour side-by-side with extreme depictions of violence, sleaze and brutality. A film like Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976), (banned in Australia for, amongst other things, depictions of cruel sexualized violence), contains several light humorous moments. But the humour is not, as might be expected, used to relieve the tension of the film’s darker more serious scenes. Rather, it is used to create a sense of passing through a spectrum of emotions -- a sense that a fuller view of human behaviour is on display. These films show joy, pain, laughter and brutality easily co-existing within the same person, the same situation, and the same universe. I will describe the final moments of Salò, because they represent the epitome of this style of scene construction. Salò’s penultimate sequence is the final murder of all those "boys and girls who had not previously been tortured to perdition" as Gideon Bachmann once wrote (1). Pasolini is unrelenting, but once this sequence is over, and the audience left exhausted and drained he shows, in the movie’s most tender moment, two young male guards dancing with each other, listening to a waltz on the radio, and talking of their girlfriends who seem to be a world away from them. Italian filmmakers don’t seem to desire the depths of human depravity and despair without also affirming life. (Note to Australian readers: as Salò is currently banned in Australia, for those who are interested in an Italian film of the sane period that also deals with the conjunction of fascism and depravity, and which contains a similar shift in its penultimate and ultimate scenes, a film which I cannot recommend highly enough, is Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties [1975]).

There is no doubt that S.S. Hell Camp lacks the deep emotional and psychological currents of films like The Night Porter, Salò, and Seven Beauties, films which, each in its own inimitable way, deal with the abuse of power and the reduction of human beings to little more than discardable objects. The fact that some people find the abovementioned films deeply offensive is understandable. They all touch upon issues of recent history that are still very much alive and still very painful. But how seriously can someone take a film like S.S. Hell Camp when it contains scenes such as this: three partisans, chained in one of Kratsch’s basements, their hands above their heads, stripped down to their underwear ... Kratsch, in an attempt to obtain information puts into action her plan of ‘torture through pleasure’ ... she slowly unbuttons her shirt, baring her breasts: she begins rubbing herself up and down against the prisoner’s chest, kissing him and caressing him ... "No!!!" he yells out, resisting, refusing to tell her what she wants ... "You will talk" she purrs and continues her ‘torture’ ... as she does this, the next prisoner in line, unable to contain himself, screams for her to torture him ... "I want you before I die!!!" the poor fellow cries ... and with an evil glint in her eye, Kratsch promises, "the fun is just beginning..." Each to his own.

Endnotes
(1) Gideon Bachmann, "Pasolini and the Marquis de Sade", Sight and Sound (Winter 1975/76) p. 54

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