'Forget about all your taboos': transgressive memory and Nazisploitation. Issue 2 (4th May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Fiddler, Michael; Banwell, Stacy
• Is Part Of: Studies in European cinema. Volume 16:Issue 2(2019)
• Page Start: 141
• Page End: 154
• Publication Date: 2019-05-04
• Subjects: Nazisploitation -- genre filmmaking -- sadiconazista -- verisimilitude -- Holocaust film; Motion pictures -- Europe -- Periodicals; 791.4309405
• DOI: 10.1080/17411548.2018.1456188
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1741-1548

Abstract

Abstract: Emerging from the Women in Prison genre of exploitation cinema, Nazisploitation – and the specifically Italian sadiconazista filone – of the late 1960s and 1970s utilized the backdrop of the concentration camps to tell eroticized stories of genocidal violence. Our point of departure here is an evaluation of their co-mingling of voyeuristic spectacle with claims to verisimilitude. In this paper, we will unpack how this produces transgressive memory. Drawing upon the notion of 'prosthetic memory', we set out how this genre blurs the dichotomies of structural-functionalist and ideological-intentionalist frameworks of explanation for the Holocaust. As such, a re-evaluation of their lurid excesses allows us to examine the interplay between trauma and affect in disrupting 'hegemonic' memory.