What was with the 1970s death-trip? It seems like every movie I rent from that period is nihilistic and amoral. The horror films of the 1970s are legendary for being brutal and uncompromising; perhaps that's why the current, relatively imaginationless, generation is dead-set on remaking all of them (Dawn of the Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror, the Toolbox Murders- the list goes on and on). George Romero has argued in interviews that the reason 70s horror films are so ballsy is because their directors were angry young men. Maybe that anger just isn't there anymore.
But, it's not just horror movies- there's a real nihilism to 70s culture that hasn't ever been accounted for. Even 70s "dramas" like Dog Day Afternoon aim for the jugular. Late 1970s era punk rock is far nastier and uglier than today's "pop-punk" could ever hope to be. Feminism of the late 1970s is far more radical and militant than today's "lifestyle feminism". But, it also tends to be much more desperate and paranoid. "Womyn are living through a genocide" and so forth. In Western academia, Foucault became a superstar in this era (later than in France, where he had peaked by the 70s) by writing books that are so bleak the authorial voice borders on sociopathic. By the end of the dedade, even disco seems pretty bleak. Then you have the sudden craze for cocaine and heroin, two drugs that can accurately be described as "mean-spirited".
And then there's the 70s Holocaust Chic; perhaps there's already been a book on this, but I would love to know why there's almost no media on the subject for decades and then there's an explosion of exploitation movies about concentration camps. Why did this become avant garde at this time? It was not totally unnoticed. Susan Sontag wrote a great essay called "Fascinating Fascism" about the topic, and Roger Ebert, when he reviewed The Night Porter, seemed to dislike the film because it played into what he saw as a bizarre obsession with the holocaust in film.
There are other good reasons to trash The Night Porter, however; it's a dreadful film in its own right. The compositions are certainly lovely and the stars; Dirk Bogarde as the night porter of the title and Charlotte Rampling as his lover; certainly do their best. But, the direction ruins the effect. Every scene seems to go on too long or run too slow. Also, it's the sort of film in which characters reveal that they are shocked by gasping loudly while the camera zooms up on them.
The storyline is certainly interesting; a woman (Rampling) arrives at a hotel in 1950s Vienna and realizes that the night porter was a guard in the concentration camp where she was held, and that the two of them had been lovers. Okay, perhaps we can accept that she took her Nazi guard as a lover to save her skin. And perhaps we can accept the idea that the two of them are so psychologically scarred that they soon fall back into their old sadomasochistic sex games. And we can even applaud the director, Liliana Cavini, for her daring in exploring cycles of abuse (a huge theme in the 70s). But, again, how pathologically dismal is the idea that all romantic relationships mirror the relationship between a Nazi and a concentration camp victim?
And, if you're going to explore these tough themes, you have to be a top-notch director. But Cavini just wasn't at this time. The actors play their roles with the right amount of haunted resignation, but the direction just pauses too often to figure out what it should do next. Most damning of all- the concentration camp scenes are so theatrical and lurid that they seem totally fake. You never get the sense that the camps were that bad, and a scene in which Rampling performs a topless Marlene Dietrich number for SS guards is certainly artistic and avant garde, but also sends the message: "Don't worry- we're not taking all this holocaust stuff too seriously."
So, I'm sure the fans of this film will argue that The Night Porter is a film that had to be made, and I might agree. Just not made by the woman who made it.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
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