Went to Film Forum today to see a tasty new 35mm print of Godard’s Contempt (Le mepris for you Gauloises smokers), set adrift on memory bliss at the sight of BB’s splendid derierre –
– and Fritz Lang’s mighty monocle. (More to come, but for now enjoy the trailer above).
But something distracted me on the way in. There was a huge poster of two Nazi She Wolves torturing a square-jawed American POW. The artwork is featured in new documentary called Stalags, which exposes the once-popular genre of Israeli-made smut with concentration camp themes! Here’s the spin from www.stalags.com:
Stalags were pocket books whose stories revealed lusty female SS officers sexually abusing camp prisoners. During the 1960s, parallel to the Eichmann trial, sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel as hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at kiosks.
The popularity of the Stalags only declined after a much-reported trial, in which their authors were accused of distributing anti-Semitic pornography. The film examines this notorious phenomenon, exposing the creators of this literary genre for the first time. Moreover it posits that pornographic aspects appears in canonic Holocaust literature and continue to be spreaded as part of the representation of the Holocaust in Israel, in schools, books and trips to Auschwitz.
More at: www.filmforum.org/films/stalags
