The Night Porter: An Essay by Kat Ellinger

It is a pleasure to present this new original piece on THE NIGHT PORTER, written by Kat Ellinger, the editor-in-chief of Diabolique Magazine especially to inaugurate the launch of CultFilms new 4k-restored edition of Liliana Cavani’s beautiful yet confounding, controversial film.

The Night Porter: Sex & Death in the Realm of Fatalist Romance.

Described by The New York Times when it was first released as ‘romantic pornography’ Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) began its run of initial theatrical screenings under a cloud of controversy. Roger Ebert’s haughty claim that… “The Night Porter is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering”… is indicative of just how far some critics missed the point. Pauline Kael added her own vitriol to the chorus of moral arbiters when she wrote in The New Yorker, “Many of us can’t take more than a few hard-core porno movies, because the absence of any human esteem makes them depressing rather than sexy; ‘The Night Porter’ offers the same dehumanized view and is brazen enough to use the Second World War as an excuse.” Yet, while The Night Porter is provocative, deliberately so, it is neither remotely pornographic, nor exploitative. And if this is the case, one has to ask, what is it that bothered critics so much about the film?

During the seventies, thanks to the decline in censorship, romance took something of a dark turn. Traditionally, at least in a literary sense, the genre has always been populated by stories of forbidden fruit or doomed lovers — take for example Shakespeare’s opus Romeo and Juliet (1597); its power lies in the fact that everyone is dead by the time the curtain falls, and there is no happily-ever-after. Films like The Night Porter arrived like a crashing wave to put an end to Hollywood fairy tales, which had dominated the Hays Code era, restoring romance to the realm of the fatalist. Like everything that breaks the rules, rallies against the status quo, it kicked up an entire storm in its wake; with some critics, like those mentioned above, taking the film very personally indeed.

I would argue that The Night Porter, far from belonging to the wave of pornography that rose up in the seventies, holds coven with another movement from the period: the destructive romance, which in part began in the decade prior, through films like Luis Buñuel ’s Belle de Jour (1967), or Yasuzo Masumura’s Blind Beast (1969). Other powerful examples include Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) — which caused its own furore when it hit American cinemas, and still continues to court controversy — Andrzej Żuławski’s L’important C’est D’aimer (1976), Walerian Borowczyk’s La Marge (1976), Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love (1973) or Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976). Each of these films turned to look at the destructive obsessive qualities inherent in romance, vomiting in the face of ideology governed by themes of redemption and goodness, to instead focus on love as a profoundly complex form of spiritual decay.

Cavani’s The Night Porter is a deeply misunderstood film, frequently placed in the canon of Nazisploitation; a cycle of exploitation film that came largely off the back of Lee Frost’s Love Camp 7 (1969), the commercial success of which propelled (mainly) Italian producers to embark on an entire spree of like minded pictures: for example, Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977), Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975), The Beast in Heat (1977). In addition, the Italian arthouse crowd had started to examine the theme of fascism within the backdrop of WWII; Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Even the American musical, via Bob Fosse’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret (1972), was starting to sail into the same murky waters. While Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty (1976) sat in the middle ground between political metaphor and outright eroticism.

As a result, writers like Susan Sontag worried about the eroticisation of the holocaust in her essay Fascinating Facism for New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975) stating, “If the message of fascism has been neutralized by an aesthetic view of life, its trappings have been sexualized. This eroticization of fascism can be remarked in such enthralling and devout manifestations as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel, and in films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and, more recently and far less interestingly, in Visconti’s The Damned and Cavani’s The Night Porter.” Filmmakers were suddenly touching the untouchable, and it made certain people incredibly uncomfortable.

Unlike Naziploitation, The Night Porter does nothing to cartoonise the Nazi officers that dominate the narrative. It isn’t a case of good versus evil, or that sadism is presented as a form of lasivious softcore pornography. Neither is the film a deliberate political treatise like the art films of Bertolucci, Visconti, or Pasolini. Its biggest transgression is that it humanises one of its main characters, Max (Dirk Bogarde), a former Nazi officer with a penchant for sadism, when he finds his ‘little girl’ again in the postwar period; a former concentration camp inmate Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) with whom he undertook a sadistic affair while she was incarcerated. On reuniting it is clear that their loved never died, so they continue, even though they know it will eventually contribute to their downfall and consequent death. Love in this realm is desperately profane, disgusting, something that should never be. And because of this it remains infinitely fascinating and uniquely humanistic.

In her exclusive interview for this new restoration by Cult Films, director Cavani states she got the initial idea for the film after making two documentaries on the holocaust early on in her career for Italian television. She reveals that watching archive footage of concentration camps and speaking to two camp survivors was a traumatic experience for her, one that continued to resonate for years afterwards. But it was because of one of those interviews—  with a woman who was compelled to revisit her former camp year after year —  that the director realised for many the war might have been over, but the trauma remained; especially because many of those survivors were unable to speak openly about their experiences. To some it felt like a dirty secret they were all condemned to share.

The Night Porter takes the ultimate dirty secret and lays it bare for the world to see. The theme of collaboration has always been a bitter pill to swallow when it comes to stories about WWII. For instance, Juraj Herz’s The Cremator (1968) was banned by the Communist regime in its native Czechoslovakia for delving into such themes. While, Zbyněk Brynych’s The Fifth Horseman is Fear (1965) — produced by Italian Carlo Ponti but also made in Czechoslovakia—  took a similar route into Gothic horror, exposing informers in the period of Nazi occupation; as did the director’s previous picture set in a Jewish Ghetto Transport from Paradise (1962). Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943) can be read as an allegory on the themes of fear, suspicion, paranoia, and informing, that took place in France during the war. While Roger Vadim’s Vice and Virtue (1963) used the backdrop of WWII to re-imagine De Sade’s Justine and Juliette, with the “evil” sister Juliette (played by Annie Girardot) depicted as a woman desperate to survive the occupation, having sold her soul through sexual favours to Nazi officers.

When it comes to the themes of collaboration in Cavani’s film, much like Vadim’s aforementioned Vice and Virtue, it uses the concept of sex as a starting point for further exploration. When we first meet Lucia in the camp she is a very young girl taken under the wing of Max, as they begin to play out their power games. At first it is he who holds all of the cards. Yet, there is an obvious shift in one of the only outwardly erotic scenes in the film, when Charlotte Rampling gives a bare breasted rendition of Marlene Dietrich’s Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte (If I Could Make a Wish) to a crowd of officers, whilst partially dressed in Nazi uniform (in a deliberately peverse touch, which in and of itself is highly symbolic as if she is reclaiming that power and mocking her oppressors all at the same time).

Even though the scene is admittedly titillating —  largely because of Rampling’s beguiling performance —  it speaks heavily to the power of a woman’s sexuality, even under the most extreme circumstances. It is Lucia who has the power as she manipulates her body, while the men can only look on in awe. And it is at this moment that we realise Max is just as much under her spell, as she is his. Although, while she has no choice but to play the game, he could easily walk away. The fact that he can’t tells us everything we need to know.

Nor can either of them walk away when they meet again in the postwar period. Both are compelled to act out the extreme behaviours of their past, even though it puts them at risk of total destruction. Their shared experience is a secret they both share, and it is a secret they both appear to covet, no matter how perverse or rotten it is. As Rampling reveals in her new interview for this Cult Films release, both her and co-star Dirk Borgarde made the film under the utter conviction that it should be a love story, first and foremost — when Cavani had initially conceived the film to be somewhat more intellectual.

Actors Bogarde and Rampling’s respective performances pack the narrative with emotional intensity; running the gamut from wide-eyed giddy love, to the other end of the spectrum: disgust and shame. What seems to challenge viewers so much is Lucia’s complicity in this. In taking this view it ignores the fact this is a woman who was severely abused during her formative years, learning, tragically, this might be the only way she can love. Yet, the fact that she goes to Max willingly, and in one of the only graphic sex scenes — in which no nudity is shown — it is she who mounts him, driving the penetration, is taken by many as the ultimate betrayal. As Rampling states in her aforementioned interview a large number of critics were of the view “how dare she!”

In his book Dirk Bogarde: Matinee Idol, Art House Star, Dr. David Huckvale argues that The Night Porter is a Gothic film, pointing to Bogarde’s position as a traditional anti-hero/villain (the Byronic mold) as well as his ambiguous sexuality to make his point. I would agree wholeheartedly with this statement. As a fan of Gothic it’s one of the things I love about the film so much. When it comes to the themes of sex and love within the canon of Gothic, sadism, abuse, sickness, almost always follows. This is the most powerful aspect of Cavani’s film. Had it been an outright horror film, it might have been easier for viewers to swallow. It is, much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, at its core a fatalistic love story, in which a woman falls in love with a monster. As such, the film arguably has much more in common with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) — and its damned love affair between Frank and Julia — than it does many of the Nazi-based films that were made during the seventies. Max, like Count Dracula, is forced to lurk in the shadows, admitting that he works at night because he feels a sense of shame when he’s in the light. It is this shame that governs the love he shares with Lucia. However, what sticks in the throats of critics who have condemned the film, isn’t Max’s monstrosity, it’s his vulnerability, his complexity, his love, his humanity.