Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter has been labeled “Nazi chic” (Roger Ebert). For some critics the film is a shamelessly pornographic fantasy of the Holocaust, a “sentimental idyll … exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer, against the brute reality of Nazi violence,” (Marga Cottino-Jones) using the Holocaust as a mere “backdrop to the erotic/sadomasochistic misadventures of Max and Lucia, Nazi and victim” (Rebecca Scherr); a “despicable attempt to titillate [the viewer] by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.” (Ebert)
I’m not convinced.

It’s true, there is something despicable in the deadly, compulsive  & sadomasochistic relationship between Holocaust survivor Lucia Atherton (Charlotte Rampling) and former SS officer Maximilian Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde). During the Third Reich Max, a doctor at a Nazi concentration camp, forced Lucia, a prisoner, to become his mistress and sex slave. When years later Lucia arrives in the fancy hotel in Vienna, where Max now works as night porter, they resume their relationship.

But does showing a despicable relationship make the film itself despicable? Can we understand the films ‘content’ (the story), without considering its form? Can we talk about what The Night Porter shows (and doesn’t show) without paying attention to how it is shown?

The film privileges Max’s point of view, his perception of Lucia (then and now), his memories of the concentration camp. Perpetrator memories. Repulsive memories of forced sex, of perverse sexual fantasies. Memories that many former Nazis share. Hidden memories, secret fantasies of the past.

Memories are not a matter of fact. Memories are private, subjective, intertwined with wishful fantasies. Often wish and memory are indistinguishable. Consider for instance the fantasies, (erotic or otherwise) Nazi perpetrators never acted on, perhaps never even shared with anyone. Does that mean the fantasies disappeared when the Third Reich fell apart? They did not. They became memories.

Memories are like dreams. They require a body; they are experienced by real people; they are inscribed in the mind of individuals, they must be worked through on a personal level. If we want to understand the satisfaction and enjoyment Germans + Austrians derived from being Nazis, every memory matters, every fantasy counts.

We may not want to see it, but for Max, the perpetrator, Auschwitz was and is a backdrop, a titillating setting, a turn-on.

Lucia’s/Rampling’s exquisite, if extreme, thinness — almost unbearable to look at — is less a “signifier of the real starvation actual prisoners suffered” (Scherr) than an indication that in the film’s reality (Max’s reality) she has no ‘content’, no story of her own. Lucia’s audible presence is as thin as her body. She remains silent for most of the film. Everything about Lucia suggests the presence of an absence. She is a ghost, a memory. Max’s memory.

That’s why I don’t see “exploitation of memories” in The Night Porter. I see performance and repetition. The Night Porter doesn’t ‘deal’ with the memory of the Holocaust. It is less a film about memory than a film as memory.

To expect The Night Porter to offer a realistic and truthful image of suffering in a concentration camp is to misunderstand the film’s formal concerns: to re-enact a memory, to re-evoke the sexiness of camp life as remembered by Max, the Nazi, the perpetrator.

The Night Porter made me reconsider the neatly drawn boundaries between memory and fantasy. “False memory” is a misleading term. It suggests that memories ought to refer to facts, contain the trace of some indisputable, definitive truth. When I remember something that never happened,  from the point of view of a historian my memory may seem false. But it is a true memory nonetheless.

More often than not the perpetrator’s memories lie dormant. They are reviled before they are revealed. Since they must not be repeated, the crimes whose traces they preserve cannot be mourned. I wonder, how long can an individual, how long can a society postpone grieving before it becomes delusional, denying the difference between the dead and the living?

Art can help me understand how memory works, but art cannot remember for me.
- – - – - – — – - – - – — – -

Liliana Cavani, The Night Porter (Italy 1974, 118 min., color)

On remembering the Holocaust in Germany see my essay “Voids”.

Sources:
Marga Cottino-Jones, Marga. “‘What Kind of Memory?: Liliana Cavani’s Night Porter.” Contention 5.1 (1995): 105- 111.
Roger Ebert: The Night Porter (review), in: The Chicago Sun-Times, February 10, 1975
Rebecca Scherr: The Uses of Memory and the Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Fiction and Memoir, in: Other Voices, v.2, n.1 (February 2000).
Nora Sayr: Review in: The New York Times, October 2, 1974.
Susan Sontag: Fascinating Fascism, in: The New York Review of Books, Volume 22, Number 1, February 6, 1975.

A Note on “The Night Porter” originally appeared on unguided tour on June 7, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes

What is the difference between a rug and a map?

I confess the question never entered my mind until two weeks ago when I saw Mona Hatoum’s outstanding sculpture “Bukhara” in a group show at the Belvedere (Die Macht des Ornaments, through May 21, 2009).

“Bukhara” is a handwoven Turkmen-style carpet with the ancient Bukhara pattern, a geometric, octagonal ‘elephant’s foot’ print erroneously attributed to the Uzbek city of the same name. (For 2500 years — until the end of the 19th century when borders were redrawn — Bukhara, was a center of scholarship and the arts in Central Asia. From BukharaTurkmen rugs found their way to the West.)

Hatoum hand-plucked parts of the weave to form a map of the world using the equal-area Gall-Peters Projection. (The older Mercator projection, still widely used in text books is Eurocentric making Europe look like the center of the world as well as diminishing the size of those regions closer to the equator.)

——————–

Bukhara (2008, wool, 142 x 225 cm) Galerie Chantal Crousel, photo: Rebecca Fanuele

I am completely taken by “Bukhara”. This is the most intelligent, most precise, and most evocative comment I have ever seen on the cultural implications of what the western world calls globalization. A masterpiece.

Back to my question, what is the difference between a rug and a map? “Bukhara” invites the following associations and thoughts.

A map is an erasure, a tabula rasa, an annihilation. A map obliterates the texture of the imagined structure of the world it projects; it defeats the memory of lived, material, physical history. It rejects the third dimension. When I use a map to make sense of the world, I abandon my body, my time, my physical space. A map denies me the experience of difference to replace it with the fictional dichotomy ‘Self/Other’, projecting onto the Other everything that is different within the self. But the map offers me something in return: the fiction of the nation state (a homogenous space from which difference has been banished), a mental tool to paint everything with the same brush, an invitation to colonize.

A carpet can be a map too, but of a different kind. In its design, an intricate system of directions, the abstract and the material are intertwined. A carpet interweaves the theoretical with the sensual, the logical with the physical. The matter of a carpet is form: Bukhara, the elephant’s foot print. Because the carpet tells no story, it teaches me about the materiality in which signification is grounded. On a carpet everything is connected.

In most regions of the world people like to sit on carpets. Europeans and North-Americans prefer to sit on chairs. A chair is a seat for one person only. Foreigners often get caught between stools.

The Dutch who in the 16^th & 17^th-century were both known as superb mapmakers + feared as cruel colonizers decorated the walls of their homes with maps of the world.

Where the carpet is intricate, the map is facile. Where the carpet is imaginative, the map is definitive. The carpet offers protection, the map is a weapon. The carpet belongs to the orient, the map, providing orientation, leads to orientalism.

My friend Gulia who is from Tashkent remarked that the discomfiture produced by this new method of orientation is already reflected in the title of Hatoum’s work, “Bukhara”: an Uzbek city identifies a Turkmen carpet.

Sigmund Freud, an orientalist in his own right, put trust in the carpet. His couch, draped with several layers of exquisite rugs, provided a space to recover (from) the erasures caused by a symbolic order that reduces life to two dimensions.

When the modernist turn in American psychoanalysis replaces Freud’s orientalist setting with the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona daybed and the Eames Chair, the carpets disappear from the psychoanalyst’s office.

The erasures remain.

—————–

image 1: wikepedia

image 2 : http://www.crousel.com/

image 3: wikepedia

Vienna 4 (orientation) originally appeared on unguided tour on May 16, 2009.
All rights reserved (c) bettina mathes