THE NIGHT PORTER

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"The night porter" (Il portiere di notte) is a very controversal movie by Liliana Cavani, made in 1974, whose protagonist actors are Charlotte Rampling (such a beautiful and talented woman in my opinion) and Dirk Bogarde.

The story develops around the meeting of ex concentration camp victim Charlotte Rampling and her executioner (Bogarde) in Vienna in 1957.
She's on a trip with her husband (famous composer who's in Vienna for a series of concerts), he's the night porter of the hotel.

I really don't want to say more about the story, apart from the fact that Rampling and Bogarde's morbid and ambiguous relationship lives again in those hotel rooms.
The atmosphere in the whole movie is very decadent and dark. All the characters carry with them a strong sense of guilt and a secret to hide.

Two of my favourite scenes in the movie (and of all time) are that of Rampling dancing and singing a Marlene Dietrich song for the nazi soldiers in a very dark ambient, and that of the classical ballet performed in the concentration camp by a dancer.
Here they are:

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I saw that film in the cinema when it was released. Dirk Bogarde great in it!

My favourite film of all time is 'Death in Venice'.

Don't watch films hardly at all in recent years.

des

Oh yess...that's a great movie from Luchino!
Like "The Damned" with amazingly beautiful and elegant Helmut Berger....

I, too, saw The Night Porter when it was released. Uncomfortable viewing -- I was probably in the space for something less bleak at the time. Perhaps I should watch it again. (I'm guessing that it's been released on DVD.)

I also saw The Damned when it was released -- and was more in the space for such fare when I saw that than I was for The Night Porter. That's probably a result of my fluctating mood. I bought The Damned when it was issued on DVD, but have not yet found myself with both the time to see it and in the space to watch it. It's waiting its moment, which will surely come.

I saw The Night Porter years ago but it didn't leave a big impression on me good or bad. One problem may have been that I watched it on video tape and it was in poor condition. Also, I think I read too many reviews that said it was shocking and I braced myself for the worst. I do remember not finding the plot quite believable. I would love to give it another chance, this time on dvd.

I am a big fan of Charlotte Rampling. Stardust Memories, Angel Heart, and Under the Sand are a few of my favorites.

Wasn't the film script written by Harold Pinter? Read all his stuff for creepout, and a vague sense of the existentially malicious. Learn to read plays as well as fiction, there's more involvement of the reader.

I found the film to be very disturbing that involved a very controversial relationship between the Bogarde's SS officer and Rampling a concentration camp jew and the fact that when they meet in the postwar hotel they get back into the same Master and Servant relationship. I haven't seen the film in years. I know that Criterion released a definitve version of it on DVD some years ago if anyone is interested in viewing it, which also means that it might be availble at the local library because many branches stock criterion discs.

Glad to see this movie still gets respect, it deserves it. It tackles many such themes, in a way that is not at all forced, pretentious, or just plain childish, in the way that many goths and untalented musicians of other genres try and use fascist/sadomasochistic imagery purely for the sake of getting attention.

Between sadomasochism and fascism there is a natural link. "Fascism is theater," as Genet said. As is sadomasochistic sexuality: to be involved in sadomasochism is to take part in a sexual theater, a staging of sexuality. Regulars of sadomasochistic sex are expert costumers and choreographers as well as performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people. Sadomasochism is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience. (Riefenstahl put it: "What is purely realistic, slice of life, what is average, quotidian, doesn't interest me." As the social contract seems tame in comparison with war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting. The end to which all sexual experience tends, as Bataille insisted in a lifetime of writing, is defilement, blasphemy. To be "nice," as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience—which is entirely staged.

...

The rituals of domination and enslavement being more and more practiced, the art that is more and more devoted to rendering their themes, are perhaps only a logical extension of an affluent society's tendency to turn every part of people's lives into a taste, a choice; to invite them to regard their very lives as a (life) style. In all societies up to now, sex has mostly been an activity (something to do, without thinking about it). But once sex becomes a taste, it is perhaps already on its way to becoming a self-conscious form of theater, which is what sadomasochism is about: a form of gratification that is both violent and indirect, very mental.

Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.

Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism (http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm)



I thought back and forth to comment on this film, but the excerpts of this essay say it in a better way than I ever could.......

While it isn't surprising that sado-masochistic sex borrows imagery from fascism, there is what seems to me a supremely important distinction between sado-masochism and fascism. Sado-masochism is consensual (participants choose to submit or dominate) -- fascist governments are not consensual (subjects are not required to choose whether or not they will submit).

Sorry, I certainly didn't intend to create a strict marital bond between the two. I would say there is definitely a related interest for me, just because of the abrasiveness at their core. The handful of people I have met, who actually engage in sadomasochistic sex, are, though still very much my friends, are too liberal for me sometimes. This is not to say I am a family values conservative, I have little or no interest in either side of the political spectreum. I am simply agreeing, and hopefully clarifying anything odd I might have said.

I wasn't inferring that anyone had implied a marital bond between sado-masochism and fascism... I just thought that it was worth stating the distance between the two.

As to people being too liberal, it reminds me of this from Bob Dylan (quoted from memory and not necessarily 100% perfectly):

Now I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want everyone to be free
But if you think that I'd let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter...

(In case he's been forgotten, I'll explain that Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate defeated by Johnson in the election following the Kennedy asassination. He was far from liberal. The English Daily Express [the newspaper my parents read] liked Goldwater so much that they published a picture of him, rifle in hand, on the very day Kennedy was shot. The headline read The Man Who's Gunning for Kennedy. This seemed to me sufficiently remarkable to cut it from the newspaper -- but, alas, the cutting has long since vanished from possession.)

there 's no intellectual connection between fascism and bdsm....the point is that symbolism/theater is extremely important in this sexual variation and i can't think of a better metaphor of master and servant than a kz inmate and his black garbed ss guard, mein Herr