Stalags.

"Named for the German prison camps in which they were set, the 'stalags' were soft-core s&m porn in which downed US or British pilots were abused by lustful, bodacious 'female SS brutes,' ultimately repaying their tormentors in kind," explains J Hoberman in a piece for the Voice you've got to read, if only for the mid-section on House of Dolls and its author, Ka-Tzetnik 135633:

If this tormented figure clearly deserves his own film, the whole issue of Holocaust porn deserves fuller treatment. Does a death trip of this magnitude necessarily call some sort of life force - no matter how sordid - into existence? Is there something inherently pornographic in the fascination that mass murder evokes? Far too short at 60 minutes, Stalags raises many more questions than it can possibly answer. The abrupt, inconclusive ending has the effect of throwing the problems inherent in teaching, dramatizing, or even representing the Holocaust back at the viewer. The least that can be said is that these issues are raised. However artless its presentation, Stalags imparts material that's difficult to shake off and impossible to dismiss.

Updated through 4/11.

"Simply put, this film is a revelation," writes Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door. "Like the best investigative journalists, [director Ari] Libsker patiently sifts through each and every contradiction to discover that something that would seem so horrifically paradoxical on its face proves ultimately inevitable beneath the surface. How could Israeli Nazi pornography even exist, let alone be a widespread phenomenon? Stalags answers, 'How could it not?'"

"Because only one talking head, an Israeli man who thrills at the idea of sex with the German girlfriend whose grandfather was an SS officer, sufficiently conveys how stalags, in their perverse mingling of fiction and fantasy, rouse feelings of empowerment, the documentary remains slight," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

At the Forum Forum with Roee Rosen's Two Women and a Man, a short addressed by Hoberman, Wissot and Laura Kern in her review for the New York Times as well. Through April 22.

Update: "Over a remarkably dense (and occasionally convoluted) 63 minutes, Mr Libsker serves enough food for thought to satisfy the most historically and critically voracious viewer," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "The Stalags, we are told, arrived in Israeli kiosks the same year that Israel and the world were forced to acknowledge the length and breadth of the Holocaust via Eichmann's televised trial. The books were an ineffectual cultural scab growing 'in the thick air of suppression' over a recent and, until the Eichmann trial unacknowledged, racial wound."

Updates, 4/10: "[I]f anything serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when taboos stifle dialogue, this is it," notes Michael Joshua Rowin parenthetically at indieWIRE. "Libsker, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a filmmaker known for investigating uncomfortable topics in relation to Jewish culture (as in his 2004 documentary Circumcision), refuses to dismiss the sensationalistic hyperbole of the genre and instead takes it seriously as a product and shaper of historical confusion."

"While the paperback covers flout vulgar, sexually inflamed hues - the crimson of painted lips, whip lashes and Nazi armbands - the interviews with Israeli aficionados and authors of the Stalags are photographed in black and white," notes Felicia Feaster in the New York Press. "Real life takes on a diminished, banal look next to the hot-blooded, tempestuous scroll of fantasy."

Update, 4/11: "Stalags is most interesting when Libsker explores the deeper significance of this craze, as it reflects Israel's pseudo-pornographic relationship to the past," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. And as for Two Women and a Man: "Not to be missed if you're fond of intellectual parlor games."

Posted by dwhudson at April 9, 2008 1:18 AM