The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974).
Fascism is not only an event of yesterday.… It is with us still, here and elsewhere. As dreams do, my film brings back to the surface a repressed “history.”
—Liliana Cavani
The aesthetics of fascism, and how they enable the perversion of cultural memory, are interrogated even as they are instrumentalized in The Night Porter (1974), a film that remains confounding and polarizing 50 years after its release. Its director, Liliana Cavani, knew that portraying the compulsive sexual charge between a young Holocaust survivor and her former Nazi tormentor was bound to turn stomachs. An Italian socialist, best known at the time for her four-hour television documentary, History of the Third Reich (1962–63), Cavani was well positioned to address the shifting modes of historical representation and the nuance-flattening power of the moving image, which can so readily be put in service of propaganda. During research for Women of the Resistance (1965), another television documentary, Cavani encountered a survivor of Auschwitz who, despite coming from an affluent family, was living just outside the city in a dilapidated, low-rent home. On why the woman remained in such close proximity to the site of her trauma, Cavani writes:
Having returned alive from hell, she thought that people, knowing of what man is capable, would want to change radically. On the contrary, it happened that she became ashamed, in front of the others, for having survived, for being a live witness, and therefore the stinging memory of something embarrassing that everyone wanted to forget as quickly as possible…. What disturbed her most was the fact that in the camp she had discovered the depth of her own nature, that is to say, what good and what evil she was capable of. She underlined the word evil. She said she could not forgive the Nazis for making her aware of people's capacity for evil. But she gave me no details; she only told me not to expect a victim to be always innocent because a victim too is a person.1
This testimony became the organizing principle and existential paradox at the center of the mournful tone poem that is The Night Porter. The film and its controversial reception precipitated the “Nazisploitation” genre, which trafficked in tropes of buxom Aryan prison-camp commandants (Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, 1975) and bizarre erotic torture devices (The Gestapo’s Last Orgy, 1977) for garish kink spectacles unconcerned with ideological rigor. By contrast, Cavani’s film, a divisive investigation of eros as nihilism, is set on charting the murkiest waters of the human condition, moving into the realm of profound Brechtian alienation. By creating an abhorrent sexual imaginary, one that problematizes conventional representations of Holocaust victimhood, Cavani cracks the lens through which we collectively process past atrocities and make their burden more bearable.
The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974).
In “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag details how fascist aesthetics “flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain.”2 Cavani warps and reshapes these qualifications within the film’s nebulous erotic power dynamics. The Night Porter, through its identification and inversion of Nazi cinematic tropes, in both films about Nazis and films made by them, demonstrates how visual media is used to supplant, usurp, and augment popular memory, allowing fascistic structures to be replicated and reified, whether overtly or subliminally.
The Night Porter charts the doomed reunion of Max (Dirk Bogarde), a former SS officer living under an assumed identity as the titular porter of a luxury hotel in Vienna, and Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), a concentration camp survivor, the daughter of socialist dissidents, whom Max simultaneously favored, tortured, protected, and sexually exploited during her time as a teenage inmate, glimpses of which are seen in highly stylized, lurid flashback sequences—recollections contaminated by mutual fantasy.
The year is 1957. After a chance encounter at the hotel, where Lucia is staying while her husband is conducting a production of The Magic Flute, Max and Lucia resume their disturbing sadomasochistic relationship, bound inextricably and enigmatically by their inability to forget their shared history. These encounters anger the secret council of Nazis to which Max belongs. Through the empty rituals of mock trials designed to absolve members of their guilt, the council intends to dispose of all evidence of their war crimes by any means necessary, including silencing the surviving witnesses. The mounting friction between subjective memory and historical fact at the core of The Night Porter is externalized when Klaus, the stereotypically monocled leader of the council, grimly states, “Even if it says a thousand persons on paper—ten thousand—it still makes less impression than one witness, in flesh and blood, staring at you."
The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974).
Max and Lucia’s shared obsession is so devouring that they abandon all reason and barricade themselves in Max’s apartment to continue the affair in spite of their inevitable persecution. With gunmen encircling the tenement at all hours, they are systematically deprived of food, resources, and contact with the outside world, echoing the malnourishment and captivity of the camps. This accelerated regression emphasizes the elliptical nature of history and destabilizes conventional subject positions between tormentor and tormented while calling into question the ways in which global atrocity is mapped onto psychosexual consciousness.
Max is as prone to unctuous missives and wistful soliloquies as he is to sudden violent outbursts, at one moment tearfully referring to Lucia as his little girl, at another striking her to the ground or destroying written correspondence from her husband. Lucia is intermittently taciturn and feral, laughing maniacally as she straddles Max on the floor, smeared with bright red jam from a broken jar, instigating sex amid newspapers depicting Viennese design and architecture, before sinking into prolonged bouts of pensive silence, chained to a bedpost to prevent her abduction by Max’s Nazi coterie. Max’s and Lucia’s motivations become increasingly opaque, their behavior more primal and desperate, in their attempt to access and embody an approximation of the past. The inscrutability of this impulse is a major part of the film’s gravitational pull. By prioritizing unconscious urge over logic or regard for their own mortality, they orient toward a Bataillean formlessness or debasement, a yearning to obliterate any semblance of meaning.
The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974).
The Night Porter was described by critics as junk, pornography, and tasteless provocation; as a “superficial soap opera” and “Nazi chic” in a one-star review by Roger Ebert; and as “humanly and aesthetically offensive” by Pauline Kael. The film’s American marketing campaign leaned into the negative press, with promotional materials that reappropriated a sarcastic quote by Vincent Canby calling the film “a kinky turn-on.” Sontag, in “Fascinating Fascism,” briefly referred to The Night Porter only to say that it eroticized fascism “far less interestingly” than other films, such as Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963).
The tension between Cavani’s prior work as a respected documentarian and her subsequent foray into what was widely considered meritless titillation is generative in its apparent disjunction. The language of lowbrow cinema deployed within the film, with its emphasis on taboo and excess, troubles the aura of respectability that is conferred upon more palatable cultural representations of the Holocaust. Cavani’s tone is far from the stately melodrama of Sophie’s Choice (1982), the prestige mawkishness and cruel optimism of Life is Beautiful (1997), and the slapstick fabulations of Jojo Rabbit (2019). Each of these films oversimplify the moralistic dichotomy between victim and perpetrator, be it through the trope of the inspirational victim, who is canonized through the virtue of their suffering, or through overwrought satire that trivializes the general population’s complicity in atrocity. Conversely, Cavani mines the space between fantasy and reality to bring discontinuities around our comprehension of genocidal violence into sharper focus. By presenting an ahistoricity that is sexually confrontational, Cavani reminds us of our own capacity for darkness and moral relativism.
In addition to finding the subject matter ethically reprehensible, critics dismissed The Night Porter as elegantly crafted schlock, acknowledging its technical sufficiency while comparing it unfavorably to movies made by Cavani’s male contemporaries, including The Damned (1969) by Luchino Visconti and The Conformist (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci. While those films each deal with the imbrication of Nazism and amoral hedonism within the ruling class, The Night Porter is more acutely self-reflexive and slyly metafictive than either offering. Cavani’s film is a hyper-pastiche, fluidly operating in multiple genre traditions (melodrama, political thriller, sexploitation, historical epic) without becoming mere allegory or mishmash, a slipperiness that continues to mystify and infuriate audiences.
The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974).
Cavani’s preoccupation with modes of viewing extends to Max’s scopophilic use of a camera to document his acts of pseudoscientific barbarism during the war. The way he fixes a spotlight on Lucia when he first notices her amongst the naked and cowering masses conjures a distorted sense of destiny; the scene is another instance of dubious recollection and hyperbolized reverie, highlighting the human propensity to reorganize and romanticize atrocity, be it as coping mechanism or means of rationalizing complicity.
The flashback sequences are lensed in putrid greens and mottled grays, invoking the rot of misplaced nostalgia that seeps into the color palette of the present as the film works its way toward its fatalist conclusion. Bogarde, appearing in these scenes as a Nazi officer, was in fact one of the first Allied officers to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. In his memoir, Snakes and Ladders, he describes the “liquefying death beneath the pine needles and moss” he encountered while moving through mass graves to liberate the few captives left alive. This is the spectral, visceral green that Cavani paints with throughout the film.
In the most infamous of these flashbacks, Lucia performs the Marlene Dietrich song “Wenn Ich Mir Was Wünschen Dürftewhile” (“If I Could Wish for Something”) topless in men’s trousers, suspenders, long black leather gloves, and a SS officer’s cap for a group of Nazis and their female companions in a dingy makeshift nightclub setting for what appears to be a masked ball. Shadowy figures in grotesque masks accompany her on accordion and violin, the floor is littered with cigarettes, confetti, and streamers, and Lucia is commanding and androgynous in her tightly choreographed performance, working the room like a Weimar-era cabaret chanteuse. At the end of her number, Max, inclined toward theatrics and reminded of the story of Salome and John the Baptist, presents Lucia with the decapitated head of an inmate who was known to bully her in a gift-wrapped box, eliciting from her an inscrutable response, somewhere between appreciation and terror. This extravagant tonal flourish prompts incredulity, but also presents Lucia outside of the parameters of conventional victimhood. Her hypersexual performance is so commanding, and such a clear break from how she has been depicted in flashbacks up to that point, as a fearful and inexperienced adolescent, that it invokes speculation around her sense of agency and even pleasure. Did Lucia know the potential consequences of confiding in Max about her bully? If so, was she excited to have an opportunity to test his devotion?
The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974).
In an earlier flashback sequence, Lucia is pictured riding an amusement park swing ride while encroaching screams and gunfire are heard from below. Wearing a pink dress and a headband, she appears girlish and chaste. When Cavani presents her as a victim capable of both erotic agency and ethical compromise, it threatens the mytho-symbolic continuity of the perpetual victim in need of constant protection, no matter the cost. In this sense, The Night Porter has something in common politically and thematically with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and even Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), the former in its use of extreme depravity to illuminate the process of fascistic acculturation by the bourgeoisie, the latter in how it demonstrates the banality of evil and its use of jarring thermal camerawork and atemporal vignettes to call attention to its own contrivance. These films work against superficial readings of good versus evil by presenting corroded ideologies, amorphous identities, and a resistance to hegemonic narrativity through abject fantasy.
The Italian memoirist Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, described The Night Porter as “beautiful and false” while conceding that it possessed “a certain artistic dignity.”3 This blatant falseness, the elaborate artifice of Cavani’s premise, is crucial to her sphere of inquiry: Which storytellers are permitted to delineate the parameters of atrocity? What stories (and whose memories) are allowed to circumnavigate the boundaries of propriety? Cavani, through her elegantly crafted refusal of respectability, destabilizes the culturally sanctioned borders of suffering rather than policing them.
The Night Porter, a prurient and pessimistic fabrication, continues to antagonize paradigms of societally accepted suffering. The sensationalism of its subject matter, its tawdry American marketing campaign, and its perceived flippancy have for many audiences obfuscated the intricacies of its form and function: it is a haunted memory box and psychosexual echo chamber designed to expose the pervasiveness of the fascist ideology by dealing in its numerous contradictory modalities. Cavani’s profane thought experiment presents a tragic love story not between two individuals, but between two oppositional modes of representation—the victim and the victimizer—speculating how they may come to be enmeshed, magnetized, reappropriated, and abstracted as signs and symbols divorced from their original meanings. In the end, Max and Lucia remain suspended in time, on a bridge that cannot be crossed.
- Quoted in Teresa de Lauretis, “Cavani’s ‘Night Porter’: A Woman’s Film?,” Film Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1976): 35–38. ↩
- Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 91. ↩
- Risa Sodi, “An Interview with Primo Levi,” Partisan Review, Summer 1987, 355–66. ↩