When jews are not whining about the holocaust they are wanking over
it.
Taking their name from the Nazi prison camps in which they were set,
Stalags were Israeli ****ographic paperbacks featuring Nazi themes.
How do you make a movie about a disreputable and totally defunct
literary genre? That question never quite gets answered by Ari
Libsker's hour-long do***entary "Stalags," but the questions Libsker
raises about truth, fiction, ***uality and post-Holocaust Jewish
identity are so interesting the film's lack of cinematic sensibility
may not matter. For some reason Libsker shot most of "Stalags" on
black-and-white video, a distracting and perverse choice given that
the Nazi-themed pulp novels of his title s****ted titillating covers in
lurid color. Maybe he wants to dampen the sensationalistic aspect of
his subject matter, but there's really no way to do that.
As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was
afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early '60s, at a time
when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors,
nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely
puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks
of semi-****ographic pulp novels known as "Stalags," whose utterly
implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into
the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed
essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II
pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he
is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic,
voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit
unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and
murder his captors.
Stalags thrived for a few years and then disappeared, banished to the
memory hole as a massive cultural embarrassment. Libsker meets a
couple of the dubious characters who collect them; one insists that
his face be obscured on camera (like a cor****ate whistleblower or a
child molester on "60 Minutes"), and also appears to believe that the
scenarios depicted actually occurred during World War II, or at least
could have. (Just in case you're wondering, there were no female SS
officers, nor any other women assigned to guard Allied POWs.) Israel's
national library appears to contain a trove of them, buried deep in
the catalog software and hidden from public view. Yet as some Israelis
who were children and teenagers at the time testify, the Stalags
provided ***ual titillation in a society that repressed it, and also
the illicit thrill of accessing a dark, secret recent past their
European-born parents never discussed. They offered a Stockholm-
syndrome equation of evil with eros and a juvenile revenge fantasy,
all rolled into one.
As an outsider to both Judaism and Israeli society, I don't find the
existence of the Stalags mysterious in the least. Given the scale of
trauma that brought the State of Israel into being, and brought so
many of its inhabitants over the sea, some kind of twisted and
perverse fantasy reaction was inevitable. As Libsker's film further
explains, the televised trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann
transfixed Israelis in the early '60s, providing many younger people
their first look at the horrific and dramatic events many of their
parents had witnessed first hand. The Stalags may be understood as a
dream-world, midnight version of the Eichmann revelations.
Libsker tracks down a former Stalags author, who still seems injured
that the phenomenon did not bring him massive literary fame, along
with a publisher who cheerfully shrugs the whole thing off: We gave
the public what they wanted, and who am I to judge? But "Stalags" is
most interesting when Libsker explores the deeper significance of this
craze, as it reflects Israel's pseudo-****ographic relation****p to the
past. Many Jews and non-Jews remain fixated on salacious details of
the Holocaust, such as the "Night ****ter" idea that female camp
inmates ensured their survival by sleeping with German officers, or
that the Nazis maintained brothels of Jewish women at Auschwitz and
other camps. Such things may have happened here and there, but they
are not clearly attested, and in any case fade into total
insignificance against the scale of the tragedy.
"Stalags" comes with a perfect companion piece, a short film called
"Two Women and a Man" by avant-garde Israeli artist Roee Rosen, who
has offended audiences worldwide with his interactive exhibition "Live
and Die as Eva Braun." I can't tell you much about "Two Women and a
Man" without giving Rosen's gambit away, but it pur****ts to be a film
about Justine Frank, a rediscovered Belgian Jewish surrealist of the
1930s and '40s whose ****ographic and scatological art outraged even
her artistic peers by repurposing Jewish themes and images in many
distasteful directions. Not to be missed if you're fond of
intellectual parlor games.
"Stalags" and "Two Women and a Man" are now playing at Film Forum in
New York. Other engagements will follow.
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