{"id":66875,"date":"2023-09-20T05:23:03","date_gmt":"2023-09-20T05:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/talkcelnews.com\/?p=66875"},"modified":"2023-09-20T05:23:03","modified_gmt":"2023-09-20T05:23:03","slug":"revelatory-or-reprehensible-controversial-filmmaker-accused-of-nazi-porn-returns-to-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talkcelnews.com\/lifestyle\/revelatory-or-reprehensible-controversial-filmmaker-accused-of-nazi-porn-returns-to-screen\/","title":{"rendered":"Revelatory or reprehensible? Controversial filmmaker accused of \u2018Nazi porn\u2019 returns to screen"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Stephanie Bunbury<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Charlotte Rampling, left, and Liliana Cavani at the Venice Film Festival in August.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n

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Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.<\/p>\n

Liliana Cavani is best known outside Italy for her seminal 1974 film The Night Porter<\/em>, a brilliantly wrought (arguably overwrought) portrait of a sado-masochistic relationship between a Nazi concentration camp guard played with elaborate menace by Dirk Bogarde and a teenage prisoner, a waifish Charlotte Rampling. Its portrayal of perverse eroticism caused an uproar. In Europe it was almost banned. In America, it was slated by the most respected critics as Nazi porn.<\/p>\n

Recently restored, The Night Porter<\/em> remains the subject of heated debate. Is it revelatory and taboo-crunching, or twisted and politically reprehensible? Or, indeed, both? Cavani\u2019s defenders at the time included Bernardo Bertolucci, who had also recently addressed the fascist psyche in The Conformist<\/em>. Along with Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the feisty female director of The Night Porter<\/em> was seen to be in the front rank of the Italian New Wave.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n

Cavani is now 90, although anyone meeting her would take her for at least a decade younger. She has just made her first film in 20 years, which the ticking of the clock suggests \u2013 although you wouldn\u2019t want to put money on it \u2013 will be her last. It screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival last month, where Cavani also received a Golden Lion for her life\u2019s work in film. Rampling was on hand to present it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a certain sense, you could say both Liliana Cavani and I have been defined by The Night Porter<\/em>,\u201d Rampling told the first-night audience in a passionately partisan speech. \u201cShe showed us \u2013 in its original, etymological, radical sense \u2013 what is monstrous \u2026 She turned her camera toward the beast, straight at it, eyes-wide, surrounding it to understand it, to recognise it when it returns.\u201d The first-night audience responded with a standing ovation.<\/p>\n

Reviews for the veteran\u2019s new film, especially from the Italian press, were less reverent. The Order of Time<\/em> certainly addresses a suitably terminal subject for a swansong \u2013 the end of the world \u2013 albeit couched within a kind of Big Chill<\/em> for middle-aged Italians. Several haute-bourgeois couples, a few of them former partners who have since swapped, gather for their regular summer holiday, arguing, eating and partying to old people\u2019s music. Meanwhile, an asteroid hurtles towards Earth.<\/p>\n

One of the guests, Enrico (Edoardo Leo) is an eminent physicist who is intermittently on the phone to his American colleagues, checking the asteroid\u2019s progress. He gives it a one-in-20 chance of destroying the planet, adding that the odds are narrowing as it gets closer.<\/p>\n

You might think that would focus the collective mind, but only Enrico and the Peruvian maid, who is following the news on some crackpot millenarian website, are properly afraid. Everyone else is focused on the coming 50th birthday celebration for their hostess Elsa (Claudia Gerini), their various past and present romantic intrigues and on working out what bon mot they will say next, given that the conversation pit is a highly competitive space.<\/p>\n

\u201cI imagined many things; everyone would have a different reaction. We come face to face with life, while usually, we follow a daily routine and do not stop to reflect on our existence,\u201d says Cavani. The thing is, she tells a masterclass in Venice, we can\u2019t worry about dealing with the worst possible things. \u201cBecause the thing that is worse than the worst thing \u2013 you can\u2019t know when it might happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Friends gather as an asteroid approaches Earth in The Order of Time. <\/span><\/p>\n

Cavani came face to face with the worst things as a young documentary filmmaker, researching material for the series she made for RAI, Italy\u2019s national television network, on the Third Reich and Stalin. She was a child during World War II; she remembers hearing the crack of bombs without feeling any fear.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen I studied ancient literature at the university so, in fact, I knew more about the Peloponnesian Wars from the 5th century BC than I did about the Second World War. I had to open my eyes \u2013 and I was astonished by what I saw, horrendous images every day.\u201d Her voice trembles slightly at the memory. \u201cSo that was my second degree.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a creator of fiction, her guiding lights were gloomy Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and Italian Vittorio De Sica, who made the heart-wrenching Bicycle Thieves<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaking documentaries on the most devastating war in history prevented me from making lighter cinema later,\u201d she says. The starting point for The Night Porter<\/em> was Women of the Resistance<\/em> (1965), for which she interviewed partisan fighters. One was a teacher who took holidays every year in Dachau, where she had been imprisoned. Another, who had been in Auschwitz, said she could not forgive the Nazis for making her \u201cdiscover a part of myself capable of doing things I never thought I would do\u201d. What they were, she wouldn\u2019t say.<\/p>\n

Fifty years after The Night Porter, The Order of Time<\/em> shows Cavani still wrestling with Italy\u2019s own fascist legacy, putting her anxieties in the mouths of her characters. Historian Giulia (Francesca Inaudi) observes with asperity that if anyone refers to the Nazi concentration camps in an academic context, some wise owl will warn them to be aware that there must be an allowance for doubt, \u201cas if there had been no witnesses or photographs taken!\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Claudia Gerini and Alessandro Gassmann in The Order of Time.<\/span><\/p>\n

References to climate change highlight another truth she sees denied by those who find it politically or financially inconvenient. Another variety of denial is brewing in the mind of Viktor (Richard Sammel) \u2013 the German technocrat among these Italian liberals \u2013 who is relying on Bloomberg\u2019s running market indices to get him through Armageddon. The financial markets, he points out, are surging. And the market deals in facts! That\u2019s where the real truth lies!<\/p>\n

Cavani\u2019s primary concern, however, is with ideas of time \u2013 its mutability, elasticity and speedy passage \u2013 inspired, according to the credits, by a widely admired book of essays by physicist Carlo Rovelli. Sometimes, says Cavani, she will read or see something that leaves her writing not a complete literary response, but a page of arguments; so it was when she read Rovelli\u2019s book, also called The Order of Time<\/em>.<\/p>\n

She is intrigued by Rovelli\u2019s observations about the arbitrary way we mark time in order to make it manageable: measuring it on clocks, dividing it into slabs \u2013 \u201cbefore Christ\u201d or \u201cthe 18th century\u201d \u2013 and then pegging it to events that mark its passage. \u201cTime doesn\u2019t have a stable figure in itself. In itself, it doesn\u2019t mean anything, except in relation to something that happened. We all agree that it passes, but we don\u2019t go further,\u201d she muses. Rovelli himself acted as a consultant on the project.<\/p>\n

Working these ideas into a screenplay, directing actors on set \u2013 she still relishes all of it. Cavani has had a long and vigorous career, as she reminded the Venice festival when she observed how few women had stood where she was, holding her Golden Lion. She has a huge body of risky, visceral work, including a modern reworking of the Antigone story, The Year of the Cannibals<\/em> (1969); The Skin<\/em> (1981), which picks up on The Night Porter<\/em>\u2019s concern with survival and degradation, this time in post-war Italy; and Ripley\u2019s Game<\/em> (2002) with John Malkovich at his most saturnine. She has also made three films about the life of St Francis of Assisi, who remains a touchstone. None has had the enduring impact of The Night Porter<\/em> but then, very few films have. And who knows? She may not be finished yet.<\/p>\n

The Order of Time<\/em> screens as part of the Italian Film Festival, Sydney, Sep 19-Oct 18; Melbourne, Sep 21-Oct 18; and Brisbane, Sep 27-Oct 25. http:\/\/italianfilmfestival.com.au<\/strong><\/p>\n

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By Stephanie Bunbury Charlotte Rampling, left, and Liliana Cavani at the Venice Film Festival in August.Credit: Getty Images Save articles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nRevelatory or reprehensible? Controversial filmmaker accused of \u2018Nazi porn\u2019 returns to screen - talkcelnews.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/talkcelnews.com\/lifestyle\/revelatory-or-reprehensible-controversial-filmmaker-accused-of-nazi-porn-returns-to-screen\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Revelatory or reprehensible? 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