A Lover's Pinch by Peter Tupper

Author:Peter Tupper [Tupper, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.1. Promotional poster, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, 1974. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

David F. Friedman, Ilsa’s producer, was in the US Army Signal Corps in the mid-1940s, and worked on films about the newly liberated concentration camps, using the shocking images of emaciated survivors and stacked corpses. Later, Friedman worked on the anti-Communist film Halfway to Hell (1953), which used similar shock imagery, then produced and played a bit part in Love Camp Seven (1969), then produced the first Ilsa movie in 1974.27 This is the familiar blurring of lines between propaganda and exploitation we’ve seen in treatments of Mediterranean and Atlantic slavery. Ilsa even begins with a title card and a voice-over claiming the film’s historical accuracy, making it a bizarre parody of the real atrocities of Nazi concentration camps.

Don Edmonds, the director, described his conversation with Friedman:

The things that are in Ilsa, I told him at the time, “You wanna see this stuff? Because I can put it on the screen for you. You want to pull back and cut away?” And he said, “No.” And I said, “Then I’m going to give it to you, brother”. . . And I did.28

In the film, the women sent to Ilsa’s camp are divided into two groups. Some are sent for “work detail” of sexually serving the men in the guardhouse. The others are beaten, electrocuted, boiled, suffocated, and more in “experiments” overseen by the uniformed Ilsa and her female assistants. Ilsa’s ostensible reason for this is to demonstrate that women can endure as much pain as men and prove that women can serve the Reich by fighting on the front line. Thus, Ilsa and her female subordinates are a feminist insurgency within Nazism, usurping male prerogatives like authority, violence, and sexual service.

Male prisoners get one night with Ilsa, after which she has them castrated. This changes with the arrival of the prisoner Wolfe, a German-American soldier with the ability to withhold ejaculation indefinitely. Ilsa is so taken with Wolfe’s indefatigable penis that he alone survives a night with her intact.

Whereas Wolfe represents ideal masculinity, the general who oversees Ilsa’s camp is a masochistic freak. He tops Ilsa from the bottom by demanding that she strip down to just her uniform tunic and stockings, then urinate on him. The camera focuses on Ilsa’s face, grimacing in disgust and humiliation as she complies with his command.

At the climax of the film, Wolfe seduces Ilsa into letting him tie her to her bed, then leads the prisoners in revolt. One of Ilsa’s bloody female victims tries to stab Ilsa to death, but she passes out or dies before she can finish the job. After the prisoners escape, German forces arrive, and an officer kills Ilsa, on orders from the general, and then burns the camp down so there is no evidence.

The last shot is of Wolfe and one of the female prisoners standing together, watching the fire; proper sexual and gender roles are restored by the death of Ilsa. The

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