ABSTRACT
It all started with Cabaret ... suddenly, the Third Reich had become a subject for feature films, in fact, for a while it seemed to be, especially for European filmmakers, the subject. Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties, Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien, Lilian Cavani’s The Night Porter, François Truffaut’s The Last Metro, Joseph Losey’s M. Klein: the 1970s were the decade of films exploring what Susan Sontag had termed “fascinating fascism.” The combination of kitsch and camp, the cult of death and the ambiguous celebration of style which had made Nazi imagery, colors and iconography lead a second life, first in garish comics and then in coffee-table books, surfaced in the movie mainstream, to join the growing number of biographies, monographs and scholarly publications devoted to the period.
