8 - Guns, Girls, and Gynecologists: West German Exploitation Cinema and the St. Pauli Film Wave in the Late 1960s

Summary

Widely recognized for its national art cinemas, European cinema in the 1960s and 1970s also yielded a plethora of exploitation films, from the Italian giallo and “nunsploitation” films to the Spanish erotic vampire thrillers, from the British occult horror hybrids to the French and West German softcore porn serials. While scholars have recently begun to examine the exploitation cinemas of the United States, Great Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, West German B-films have received little critical attention outside of a few notable studies on the popular sex education documentaries in the late 1960s and schoolgirl sexploitation films in the early 1970s.Scholarship on 1960s West German cinema has tended to focus instead on the Young German Cinema, the new art cinema that developed into the internationally acclaimed New German Cinema in the 1970s. Unlike the more intellectual films of the Young German Cinema, internationally co-produced genre films and domestic B-films attracted millions of cinemagoers. Produced by, among others, Wolf C. Hartwig and Heinz Willeg—two especially prolific B-film producers—a series of crime films exploiting the sensationalist attractions of St. Pauli, Hamburg’s notorious red light district, were enormous box-office successes in the late 1960s and are slowly gaining “Euro-cult” status today.Reading the series within the context of late 1960s exploitation cinema, this article argues that the St. Pauli films rebel against establishments of taste as represented by the culturally acceptable films of the Young German Cinema. At the same time, however, they reveal specific cultural anxieties in postwar West Germany. I suggest that the films therefore represent the internal tensions and paradoxes of the “long 1968,” as well as the various, sometimes contradictory, forms of the “political” in late 1960s West German culture.

Exploitation and the Politics of Excess

Although loosely defined, “exploitation” in film criticism generally refers to a cinema that is cheaply produced, that exploits cultural taboos as a means of provocation, and that directly opposes the canon of highbrow art or “quality” cinema. Exploitation films address a range of controversial topics such as prostitution, venereal disease, sexuality, and violence against women, gays, and racial minorities. With their quick turnaround rate, they are able to exploit highly topical news events from political protests to bank robberies and homicides. While they claim to warn about the vices and dangers they represent, the films tend to be more invested in sensationalizing contemporary social problems.