siff day 13
Jun. 5th, 2008 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ironymaidena brief day, since there was nothing super-exciting in the evening and i have a cursed headcold. the evening was for rest, snuggling, and a calzone from Palermo's.
Stalags
i didn't know there was a short with this one until they handed me two ballots.
the short is an art film by Roee Rosen who created Justine Frank, an imaginary Jewish lesbian surrealist painter. he made "her" paintings, and dresses in drag as a scholar comparing Frank's work to the Rosen's actual installation "Live and Die as Eva Braun". meh.
the feature had cruddy production values, but was fascinating. "Stalags" were a genre of popular soft porn novels in Israel around 1960. the conceit was that they were the true stories of British or American POWs that had been translated into Hebrew. (actually, they were written by the "translators".) the standard plot was that these POWs were raped and abused by bodacious female SS officers, and eventually gained the upper hand to rape and abuse their tormentors before they escaped. these little paperbacks were bestsellers.
according to the film, up until the Eichmann trial was televised nationally, the Holocaust was a taboo subject in Israel. survivors were regarded with suspicion - surely they must have been collaborators or prostituted themselves to survive when others did not. and earlier Zionists thought that everyone should have moved to Palestine before the war like they did.
after Eichmann's execution, the Stalag fad abated and some of the books were destroyed. the film wanders around, touching on whether or not Jewish girls were used as prostitutes during the war, and modern Israeli fetishists who travel to have rough sex with German women. ultimately, the film can't decide if it's about the places where sex and the Holocaust meet in the Israeli consciousness, or about how Stalags led into the moment when Israelis looked more carefully at the Holocaust and stopped blaming the survivors.
Stalags
i didn't know there was a short with this one until they handed me two ballots.
the short is an art film by Roee Rosen who created Justine Frank, an imaginary Jewish lesbian surrealist painter. he made "her" paintings, and dresses in drag as a scholar comparing Frank's work to the Rosen's actual installation "Live and Die as Eva Braun". meh.
the feature had cruddy production values, but was fascinating. "Stalags" were a genre of popular soft porn novels in Israel around 1960. the conceit was that they were the true stories of British or American POWs that had been translated into Hebrew. (actually, they were written by the "translators".) the standard plot was that these POWs were raped and abused by bodacious female SS officers, and eventually gained the upper hand to rape and abuse their tormentors before they escaped. these little paperbacks were bestsellers.
according to the film, up until the Eichmann trial was televised nationally, the Holocaust was a taboo subject in Israel. survivors were regarded with suspicion - surely they must have been collaborators or prostituted themselves to survive when others did not. and earlier Zionists thought that everyone should have moved to Palestine before the war like they did.
after Eichmann's execution, the Stalag fad abated and some of the books were destroyed. the film wanders around, touching on whether or not Jewish girls were used as prostitutes during the war, and modern Israeli fetishists who travel to have rough sex with German women. ultimately, the film can't decide if it's about the places where sex and the Holocaust meet in the Israeli consciousness, or about how Stalags led into the moment when Israelis looked more carefully at the Holocaust and stopped blaming the survivors.
