Thirty-five words from Issue 16, “Double Bind,” in order of frequency:
119 no
86 cunningham
80 [princess] donna
61 balibar
46 munro
45 haneke
39 space
38 police
28 porn
28 oneida
27 tour
23 indian
20 google
19 insurrection
18 class
17 factory
17 european
17 desire
16 power
14 technique
14 surveillance
12 sadomodernism
11 disgrace
8 sabotage
5 unpleasant
5 unknown
4 uh
4 pandas
4 naive
4 irregardless
3 torture
3 sandwich
3 counterespionage
2 vaginas
2 vacations
Footnote:
The director Liliana Cavani has outlived Pasolini, but she hasn’t lived down The Night Porter (1974), which tells the story of a chance reunion between a concentration-camp prisoner and her Nazi torturer at a hotel in Vienna. As sadist and victim revive their affair, Cavani uses sustained close-ups, matches on action, and sound bridges to leap from the present to sex tableaux staged at the camp, in blue-lit scenes that exude the clammy kink of an Otto Dix portrait. The early ’70s saw a small boom in American and Italian sexploitation films with sadomasochistic themes set in concentration camps. Most showed male officers torturing female prisoners, but the most famous, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, turned the tables, casting as the camp commandant a buxom nymphomaniac, who, between bounces on her magenta silk sheets, tests the effects of forced dildo penetration and whipping to death on women and men. Ilsa opens with a red title card with the words, “The film you are about to see is based upon documented fact. . . . We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again.”
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