Quiz 7 - Sophie Scholl and Nazisploitation

Exploitation films

Commercial films with minimum investment (low budget) for maximum effect mainly produced in the 1960’s and 1970’s

Justification for studios to make exploitation films

Decline of the film industry and the spread and popularity of TV and VHS.

Exploitation film style

Cheap sets and costumes, bad acting, shock value imagery and strong visceral effects

Epicenter for exploitation filmmaking

Italy, France, and Spain

Conditions exploitation film benefitted from

Liberalization of censorship rules and conventions, as well as anger towards racial and social discrimination

Nazisploitation shooting location

Italy

Nazisploitation genre

Combines horror and pornography, but was not concerned with coming to terms with the past

Nazisploitation basis

Exploring liminal conditions, absolute power, and total control in the context of the Holocaust and Third Reich

Gender dynamics in Nazisploitation films

Controlled/controlling males and female bodies that are weak, injured, tortured or violated

Spaghetti Western production

Made in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Italy and Spain

Spaghetti Western justification

Response to the decline of Western films

Spaghetti Western widescreen photography usage

To fit a TV, where Westerns were more popular

Spaghetti Western anti-hero

Someone who is unconventional and morally flexible

Spaghetti Western villains

Exaggerated, odd, and extremely violent

Spaghetti Western casting

Usually multinational with an American lead and an ensemble

Spaghetti Western dialogue

Very sparse, so music is more central

Spaghetti Western example

The Magnificent 7 (1960)

The White Rose

An anti-Nazi resistance group that formed in Munich in 1942 that advocated for nonviolent resistance

The White Rose founding members

Three were medical students that had learned about how Jewish civilians were murdered by SS troops on the Eastern front; Hans Scholl, Willi Graf, and Alexander Schmorell

First White Rose leaflet

Published in June of 1942, it was mailed across Munich using addresses from a telephone directory

White Rose leaflets

Five more sent out over the eight months following the first

The White Rose in early 1943

Scattering leaflets by hand and painting anti-Nazi graffiti, which increased risk

The White Rose on February 18, 1943

A Nazi party member observed Hans and Sophie throwing leaflets from a university building

The Academy of German Law and Nazi legal theorists

Individuals like Carl Schmitt who advocated for the nazification of German law and removal of ‘Jewish influence’

Hitler’s special courts

Established in 1933 to try politically sensitive cases

People’s Court (Volksgerichtschof)

Created under orders from Hitler in Berlin in 1934 to try treason and other important political cases

Roland Freisler

Known as the ‘hanging judge’, he carried out the People’s Court’s role in the Nazi system of terror by condemning tens of thousands of people as ‘Volk Vermin’ and thousands more to death for ‘Volk Treason’

Treason deaths from 1941 to 1944

Increased from 102 to 2,097

Normal mode of execution for civilian capital offenses in the Third Reich

Beheading

Prominent Nazi jurists

Curt Rothenberger, Franz Schlegelberger, and Josef Alstoetter were all tried in the Jurist’s Trial of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings on charges of ‘judicial murder’ and other atrocities