Seksualizacja i estetyzacja Holokaustu w "Nocnym portierze" (Il portiere di notte, 1974) Liliany Cavani

Piotr Kletowski

doi:10.21697/zk.2025.12.15

Published: 2025-12-15

No. 12 (2025)

The sexualization and aestheticization of the Holocaust in Liliana Cavan's The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte, 1974)

Piotr Kletowski

Cultural Studies Appendix

Section: Artykuły

https://doi.org/10.21697/zk.2025.12.15

Abstract

Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film The Night Porter is considered one of the most controversial films in the history of cinema, touching on the subject of the Holocaust. The author of the text presents Cavani's film in the context of the Italian director's entire oeuvre, revealing its not-so--obvious connections not only to her other films devoted to Nazism, but also with ones considered religious. The most important element of the text is the examination of The Night Porter as a film that sexualizes and aestheticizes the Holocaust, inscribing the tragic events of the Shoah into codes characteristic of cinema that is seemingly distant from realism, and yet precisely through its stylization, which reaches to the heart of the relation between violence, dependence, and love tinged with perversion emanating from the relationship between the executioner and the victim, which are key to the issue of the Holocaust.

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Kletowski, P. (2025). The sexualization and aestheticization of the Holocaust in Liliana Cavan’s The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte, 1974) . Cultural Studies Appendix, (12), 271–291. https://doi.org/10.21697/zk.2025.12.15

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