In the spring of 1974, The Night Porter was released in Italian cinemas. Directed by Liliana Cavani, the film stars a young Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, a former Jewish detainee in a concentration camp who had there fallen in love with her German captor Max, played by Dirk Bogarde. The former Nazi official had since reinvented himself as a night porter in a hotel in Vienna in order to reintegrate himself into society and avoid the death penalty. Crossing paths again in 1957, their casual encounter sets the stage for the movie, with the two characters resuming their former master-slave dynamic through sadomasochistic practices and flashbacks of their history in the camps.
Considered today a cult movie, The Night Porter has long divided critics. Accused of “Nazi exploitation,” denounced by Roger Ebert as “a despicable attempt to titillate us through memories of persecution and suffering,” and condemned by Italian feminists for its portrayal of Lucia, the film has been dismissed as pornographic, perverse, even dangerous. And yet, 50 years after its release, Cavani’s work continues to provoke its audience by confronting viewers with the murky entanglement of power, trauma, and desire in the wake of unspeakable violence. Rather than an erotic fantasy, The Night Porter reads as a radical interrogation of historical memory and complicity — one that forces its audience to confront the persistence of fascism not as politics, but as pathology.
Cavani does this by reappropriating a profoundly masculine language — visually, conceptually, and politically. Visually, the director draws overtly from the fascist aesthetic codified by Luchino Visconti in The Damned (1969), from the film’s cold, decadent color palette to the casting of Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, to the costumes designed by Piero Tosi. Conceptually and politically, Cavani builds a closed world structured by domination and submission — a structure Cavani knew intimately, having spent years working as a documentarist for RAI, Italy’s public broadcaster, on the crimes and legacies of fascism. She represents this through the isolated space of the hotel and the dark, claustrophobic experience of the staged trials: secretive reenactments held by a cabal of former Nazis to purge perceived traitors — among them Bogarde’s Max — and maintain their postwar cover.
Released just before Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty (1975), Cavani’s film precedes a wave of Nazi exploitation titles such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) and SS Experiment Camp (1976), but also emerges alongside works like Swept Away (1974), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), and Pasolini’s Salò (1975). Despite their differences in tone and intent, these films reflect in material a broader zeitgeist in which European filmmakers grappled with the reintegration of fascist figures into postwar society and the collective failure to confront fascism and Nazism as historical and political phenomena. This was particularly acute in Italy, where fascist hierarchies were systematically absorbed into the postwar order to facilitate a smooth political transition to democracy. Cavani, far from exploiting fascism, exposes its lingering structures — not through simple moralism, but by staging the very power games that continued to define postwar Italy.
Critics have often read The Night Porter as a film about sadomasochism, but Cavani’s intention lies elsewhere. As Susan Sontag argues in Fascinating Fascism, the affinity between fascist aesthetics and sadomasochism is not rooted in ideology, but in their shared theatricality — both rely on carefully staged performances of domination, submission, and ritualized control. Cavani takes this scenography of power — its leather, its symmetry, its fetishized images, its death-drive — and rather than stripping it of meaning or reducing it to a simplistic binary of Nazis as evil and victims as good, she reveals how power, by its very nature, is saturated with erotic charge.
The Night Porter does not avoid this dimension — on the contrary, it unsettles by playing with the unstable balance between eroticism and domination. Scenes of ritualized intimacy between Lucia and Max are intercut with brutal flashbacks to the concentration camp, dissolving the boundaries between consensual roleplay and historic violence. Cavani presents a woman who is far from a passive or conventional victim: as a slave, Lucia possesses power — ambiguous, situational, and deeply provocative — just as much as her master. This volatile role play, however uncomfortable or contradictory, forms the film’s core premise. Lucia’s subjectivity resists reductive interpretations. She is neither fully empowered nor entirely powerless, but suspended in a tense space where desire and trauma, control and surrender, love and dependence converge. Cavani neither sensationalizes nor sanitizes this reality — instead, she reveals how systems of domination are not only social and political, but profoundly intimate.
Here, the master-slave dialectic becomes essential. Lucia appears at first under Max’s control, a former detainee entrapped once again by her abuser. But gradually, the dynamic shifts: Max grows dependent on her presence, her affirmation, her return to their shared past. He cannot let go. In the end, it is he who submits to the terms of their bond. Yet over them both hangs a greater, colder force — the surviving network of ex-Nazis, intact, disciplined, mercilessly bureaucratic, who try to impede their union in any possible way.
If there is violence in The Night Porter, it is not a simple aesthetic background for an erotic movie: it is historical, systemic, and ruthlessly impersonal — violence as legacy. The world Cavani constructs offers no redemptive arc, no moral reassurance. Evil here is not an ideological aberration but a lingering condition, reproduced through the structures of complicity, denial, and desire. As a woman filmmaker, Cavani does not critique this system solely through overt moralizing or by positioning women only as passive victims — though victimhood is certainly present and real. Instead, she reclaims the very language that has been used to control women — its imagery, its codes, its hierarchies — and reworks it from within.
In doing so, she opens up a space for feminist critique that is not didactic but confrontational, one that acknowledges where we come from while refusing to be confined by it. By refusing any form simplification, The Night Porter does not show us how we should feel about the past, but how close we still are to it — how it lingers in the folds of our most private lives. In doing so, the film refuses to let its audience retreat into safety. Instead, it insists on the discomfort of recognition — a discomfort that remains chillingly relevant today.
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