The Night Porter: the most contested film on this list

Every other film discussed in this section can be recommended with a straight face. This one cannot, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Liliana Cavani’s 1974 picture has been condemned and defended continuously for half a century, by people whose judgement is worth taking seriously in both directions. The useful thing a critical site can do is describe the dispute accurately rather than adjudicate it.

What the film is

Dirk Bogarde plays Max, once an SS officer, now the night porter of a Vienna hotel in 1957. Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia, who survived the camp where he was posted and who arrives at the hotel as a guest. They recognise each other. She does not leave.

The plot that follows is a siege. Max belongs to an informal circle of former officers who hold mock proceedings among themselves, destroying documents and disposing of anyone who could testify. Lucia is a witness. The relationship the two of them resume is conducted inside a flat while the group outside waits, and the ending is not a reprieve.

Bogarde was at the height of his late career and had already built a reputation for taking roles other leading men would not. Rampling was young and became permanently associated with this part. Neither disowned the film afterwards.

The argument against it

The objection is not squeamishness, and it is not the presence of the subject. It is a claim about what the film’s surface does independently of its intentions.

Cavani gives the camp scenes a controlled, composed look, and she costumes them. The most reproduced image from the film is a performance sequence in which Rampling appears in fragments of SS uniform. That image left the film almost immediately and had a second life in fashion shoots, record sleeves and pornography, in contexts with no interest whatever in the psychology of survivors. Critics argue that this was predictable, that a beautifully lit atrocity is still an atrocity that has been made beautiful, and that the film supplied a visual vocabulary the culture then used badly for decades.

Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay on the aesthetics of fascism gave this objection its most durable statement, and Cavani’s film is routinely named in the argument that followed. Reviewers at the time were often blunter. Roger Ebert dismissed it outright, and he was not alone among major critics.

The argument for it

The defence is not that the objection is silly. It is that the film has been read too quickly.

On this reading, the picture is about a bond formed under conditions that removed the possibility of consent, and about what that does to two people afterwards. Nothing in the film presents the camp as anything other than a system of terror. The relationship in 1957 is shown as a collapse, not as a romance: the pair barricade themselves in, stop eating properly, and are destroyed. Cavani has argued for decades that her subject was the psychology of the persecutor and the persecuted, and she came to the material with a serious interest in the period rather than as a provocateur.

Defenders also point out that the objection proves a great deal if it proves anything. If a film may not depict an eroticised power relation formed under coercion, a large part of what fiction does about atrocity becomes unavailable.

Where this leaves a viewer

There is no reconciliation available between those two positions, and this site is not going to manufacture one. What can be said plainly is that the film is not a study of consensual power exchange and should never be cited as one. Whatever is happening between Max and Lucia, it began in a place where refusal was impossible, and the film knows it.

That distinction matters for the rest of this section. The Duke of Burgundy is about negotiation, scheduling and consent maintained under strain. Belle de Jour is about a fantasy life that harms nobody. This film belongs to a different category, and blurring the categories is how the whole subject gets discredited. The blurring does not require anything as extreme as Cavani’s material either: Obsession, made half a century later by people who said in advance that they did not want to imply this sex was damaging, inherited a plot from 1991 in which a man’s wanting ruins his family and let the plot make the argument for them.

If you do watch it, the passes in how to read a picture of power are more useful here than anywhere else, because they force the question of who the composition serves. Ask, in each camp sequence, whether the framing is describing a horror or arranging one. Different viewers give different answers to that question, honestly, which is precisely why the argument has lasted. The broader version of the same dispute, about whether an image of dominance describes power or merely sells it, runs through the profile of Helmut Newton.