Wolfgang C. Hartwig (1921 - )
Related: Aufklärungsfilm - German erotica - Germany - German exploitation - sex report films
Biography
Wolfgang C. Hartwig (1921 - ), born in Düsseldorf, Germany, sometimes credited as: Wolfgang C. Hartwig and Wolfgang Hartwig is a German film producer working in exploitation genres. --http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0367322/ [Nov 2005]
Der Nackte und der Satan/The Head (1959) - Victor Trivas
The Head (1959) - Victor Trivas [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Art direction and pulp fiction merge in this story of a head grafted onto another's body.
Dr Ood (Horst Frank) is the mad doctor in writer/director Victor Trivas's uniquely trashy Der Nackte und der Satan (literally from the German, "The Nude and the Devil," aka The Head, West Germany, 1959). It is Horst Frank's persona, with his entertaining, Conrad Veidt-like demeanor and demented sense of focus, that gives this film its centre. My introduction to The Head comes via American director Curtis Harrington, whose enthusiasm for the film was contagious. He was especially taken with the set design and atmosphere. Harrington discovered that Hermann Warm, the set decorator for Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Germany, 1919), had come out of retirement this one and only instance to give Trivas's film the nightmarish décor and ambiance that somewhat balances the trappings of the Edgar Wallace krimis inherent in the film itself.[2]
Der Nackte und der Satan exudes a spidery fascination as it opens on a full moon accompanied by the unsettling score of Jacques Lasry and Willy Mattes. The credits are suitably offsetting in a manner Tim Burton is fond of emulating. We are introduced to our mad doctor straightaway. He is seen in shadow approaching the laboratory/residence of Professor Doktor Abel (played by the distinguished Michel Simon). The residence is depicted in the manner of Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, France, 1959). The latter film's ambient tone is very much apparent in Der Nackte und der Satan, almost to the point of homage.
Dr Ood approaches the house and our first glimpse of Horst Frank is as he picks up a tortoise and slips away into a nest of dead branches which silhouette his bleached-white features. He observes and eavesdrops on the arrival of Dr Abel's hunchbacked nurse (Karin Kernke), whose appearance harkens back to the Universal Monster rallies of the 1940s. This whole sequence sets the tone for what is to follow. As we are led into Dr Abel's home, it is apparent that we are in an abode filled with futuristic trappings whose centrepiece is a Bauhaus staircase straight out of Edgar Ulmer. --http://www.kinoeye.org/02/06/delvalle06.php [Apr 2005]
Wolf C. Hartwig .... producer
Horrors of Spider Island (1960) - Fritz Böttger
Horrors of Spider Island (1960) - Fritz Böttger
[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]
Image sourced here.
'Horrors of Spider Island' was made in Germany and originally called 'Ein Toter hing im Netz', literally 'A Dead One Hung in the Net',
Schulmädchen Report #1 (1970) - Ernst Hofbauer
The Schulmadchen Report/Schoolgirl Report (1970) - Gert Wilden & Orchestra [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Schulmädchen Report #1 (Hofbauer, 1970, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066341/) and the dozens of sex report films that followed were anxious hybrids of reportage, sex education films and soft core pornography. The series, designed to titillate a assumed older male spectator, were clearly in dialogue with German student radicalism and the politicization of sexuality and nudity of the 1960s. The Schoolgirl Reports pointedly work against this discourse by locating sexual liberation and nudity in the middleclass milieu with pubescent and teenage girls. It functions to re-privatize sex and nudity and to rediscover the erotic and unpolitical charge ofthe young female body. The fictional psychologist in the film who compiles the report from his research authorizes sexual experimentation as a natural process that schools and parents can and should monitor; sexual liberationas a political force is recuperated as a middle class coming of age story. --Jennifer Fay, Michigan State University, http://www.uiowa.edu/~mmla/abstract-sample.html [Dec 2004]
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