Rezension von SMK-4

Superficially, this is just one of the many German "report" sexploitation films from the early 1970s, with the only distinction that it focuses on female apprentices instead of schoolgirls. Well, there is another distinction: the film was also "indiziert", i.e. put on the index of films that are supposedly depraving the youth. As a consequence, the film could not be advertised for or shown in normal high street cinemas - and it is easy to forget that in those years sex films were still showing in normal cinemas.

Why, one may wonder, was the film put on that index? It is undoubtedly exploitative, going so far as showing some teenage girls being sexually exploited, raped, coerced into prostitution, and driven to suicide (note: the film is not as bleak as this list suggests - there are also comedy sequences, bordering on Benny Hill's type of humour). However, it hardly goes any further than the other report films typically go. So, why had this one been singled out as a nasty?

I cannot help but suspect that it may have something to do with the film's biting criticism of weaknesses of the German apprenticeship system. German politicians like to believe that it is just about perfect, and anybody undermining that belief is likely to be either ignored or attacked.

Make no mistake: this is a sex film, first and foremost, and a political debate does not take place. Still, European sex films in the 1970s had a noticeable anti-establishment flavour, presumably because of their obvious connections to the anti-censorship movement. Here it is particularly strong: the viewer is confronted with an amazingly long list of criticisms of the apprenticeship system, e.g. the (German version of the) DTI taking the side of the employers by default, apprentices being misused for apprenticeship-unrelated tasks, the vocational colleges as an educational dead-end, etc. The critique is fairly one-sided and some of the messages remain subliminal, but the critique is not bogus, it is real.