Lehrmädchen-Report

Is there a more astounding monument to the bizarreness of the decade known as the seventies than the endless series of "report" films that came from Germany?

These were pretend documentaries that were really just an excuse to show some skin. The extraordinary thing, though, is that when these were first shown in cinemas, the majority of Germans went to see them. The majority.

In previous decades, all nudity and sex had been banned from all films except documentaries. This was a huge shot in the arm for pornographers, who only had to slap some pseudo-informative twaddle together in between the sex and not only were these porno flicks legal, they were patronised by a much wider audience. Most people will not go to see a porno movie. But if that porno movie is disguised as a documentary...

Which brings us to the staggering success of the "report" films. You see, that boneheaded piece of censorship detailed above was such a massive shot in the arm for the same industry that it was supposed to stifle that pornographers kept making pretend-documentaries even after the ban on straight porno was lifted. They kept pretending to make documentaries, and people kept pretending to go to see them for the educational value.

Hence, the aforementioned endless stream of "report" documentaries that came out in the '70s - and the endless stream of paying customers who went to see them. The "Schoolgirl-report" series were the main money maker. These films reported to show adults what their daughters were getting up to while their backs were turned. What WERE they getting up to, you ask? Um... sex. Sex with teachers, school mates, girlfriends, doctors, nurses, employers, handymen. This was generally interspersed with obviously staged interviews with random people giving cringe-inducingly stupid responses to questions like "What do you think about young girls having sex with their teachers?"

What we have here, "Lehrmadchen-report", is a spin off from that series that purports to be about "apprentices", and features six vignettes about different girls (read: softcore porn actresses) having sex at work. Really, it's just girls having sex at work. One of the bugbears of the "Schoolgirl-report" series was that in the midst of all the ridiculousness there would often be a vignette featuring sexual assault. This would kind of put a damper on the proceedings. "Lehrmadchen-report" gets the rape out of the way with the first vignette, and then it's back to the ridiculousness.

Not one but two of the remaining stories features a young girl who is sexually harassed by her boss, and ends up getting revenge... while also getting naked. (That'll show 'em). Perhaps the strangest vignette has a girl who winks whenever she gets nervous working as an apprentice aviator (?). Is there such a thing? She keeps going up in airplanes with men who misinterpret her winking as coquetry, and attempt to grope her in the air, which ends in the plane crashing off screen.

Many of the actors and actresses involved are regulars from other "report" movies. Even some of the ugly middle aged men are: there's one hideous, ratlike little man who is here depicted naked (luckily from the waist up) with a naked soft-core actress (playing a fifteen year old, but obviously in her twenties). I wonder if they even paid that guy.

The movie is, on the whole, just more of the same. If you've seen one of these report movies, you've pretty much seen them all. But if you enjoy them, you may as well check this one out as well.

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.