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PART I
Queer Historiography
Suspending Sexual Knowledges
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FIGURE 1.1. Alice Roberts as the Countess Geschwitz in Pandora’s Box (1929).
1. Troubling Sexual History
The Anachronistic Lesbian of Pandora’s Box
The history of sexuality is, in some sense, always already anachronistic.
—Peter Cryle and Christopher E. Forth,
Sexuality at the Fin de Siècle
THE SEXUAL MODERNITY of the late silent film, Pandora’s Box (dir. G. W. Pabst, Nero-Film, Germany, 1929), depends on the presence of one character: the Countess Augusta Geschwitz, played by Alice Roberts. Yet, critical commentary on the film tends to relegate the Countess to a marginal role in its history, or she is simply—or, in my case, perhaps symptomatically—forgotten. The first time I saw Pandora’s Box at a film festival screening I barely registered her on-screen presence even though I have no doubt that it partially authorized my own erotic and identificatory investments in the central character of the film, Lulu—if not more especially the American actress who plays her, Louise Brooks. More glamorous, seductive, and enigmatic than any of the film’s other characters, the Lulu/Brooks cult star complex exerts a powerful centripetal force on both everyday and critical receptions of Pandora’s Box. It is possible that my initial forgetting of the character of the Countess was a defense against—or resistance to—the terms within which her character has most often been understood, a barely registered dis-identification with a figure whose diegetic relation to Lulu echoed my own cinema-induced fantasies. For even as the formal style and aesthetics of Pandora’s Box establish Lulu as a figure who incites desire, the Countess is remembered less for being one of the many characters caught up in the erotic force field of Lulu’s strangely vacuous screen persona than for what seems now a more prosaic, but for all that still more deadly, “fact”: her status as the film’s lesbian character.
The most influential scholarship on Pandora’s Box tends to note the “fact” of the Countess’s lesbianism in a way that sustains the character’s marginality even as she remains a paradoxically necessary figure in the film’s sexual schema. Critical claims that the Lulu/Brooks figure instantiates an appealingly mobile and ambiguous screen eroticism inevitably rely on the celluloid presence of the Countess as a kind of sexual counterpoint, a figure whose sexual identity is apparently easily determined and fixed. The identification of the Countess as the lesbian character of Pandora’s Box exhumes her from the archive as a fully formed figure continuous with present-day sexualities while occluding the historicity of her sexual intelligibility. Turning away from the charismatic star configuration of Lulu/Brooks to attend to the forgotten figure of the Countess—a seemingly perverse endeavor that goes against the film’s design and its predominant mode of reception—enables the historiography of cinematic representations of sexuality to be problematized.
The predominant signifier of Geschwitz’s lesbianism is taken to be her “masculinization,” a gendered state allegedly confirmed by what Mary Ann Doane describes as her consistent occupation of “the margins of a masculine scenario structured around Lulu.” Yet, aside from the too-easy conflation of a style of gendered embodiment with a sexual identity, the difficulty of relying solely on a gendered optic by which to read the discursive figuration of the Countess is foregrounded by Doane’s other claim that “femininity constitutes a danger which must be systematically eradicated.” Her supporting examples comprise not only the early disappearance from the film’s narrative of Schön’s fiancée, and the death of Lulu in the eighth and final Act at the hands of Jack the Ripper, but also the demise of Geschwitz in the film’s penultimate Act. Unable to discipline the figure of Geschwitz to one or other gender, Doane’s inconsistency demonstrates how common critical categories are already inflected by the historicity of sexual difference and modern homo/hetero sexual definition.
Popular and scholarly histories of lesbian cinematic representation have tended to focus in a more sustained manner on the figure of the Countess as part of an investment in the political and social value of recuperating representations of marginalized sexualities. These works draw attention to the contradictory terms of the Countess’s sexual legibility, whether in terms of her “sickness and decadence” or her same-sex devotion emblematic of the Weimar’s progressive sexual politics. Such divergent interpretations register not only the time elapsed between the character’s adaptation from play to film, but also the character’s intelligibility in terms of competing historical systems and cultures of sexual knowledge. Yet the visual strategies and aesthetics of Pandora’s Box only further unsettle readings of Geschwitz’s character in terms of sexual pathology, personality, orientation, or identity. Situating Geschwitz as a figure representative of a polymorphously perverse Weimar Republic, the film privileges the mobility of desire and the instability and contingency of social and sexual identities. Thus, even at the moment of her screen debut, the Countess’s sexual legibility is hard to synchronize to any one historical period or sexual discourse, raising questions about retrospective historiographical procedures of contextualization and periodization. The character’s cinematic renovation from stage to screen, and the subsequent restoration and digital archiving of Pandora’s Box, preserve and amplify the queer temporalities of her sexual modernity.
The Countess’s intertwined textual, cultural, and cinematic genealogies function as a “temporal drag” on any claim to be able to identify her retrospectively and definitively as the representation of a new and modern lesbian. Here I am taking up but also reorienting, for historiographical purposes, Elizabeth Freeman’s evocative phrase, which describes the anachronisms of sexual identities and politics in the present, in particular the forgotten, foreclosed, or unfinished political possibilities registered by the retrogressive effects that lesbianism and feminism seem to exert in relation to queer political thinking. A consequence of foregrounding the anachronisms of the Countess Geschwitz’s sexual modernity is that it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain the more general and seemingly straightforward proposition that lesbian representation in early cinema is consolidated by the early 1930s. This future-oriented claim sustains a continuity with present-day sexual identities that makes less visible the wayward temporal orders governing the sexual intelligiblity of the very same figures that are said to evidence it. What the Countess’s trouble with time—or rather her troubling of time—enables is a critically queer troubling of the historiographical protocols that underpin Pandora’s Box scholarship in order to demonstrate how to do a counter-history of sexuality in early cinema.
In Retrospect
Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a sense of retrospectivity inevitably governs critical assessments of Pandora’s Box, given its limited success when it was first released, an outcome compounded by the excisions and story line changes ordered by censors. It has been the restoration of the film to the director’s original cut, itself a lengthy and deferred accomplishment, that has enabled the film’s belated critical reevaluations. While it is a critical commonplace that all historical work is inevitably premised on temporal delay, retrospectivity might be an essential historiographical strategy for evaluating the institutional and cultural contexts for the film. One of Weimar cinema’s preeminent critics, Thomas Elsaesser, argues that it “cannot be understood in terms of some essence … but as the moment where in retrospect something became apparent.” This claim registers—perhaps unintentionally—a temporal paradox. Implicitly valorizing the possibility of a broader, objective historical knowledge of Weimar cinema premised on and enabled by a temporal distance from the past, such retrospectivity is nevertheless awkwardly located in an ambiguous time, “the moment.” Does it name Weimar cinema as historical period, or does it gesture toward that peculiar temporal fold in which we view the luminous, restored version? The availability of Pandora’s Box as a restored cultural object unsettles the idea that a chronological gap is necessary in order to ascertain a clearer view of its significance. Retrospectivity continues to authorize the linear temporalities that underpin conventional historiographical protocols of periodization and contextualization, at the risk of failing to account adequately for the historicity of sexuality. Despite the restoration of the film, and its lavish remediations, interpretations of the Countess Geschwitz’s role tend to be supported less by how she is represented on screen than through interpretations that contextualize the film’s representation of sexuality in terms of the cultural history of the Weimar era.
Many of the scenes in Pandora’s Box are set in Germany during the Weimar Republic, a transformative political event understood to have cultural ramifications. It organizes the conceptualization of a period of filmmaking and its institutional frameworks, the Weimar cinema, of which Pandora’s Box is understood to be an important artifact. While the Weimar era has provided a critical starting point for scholars to contextualize the film, situating Pandora’s Box in terms of the Weimar’s erotic history generates contradictory effects in relation to the Countess character that bear on her historicization as a sexual figure. Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Anne Doane, the most influential commentators on the film, establish the Weimar Republic as an era when earlier sexual prohibitions and silences are visibly and multiply transgressed. In tandem with accounts of the political, economic, and social crises of the period, both critics suggest an abrupt change in sexual morals and behavior, in broad terms a transition from a bourgeois mode of sexual secrecy to an excessive and diverse sexual exhibitionism. Both draw attention to the Weimar’s highly public and popular cultures of sexual and gender boundary crossing, of which the Countess signifies but one instance. While Elsaesser suggests that “open homosexuality” and “sexual ambiguity” have fixed the Weimar period in the “popular imagination,” he points to all kinds of cultural production—from serious literature to fashion—as evidence for the sexual obsessions of Weimar society. Similarly, Doane notes how other cultural artifacts of the period “evince a fascination with sexual transgression and the violation of traditional taboos through the exploration of pornography, prostitution, androgyny, [and] homosexuality.” Leaving aside the question of the commensurability of those terms, in these accounts an apparently self-evident and naturalized homosexuality becomes one of a number of signifiers of the Weimar era’s reputation for transgressive and experimental sexualities enabled by new consumer and commodity cultures. Ascribing lesbian sexuality to the figure of the Countess ensures that her cinematic presence in Pandora’s Box in effect acts as a visual stand-in for the sexual energies and heterogeneity of the Republic’s sexual modernity.
The changes in social and cultural formations in Germany of the Weimar period are obviously complex; it is how that history has been deployed in analyses of the representation of sexuality in Pandora’s Box that tends to undermine the historicity of sexuality itself. In describing homosexuality as breaching the prohibitions of a repressive nineteenth-century past, critics implicitly construct a historical narrative in which a publicly and culturally visible homosexuality emerges fully formed as both an indicator and a cause of paradigmatic shifts in attitudes, aesthetics, and social and legal prohibitions. Such a narrative confirms the essential nature of homosexual desire—and distinguishes it from heterosexual desire—by positing its secret and oppressed existence at precisely the same moment that it is seemingly liberated from constraining prohibitions. As Michel Foucault has demonstrated, this “repressive hypothesis” is not something separate from the deployment of sexuality but is itself folded into an increasingly intensive and multivalent network of power acting on and through the body. Rather than representing a historical rupture, the emergence of discourses of repression and its overcoming represents a continuation in the deployment of sexuality. Not only does the dominant critical version of Weimar sexual history fashion a rhetoric in which a visible homosexuality is one of a number of erotic practices and identities that register a sexual modernity, but, as an analytical tactic, it elides the possibility that sexuality itself might have a longer and more temporally complex history.
The Weimar’s history of sexuality and sexual cultures, as it is implanted by critics commenting on Pandora’s Box, produces an apparently recognizable and modern lesbian subject who in her critical figuration comes to bear the historical weight of the very sexual transformation she is said to symbolize. Both Doane and Elsaesser in their audio commentary to the most recent and lavish DVD of Pandora’s Box persist in describing the character in terms of her “repression in mannish suits” (figure 1.1) an aphorism first used by Louise Brooks to describe not the character Geschwitz but the performance of actress Alice Roberts. Rather neatly, the sexual repression that Geschwitz signals the end of is rerouted through her body and transformed into an individualizing, debilitating psychic phenomenon. In a convoluted and contradictory logic, Geschwitz’s perversity is signified not only by the apparent public legibility of her sartorial style (her “mannish suits”) but also by an internalized homophobic resistance to its fullest expression. This scholarly figuration of the lesbian of Weimar modernity—and Brooks herself should be regarded as one of the commentators involved in this enterprise, even as she is also often positioned as an authoritative historical...
