Queer Sexualities in Early Film

Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy

Shane Brown

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784536657
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

Since the publication of Vito Russo's seminal study The Celluloid Closet in 1981, much has been written about the representation of queer characters on screen. Until now, however, relatively little attention has been paid to how queer sexualities were portrayed in films from the silent and early sound period. By looking in detail at a succession of recently-found films and revisiting others, Shane Brown examines images of male-male intimacy, buddy relationships and romantic friendships in European and American films made prior to 1934, including Different from the Others and All Quiet on the Western Front. He places these films within their socio-political and scientific context and sheds new light on how they were intended to be viewed and how they were actually perceived. In doing so, Brown offers his readers a unique insight into a little known area of early cinema, queer studies and social history.

1

Seen But Not Heard: Representations of Gay Men in European Cinema, 1916–28

Introduction

By the time of the birth of cinema in the mid-1890s, Germany had become home to what was effectively the world’s first gay-rights movement. In the 1860s, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had coined the term urnings to describe what would today be called a gay man. The word derives from a description in Plato’s Symposium of the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexuality, in which Uranus is castrated by his son, Kronos, who then throws the genitals into the air behind him. Hansen writes that ‘the severed organ hurtles through the air […] [and] settles finally on the waters of the sea; in time foam issuing from the organ surrounds it, and within the foam a girl coalesces’ (Hansen 2000: 1). Ulrichs, like the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld who would follow two decades later, was a believer in what was termed the ‘third sex’ theory, the belief in which ‘became quite widespread in Germany and throughout Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century’ (Miller 1995: 14). Richard Dyer sums up this theory as the belief that ‘a man was a heterosexual man, a woman a heterosexual woman, and it followed that people who were not heterosexual were therefore neither one thing nor the other, neither a real man nor a real woman but something in-between’ (Dyer 2003: 33). Ulrichs believed that homosexuality was a result of an event during pregnancy. At the time, it was believed that embryos possessed both male and female sexual organs, losing one as it developed during pregnancy. Neil Miller writes that Ulrichs ‘theorized that male homosexuality came about when the embryo shed the female sex organ, but the same change did not occur in the part of the brain that regulates the sex drive’ (Miller 1995: 14).

What is key here is that both Ulrichs and Hirschfeld believed that homosexuality was the result of nature, and not nurture, albeit still viewed as a departure from the norm. Ulrichs used this belief as the basis for his appeal to the Reichstag in 1870 by which he hoped to liberate urnings from penal law. In the process he also identified a category of sexual identity rather than emphasising sexual behaviours. In this appeal, he stated: ‘in all creation, no other living creature endowed with sexual feeling is required to engage in lifelong suppression of this powerful drive, causing it to consume itself in cruel self-martyrdom’ (Ulrichs 1870: 64). However, despite Ulrichs’ eloquent and heartfelt appeal, in 1871 homosexual acts between men were further criminalised both within Germany and throughout the German Empire via what became known as Paragraph 175. This stated that ‘unnatural vice committed by two persons of the male sex or by people with animals is to be punished by imprisonment; the verdict may also include the loss of civil rights’ (Blasius and Phelan 1997: 63). The use of the word ‘unnatural’ in the legislation seems almost purposefully at odds with Ulrich’s theories which claimed that homosexuality was as natural as heterosexuality. Both the term ‘unnatural’ and the arguments that underpin it would be used for much of the twentieth century by lawmakers and anti-gay protestors alike.

In Germany, building on Ulrich’s efforts, Dr Magnus Hirshfeld began his campaign for the repeal of Paragraph 175 in the 1880s, and in 1897 founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee/Scientific- Humanitarian Committee to this specific end. Although he gave advice to people with all kinds of sexual problems and diseases, the Committee ‘initially formulated as its primary goal the repeal of §175’ (Steakley 1997: 139). It was not just in Germany that laws prohibiting homosexuality were strengthened during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. For example, in 1885, British law had also been extended so that now any sexual relations between men were outlawed rather than just the act of sodomy itself. This became popularly known, until its repeal in 1967, as the ‘blackmailer’s charter’. The prevalence of blackmail was also one of the major arguments Hirschfeld used against the validity and efficacy of Paragraph 175 in his 1897 appeal to the Reichstag. In the course of this appeal, he claimed that that the law ‘has not helped to “cure” homosexuals, but […] has made many courageous and useful human beings desperate and guilty. And in some cases, this law was and is responsible for madness and suicide’ (Hirschfeld 1897: 136). This appeal, and all later attempts by Hirschfeld, was unsuccessful, with the exception of a vote for reform in 1929. Blasius and Phelan write that ‘in 1929, socialist and communist Reichstag delegates voted to reform Paragraph 175, but this proposal was scathingly denounced by the burgeoning Nazi Party, which repudiated Weimar culture as decadent and promised to wipe out homosexuality’ (Blasius and Phelan 1997: 134). Hirschfeld left Germany for a world tour in 1930, never to return. He died in Paris in 1935, just over a year after watching newsreel images showing the destruction of his Sexual Institute and the burning of its library by the Nazis.

Filmmakers in both Germany and the UK would go on to use cinema in their fight to repeal the laws outlawing homosexual acts, with the films Anders als die Andern/Different from the Others (Richard Oswald, 1919) and Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) both tackling the issue via the continuing problem of blackmail even though they were made some four decades apart. Both films were produced during a context of political and/or social change. The origins of Anders als die Andern will be discussed fully later in this chapter, but it is worth noting here Hirschfeld’s involvement in the project as co-writer and performer. This involvement meant that many of the ideas and theories he had been publishing and lecturing on since the 1890s were included here in a film which could be described as his most public of lectures. The production of Victim took place a few years after the publication in Britain of the Wolfenden Report, which recommended that committing a homosexual act in private should not be regarded as a criminal offence. During the late 1950s, British cinema had also sounded out public reaction to the subject of homosexuality in films such as Serious Charge (Terence Young, 1959) and The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Ken Hughes, 1960) before producing Victim, a film with a fully-fledged gay storyline. Of course, it is not just against these laws that film has historically been used as a campaigning tool. Social issues were regularly addressed during the silent and early sound era by films ranging from Intolerance (D W Griffith, 1916) and the ‘My Forgotten Man‘ sequence which closes Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) in America, to Prostitutka/Prostitute (Oleg Frelikh, 1927) in the Soviet Union and Berg-Ejvind och Hans Hustru/The Outlaw and his Wife (Victor Sjöström, 1918) in Sweden, a film which criticised the country’s poor laws.

Though Hirschfeld’s name is recognisable today due to his work for gay rights, there was also a second, distinct gay movement in Germany during the same period. This was known as the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen/Community of the Self-Owned, and was headed by German author Adolf Brand. Brand and his followers believed in what Glenn Ramsey calls an ‘older, nationalistic aesthetic of classical male eros or Freundesliebe (‘friend-love’ between males)’ (Ramsey 2008: 89). Ramsey goes on to say that the Community of the Self-Owned ‘insisted on a broad cultural and aesthetic program of promoting classical Hellenism in the service of its model of erotic male comradeship, in which pederasty played a key note’ (ibid). Brand was also the founder and editor of the world’s first gay journal, Der Eigene, which was devoted to fiction, articles, photographs and drawings which celebrated Brand’s concept of homosexuality. The journal ran intermittently from 1896 until 1932. Brand’s opinion of what a homosexual man should be and how he should act led him to author a number of attacks on Hirschfeld’s theories and the more effeminate (and often extrovert) gay men with whom he associated. In contrast to Hirschfeld, Brand and his followers were advocates of a teacher-pupil model of male–male relationships. The love of an older man for a younger one, the sort of relationship advocated by Brand, had been spoken about by Oscar Wilde during his infamous trials during the spring of 1895. To this extent Brand provided a model of same-sex relations which had a defined public presence. Significantly, it is this relationship model which is portrayed in the majority of the films examined in this chapter.

The existence of both Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and Brand’s Community of the Self-Owned, suggests that opinion in Germany was split within the homosexual population itself at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Ramsey writes:

male same-sex desire had largely fallen into the two discursive paradigms of either homoerotic sociality among males who claimed to be more or less bisexual or a third-sexed, psychic hermaphroditism, where male physical sex characteristics were believed to cohabit with a feminine mental constitution.

Ramsey 2008: 89

Correspondingly, one would expect that films produced in Germany and elsewhere in Europe which featured gay characters during the silent and early sound periods would be influenced by either Hirschfeld’s or Brand’s theories, and yet a closer examination reveals that many were actually influenced by both. In this chapter, therefore, I will argue that the division in popular opinion on homosexuality in turn generated an almost schizophrenic portrayal of gay males within European films of the 1910s and 1920s. In developing this argument, I will concentrate on five European films: Vingarne (Mauritz Stiller, 1916), a Swedish film, and Anders als die Andern (1919), Michael (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924), the documentary Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit/Ways to Strength and Beauty (Nicholas Kaufman and Wilhelm Prager, 1925) and Geschlecht in Fesseln/Sex in Chains (Wilhelm Dieterle, 1928), all four of which are German in origin. By looking specifically at characterisation in these works (along with elements such as performance, costuming, narrative and intertitles), I will demonstrate the high degree to which scientific and social theories influenced films from mainland Europe. Although connections between European film and the work of Hirschfeld have been drawn before by scholars such as Dyer (2003) and Kuzniar (2000), relatively little has been written about the influence of Brand’s relationship model on these films. It is the links between European film, the work of Hirschfeld and the philosophies of Brand which I will discuss in detail in this chapter. This analysis is both productive in its own terms and also allows an examination of the contrasting attitudes in American films of the same period which is developed in the next chapter. Unlike previous readings of these films, I will attempt to separate these texts from extraneous information and modern conceptions of sexuality and gender. This will allow for an exploration of how these films were understood by audiences on initial release.

The question needs to be addressed as to why, in a book which explores comparisons between the films of Europe and America, and not just Germany and America, so much of this first chapter dwells on the output of just one country. To begin, much of the previous academic work on European queer silent cinema has concentrated solely on German film, and so to put my work in the context of what has gone before, it is important to revisit with fresh eyes the quintet of films which could now perhaps be classed as the ‘core works’ of European gay silent film. That four of these works originate from Germany should come as no surprise considering the period in history with whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author bio
• Endorsement
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Seen But Not Heard: Representations of Gay Men in European Cinema, 1916–28
• 2 ‘Laughing at him will do as much to cure him as compulsory football’: American Film, the Sissy and the Fop
• 3 Romantic Friendships and the College Film
• 4 ‘Wonderful, Terrible Days’: The War Film and Depictions of the Buddy Relationship
• 5 Madmen, Murderers and Monsters: Queerness in the Early Horror Film
• Conclusion
• Bibliography