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Terry Chen
Prof. Jerome Li
21 Dec. 2013
Stylistic Paradigms and Narrative Strategies of Weimar Queer Cinema
According to the existed record in previous scholarship, Weimar Germany (19191933) produced the first film featuring a gay man’s life (Different from the Others,
Richard Oswald, 1919), the first film presenting a role as a lesbian (Pandora’s Box,
Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929). and the first film depicting lesbianism as its main theme
(Girls in Uniform, Leotine Sagan, 1931). 1 Therefore, it is recognized that Weimar
cinema created the subgenres of “gay films” and “lesbian films.” Furthermore, due to
the abundant queer elements such as the homosexual identity, transvestitism,
bisexuality, fetishism and necrophilia2 expressed skillfully in different ways through
gay and lesbian films, the horror films and the films of the German expressionist silentfilm master— F. W. Murnau, Weimar cinema thus greatly enriched the main genre of
“queer films” by inclusively presenting various sexual inclinations and sexual practices
other than heterosexuality. Weimar Germany not only gave birth to the first group of
films in this world containing rich queer elements but also preserved a notorious antihomosexual law and established the homophobic film censorship. There had existed
some taboo on homosexuality in Weimar films because of this stern anti-homosexual
The German titles of the films Different from the Others, Pandora’s Box, and Girls in Uniform are
respectively Anders als die Andern, Die Büchse der Pandora, and Mädchen in Uniform. See James D.
Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern,” Film
History 11:2 (1999): 189.
2
The queer-film theorist, Harry M. Benshoff, gives the term “queer” a wide covering definition. He
includes gays, lesbians, bisexuals, androgynies, asexuals, transvestites, feminists, the interracial sex and
even the sex between physical-challenged people into the category of “queer.” See Harry M. Benshoff,
Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, (Manchester and New York: Manchester
UP, 1997) 4.
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penal code incriminating gay men and also the strict anti-homosexual censorship code
banning any film containing explicit gay content. However, the ingenious Weimar
directors figured out various brilliant ways to cheat the censors and the audience as a
form of artistic resistance. Thus, the convergence of the resistance against the antihomosexual criminal law and censorship stimulated the gay liberation movement and
the ingenious cinematic innovation, both of which contributed to shape the resilient
nature of Weimar queer cinema. In this thesis, I argue that the queer subject matters
never ceased to appear abundantly in Weimar films even since the strict censorship had
banned homosexual films; the queer elements could never be discovered and destroyed
by the censorship because they were transformed skillfully into various cryptograms
only for the spectators with queer eyes to decode in order to cheat the censors’ judgment.
Through re-examining the films that were regarded as heterosexual or non-homosexual
films produced by Weimar filmmakers, I would identify and decode the hidden
cinematic queerness to discover these films’ true genre identity as queer films and to
unfold their queer visual pleasure. I will introduce four paradigms of Weimar queer
cinema, discuss their various narrative strategies and analyze the creative exploitation
of cinematic conventions to depict both overt and carefully-hidden homosexuality and
queerness in Weimar gay, lesbian and queer films as well as the films of F. W. Murnau
through the era of silent films to that of talkies, from the abolishment to reestablishment
of film censorship, and from the presence to absence of the use of inter-titles.
Furthermore, I will illustrate how the paradigms and strategies of Weimar Queer
Cinema were transformed to inherit the mission of the Weimar queer social movement,
to fight against German conservative power’s political, juridical, and religious
oppressions over the homosexuals, and to create a new artistic peak of Weimar Cinema.
The four paradigms as the four chapters in this thesis would be gay films, horror films,
Murnau’s films and lesbian films.
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Paradigm One: Gay Film—A History of the Fierce Battles between Weimar Gay
Liberation Movement and the Conservative Power/Film Censorship
Different from the Others was not only the first film in the world featuring a gay
man’s life but also a blockbuster that achieved a huge box-office success and caused a
great sensation in Weimar Germany. However, with great attention endowed by the
audience came the great objection endorsed by the conservative groups which were
greatly infuriated by the film’s popularity. The irritated conservative groups
immediately built up the social pressure to urge the congress to alter the constitutional
law for reinstating film censorship which was abandoned when Weimar Republic was
established. In Chapter 1, I will conduct a historical research and provide a
cinematographic analysis of Different from the Others to demonstrate the dialectic
relationship between the formation of Weimar film censorship and the liberating
essence of this film. My historical research will extract the materials from the findings
of the three film historians—James D. Steakley, Martin Loiperdinger and Peter Jelavich
to piece together the social context of the battles between this film and the conservative
power on institutional, political and legal aspects. My cinematographic analysis of this
film will demonstrate how a queer cinematic paradigm had been built to convey a
positive and righteous image of queer people with educational and liberal purposes.
Furthermore, I will pinpoint the scenes, shots and takes by which the conservatives felt
offended and against which the ban of screening was ruled. And based on this precedent
ruled by the censorship panel against the positive and righteous depictions of
homosexuality, new paradigms, new techniques, new styles, new narrative strategies
and new genres were invented by the talented filmmakers to be evasive and deceptive
on the radar screen of the censorship.
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Paradigms Two: Horror Films—Pathetic, Sympathetic and Concealing Queer
Identities
With the ruling precedent banning all the films with positive and righteous
depictions of male homosexuality, the genre of “horror film” becomes a very important
and convenient vehicle for the ingenious directors to disguise and smuggle the queer
identity onto the silver screen. In Chapter 2, I will argue that the monster figures in
Weimar horror films are the disguised objects for the queer audience to project their
gender identities by invoking Harry M. Benshoff’s idea of “the monster and the
homosexual.” I will deploy a thorough textual analysis on the aspect of film language
to search and identify the rich queer elements disguised and hidden in the horror films
to prove that the zombie-like figure Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and
the vampire in Nosferatu (1922) are both avatars signifying the oppressed and isolated
individuals with queer identities. Through the disguised cover of evil and ugly
depictions of the monster figures encoded to scare and entertain the heterosexual
audience and to cheat censorship, the queer symbolic implications could therefore
unfold themselves in the constantly decrypting eyes of the queer audience. I would also
probe into the relationship between the queer audience’s reception and the queer star
image of Conrad Veidt, the actor who played Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and
the gay protagonist in Different from the Others with the support of Richard Dyer’s idea
of film star image. I will demonstrate how the queer implication in Veidt’s horror film
was amplified through his queer charm with the perspectives of “the constitutive
elements of stars” and “the notions of personhood and social reality that they relate to.”3
Furthermore, since the existence of women’s sexuality was denied in Weimar period,
the queer connotations hidden under the appearance of the seemingly pure-wife figure
3
See Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, (NY: ST. Martin’s Press, 1986) 2.
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tend to be overlooked by both Weimar audience and contemporary scholars. I will also
try to prove that the brave and loyal pure-wife figure in Nosferatu is actually a disguised
symbol carrying rich queer significance, not only for the female queer visibility to
emerge to the symbolic surface for the queer audience to decode, but also for the
invisibility of the queer female to be demonstrated to forge a stabilized gender norm to
satisfy the heterosexual audience.
Paradigm Three: Murnau’s Films—Displaying by Distracting and Disguising
Murnau’s silent films are considered to be over-simplistic by previous scholarship
on Weimar cinema, for the clear-cut binary oppositions of the visual and symbolical
elements dominate the formal and narrative structures in his films. However, this
observation prevents scholars from perceiving Murnau’s artistic and critical intention
carefully hidden in his films to blur the mainstream gender identities through the
presentation of sexual ambiguity. I argue that the visual and symbolic terrains of
ambiguity existing between the binary oppositions in Murnau’s films were designed to
be unfolded to and identified by the queer eyes, while the seemingly binary oppositions
served as decoys for distracting the attention of Weimar mainstream audience. This
chapter presents the contextualized analysis concerning Weimar cinematic production,
German expressionist tradition, the directors’ artistic and personal inclinations, and the
contemporaneous anti-homosexual social background in Murnau’s times. I would
elaborate how the heterosexual plotlines were used to distract the homoerotic ones by
synthesizing Thomas Elsaesser’s analysis of homosocial interactions and Janet
Bergstrom’s idea of the distracted and redirected queer desire. By examining the sexual
ambiguity disguised and distracted by all the apparent binary oppositions in six of his
prestigious films in silent era, Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Faust, Sunrise, City Girl, and
Tabu, this chapter argues that Murnau’s films, from his Weimar to Hollywood period,
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consistently provide queer visual pleasure and subversive gender identification under
the disguise of heterosexual romances for destabilizing the mainstream gender norm,
and for challenging the de jure anti-homosexual attitude in Weimar society.
Paradigm Four：Lesbian Films—Fearless Rebellion against Patriarchy, Fascism
and Militarism
However, the whole Weimar society seemed very tolerant to lesbian elements
expressed in the films because of the society’s particular male-centered concepts on
female sexuality, and of the specific artistic techniques ingeniously deployed by the
directors to blind the censors from seeing the lesbianism. I will also examine whether
this tolerance was based on the mainstream society’s merciful sympathy or actually on
its ignorance of lesbianism and the denial of the existence of women’s sexuality.
Furthermore, I will refer to Richard Dyer’s categorization of the two major discourses
of gender identification advocated in Weimar gay and lesbian circles—the model of
“in-between-ism” 4 and that of “the male-identified 5 gayness and female-identified6
lesbianism”—to illustrate how the films with lesbian implications adopting the latter
model could pass through the censorship’s filter without triggering the homophobic
alarm. Therefore, since the homophobic German film censorship had been reinstated in
1920, the films transpiring obvious and devious lesbian visual pleasure become a very
important vehicle for scholars to decode the directors’ cinematic lesbianism and to
discover the society’s discrepant attitude toward gay love and lesbian love. So to speak,
it is the overt male homosexuality that Weimar censorship was more concerned with,
but not the lesbianism depicted ambiguously, dismissively and deniably. Mostly, the
lesbian visual pleasure was intentionally designed and skillfully disguised in the films
See Richard Dyer, “Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany,” New German Critique 51 (Fall),
41.
5
Dyer, Weimar 24.
6
Dyer, Weimar 49.
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by the directors knowing the blind side of the anti-gay censors, the patriarchal society
and its audience, and in doing so, these films managed to deceive the censors and
escaped from the fate of being banned. This chapter will examine how lesbian visual
pleasure in Weimar cinema was utilized, deployed and disguised to convey the lesbian
narrative impulse as an artistic support also for the homosexual liberation movement
that was developing ardently in Weimar Germany.
I would conclude that although the film censorship of Weimar Germany strictly
forbade the presentation of the homosexual subjects and themes, this sort of highpressure ban executed by the government could not terminate the queer elements
presented in Weimar cinema at all. On the contrary, the homophobic film censorship of
Weimar Germany had somehow instead stimulated the mutation and evolution of the
queer elements in Weimar cinema in many unexpected ways. However, nowadays when
visual and symbolic queer elements could be openly and freely displayed on the silver
screen in many queer-friendly countries, this kind of precious art of disguise and
distraction has gradually disappeared. I wish this study could bring some more attention
to the preservation and promotion of this artistic treasure. Till now there are still more
than 80 countries having the laws incriminating the gay people; I hope that the
discovery of this study could well-equipped the viewers with stronger ability and
insight to better identify more hidden queer messages in films; furthermore, the hidden
liberating messages forbidden by the hegemonic power in many other oppressive
countries or societies in different periods in history.
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Tentative Bibliography
Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film.
Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1997.
-----. “The Monster and the Homosexual,” in his Queer Cinema: The Film Reader. Ed.
Sean Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2004, 63-74.
Bergstrom, Janet. “Sexuality at a Loss: The Films of F.W. Murnau.” Poetics Today,
Vol. 6, No. 1/2 (1985): 185-203.
Danks, Adrian. “Reaching beyond the Frame: Murnau’s City Girl.” Senses of Cinema.
12 Jan. 2011 <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/cteq/city_girl/>.
Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: Macmillan Press,
1986.
-----. “Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany.” New German Critique 51 (Fall):
5-60.
Elsaesser, Thomas. “No End to Nosferatu (1922).” In Weimar Cinema: An Essential
Guide to Classic Films of the Era. Ed. Noah Isenberg. New York: Columbia UP,
2009, 79-94.
-----. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. London:
Routledge. 2000.
-----. “Nosferatu, Tartuffe and Faust: Secret Affinities in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.”
In Weimar Cinema and after: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York:
Routledge, 2000, 223-58.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Hadleigh, Boze. The Lavender Screen. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993.
Hake, Sabine. “Who Gets the Last Laugh? Old Age and Generational Change in F. W.
Murnau’s The last Laugh (1924).” In Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to
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Classic Films of the Era. Ed. Noah Isenberg. New York: Columbia UP, 2009,
115-33.
Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film and the Death of Weimar Culture.
London: University of California Press, 2006.
Kiss, Robert J. “Queer Tradition in German Cinema.” In The German Cinema Book.
Ed. Tim Bergfelder et al. London: British Film Institute, 2002, 48-56.
Kaczorowsky, Craig. “Paragraph 175.” Social Science. glbtq.com. 2 Feb. 2011
<http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/paragraph_175.html >.
Lebeau, Vicky. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows. London:
Wallflower Press, 2001.
Loiperdinger, Martin. “State Legislation, Censorship and Funding.” In The German
Cinema Book. Ed. Tim Bergfelder et al. London: British Film Institute, 2002,
148-57.
Mayne, Judith. "Dracula in the Twilight: Murnau's Nosferatu." In German Film
and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations. Ed. Eric Rent-schler. New
York: Methuen, 1986, 25-39.
Mccormick, Richard W. “Coming out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual
Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931).” In Weimar
Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. Ed. Noah Isenberg. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009, 271-89.
Rosso, Vito. The Celluloid Closet. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987.
Steakley, James D. “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of
Anders als die Andern.” Film History, 11:2 (1999), 181-203.