How the Fist Gay Movie was Saved from the Nazis
Sara Laskow wrote this wonderful story of LGBT movie history. She fills many questions about what gay movie survived that period in which so many LGBT were not able to survived themselves. We lost so many writings available on that period and movies which were made taking advantage of this new medium in which you could now have the characters in the books come alive in front of your eyes.
The early movies were a wonderful new medium for gays to get to know how other gays behaved, looked and were able to communicate sexually or otherwise in works from the great writers from previous ages.
Such a sad shame that we lost so much and up to this point I am not sure if we have found everything that was saved. Atlas Obscura published this story today.
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| Looting of Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology (Photo: Wikimedia) |
The first LGBT film ever made was released in Berlin, not long after the end of the Great War, and it was almost lost entirely.
A silent film, filled with love, betrayal, art and suicide, Different from the Others argued, very explicitly, that being gay was natural and that the only problem with relationships between two men were the laws that criminalized them. It was co-written by a sexologist and a movie producer, and though it was a popular film, within a year of its release in 1919, it had been banned from cinemas across Germany.
Any of the 30 or 40 original copies that were still around when the Nazi Party took over are now gone; a film like this one would have been singled out for destruction.
Original footage from the movie survived only serendipitously. After the first version of the film was censored, one of the co-writers, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, patched about 40 minutes of it into another film, a copy of which ended up in a Russian archive, where it sat, untouched, for decades.
Over the past few years, film archivists at UCLA have been working to combine that footage with photos taken from Hirschfeld’s own collection and additional stills from the movie, in order to create a version as loyal to the original as possible. In February, that cut of the film will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, and audiences will have a chance to see a Different from the Others that’s as close an approximation of the original as has been seen since before World War II.
A scene from Different from the Others, in which Körner meets his blackmailer (Photo: Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive)
This plot was drawn from Hirschfeld’s preoccupations. Since the 1890s, he had been fighting against Paragraph 175, a law that criminalized homosexual acts, and arguing that the law did more to assist blackmailers than it did to stop homosexuality. He was also deeply troubled by suicide in the gay community; he once wrote that one of the greatest satisfactions of his life had been to keep at least some people from killing themselves.
By 1919, though, Hirschfeld was already, in some ways, old-fashioned, “an avant-gardist of the belle Ă©poque,” whose rivals for leadership in the gay rights movement thought of him as “a fossil of a bygone era," as James Steakley, an academic who studies 20th century gay history in Germany, writes. But if the plot and storyline were drawn from the pre-War era, the movie was still a radical piece of culture. When it came out in May 1919, nothing so accepting of and positive about homosexuality had ever been shown on film before.
Where the film was distributed, it filled movie houses. But in some parts of Germany, screenings were banned almost immediately or restricted to audiences of people over the age of 20. Within a few months, Hirschfeld and Oswald were organizing special screenings for politicians, with little success. The opposition to the film (and others made in this free period) was so strong that by 1920, the parliament had reinstated censorship. Different from the Others was quickly banned–in part on the recommendation of Hirschfeld’s rivals, who claimed to cure homosexuality with hypnotism, which the film depicted as an ineffective ruse.
Hirschfeld was still allowed to show the film at his own institute, but he wanted it to have a wider audience. Over the next few years, he tried to edit the film into some form that would make it past the censors, and, very briefly, in 1927, he succeeded. His movie Laws of Love was an educational picture, which combined David Attenborough-esque nature footage of sex in the animal kingdom with parts of Different from the Others.
The film was shown in theaters for just a week and was not well reviewed, before it was yanked from public distribution. A version of that movie, though, made it to Russia, where it stayed safe (and forgotten) for decades.
Some of the images in Hirschfeld's collection (Photo: Wellcome Images/Wikimedia)
In the later decades of the 20th century, the most widely seen copy of the film was just 24 minutes, a version that had been edited in 1928 to evade censorship. In 2004, though, the Munich Film Museum rescued the footage from the archive and cut together a restored version. “The Munich version was a breakthrough,” says Steakley, who translated the text for the English version.
It's also the basis for the new cut of the film. Jan-Christopher Horak, now director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, oversaw that earlier restoration, and, when he came to California, started working with Outfest, an L.A. organization that promotes LGBT films, on a new version, based on that same footage from the Moscow archive.
“We have about half the film, maybe slightly more,” says Horak. “That’s all there actually is. There has been a search all over the world, but so far no one has found more. No print was found in other countries. We’re lucky to at least have some of this material.”
The version that will premiere in February at the Berlinale makes some improvements on the 2004 German version, though. Horak says that a “very, very long synopsis of the film,” found in censorships records, gave them additional hints as to how the existing footage should be ordered and how the plot worked. The latest version also has newly uncovered stills from the film, some of which were saved in film magazines from the time, including an additional shot from Körner’s funeral.
The most important update, though, may be to the lecture that Hirschfeld gives. In the film, he showed his own slides about the nature of human sexuality, including people in gay and lesbian relationships, as well as transgendered and transsexual people. In the new version, those slides come from Hirschfeld’s four-volume history of sexuality, which includes selections from his photo archive and from the photos that once hung on the wall of his Institute for Sexology.
“We can’t say for certain that these were the actual images in the film,” says Horak. “But they could have been.”
With the information available, this may be the best version of the film that can be made–unless, by chance, there’s more original footage, somewhere in the world, hidden away.
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