#in all his slinking androgynous omniravishing pantherness

[aikainkauna]

Those *other* Conrad Veidt films of queer interest

Now, almost everyone who’s heard of Conrad Veidt has also heard that he played the first explicitly homosexual character in cinema in the gay rights film Different From The Others, in 1919, and perhaps also that he was bisexual himself. But fewer people would know he starred in several other films of queer interest, some in which the queerness is merely a hint, some in which it’s so blatant it emerges out of the subtext into the text, and some where the queerness is a major part of the text. So I thought I’d list the *other* surviving/available Veidt films of queer interest (all available from veidtveidtveidt ) for your perusal.  The categories are more than a little fluid and I’m sure that someone else might categorise these films differently, but this is how they appear to my eyes when I move the queer/slash fangirls goggles aside–except for the “slash” category, of course. So, here we go:

Films with actual queer text: -Der Geiger von Florenz (The Violinist of Florence, or Impetuous Youth), 1926

A Freudian tale from beginning to end. At the time, Freud was at the height of his success and there were several films being made that took his theories quite seriously indeed–in this case, the exploration focuses on the Electra complex (the female version of the Oedipus complex) and its relation to sexual/gender variance. 

Renee (Elisabeth Bergner), a feisty young girl, has severe daddy issues. To the point where she cannot bear it when her widowed father (Veidt) remarries, and she keeps on trying to sabotage her father’s relationship with his new wife. Her father sends her to a Swiss boarding school, but she soon runs away, dressed as a boy, across the border to Italy. In Florence, she poses as a violinist and becomes quite a success on the streets. Soon, she is spotted by a young artist (Walter Rilla)–who lives in a romantic relationship with his own sister (Grete Mosheim), like they were husband and wife. He finds the young violinist so beautiful he wants to paint “him.” He invites the “boy” to live with himself and his sister, and they both develop crushes on her–the artist offers to wash “his” back in the shower and the sister realises Renee’s actually a girl in drag, but that just excites her. Tension mounts until the painting the artist made of the young violinist makes it to international newspapers, and the girl’s father recognises his daughter, immediately travelling to Florence to be reunited with her. Her secret is discovered and at the end of the film, we see her (still in drag) embracing the artist–and as she’s just been shown being groped by the sister (and enjoying it), it’s basically implied that she will now be living together with the artist and his sister in a happy, incestuous bisexual threesome. Not joking. And it’s a happy ending, too, in case you were wondering.

-Die Andere Seite (1931)

This is a German talkie version of Journey’s End, a World War I play by R.C. Sherriff and originally filmed in English by James Whale a little earlier. The story is a bleak, grey and heartbreaking glimpse into the brief lives of a company of doomed English soldiers in the trenches. It shows men, old and young alike, at their most raw and vulnerable, clinging desperately to alcohol, duty, their memories of their girlfriends–but most importantly, each other–as they fall apart mentally and physically, hurtling towards inevitable destruction. Veidt plays Captain Stanhope, whose men look up to him, but who is falling apart and sinking into the bottle himself. Grim viewing, but with superb acting performances, and it’s hard not to weep as you watch these doomed souls snatching but tiny pieces of comfort and tenderness from each other as the shells come down and everybody dies. Connie’s drunk, broken, despairing whisper of “Küss mich?” (“Kiss me?”) to his superior officer whom he idolises–it’s dark and we cannot even see his face–is gut-wrenching. Edited to add the fact that we now have engsubs for this! I ripped them from a rare (unavailable or not easily available to the public) copy and you can get them on the masterpost.

And now, for the swathe of films with queer subtext, slashiness and other forms of queer interest–continued in the rest of the blog post here. Enjoy:)