Film Special: Rosa von Praunheim
Pioneer of Queer Cinema in Germany

West Germany, 1971, 67 min., FSK 16, German with Japanese subtitles

Daniel and Clemens fall in love, move in together, and attempt to imitate the conventions of a bourgeois marriage. When their relationship ends after four months, Daniel becomes increasingly immersed into Berlin’s gay subculture. He takes a job at a gay café and frequents parks and public meeting places popular with gay men. Eventually, he meets Paul in a transvestite bar, who introduces him to a gay communal household where alternative models of gay life and identity are openly discussed.

Praunheim’s scathing critique of the self-imposed invisibility of gay people in public life is one of the rare examples of a film that had a direct socio-political impact. Following its first screenings, more than fifty activist groups were founded, laying the groundwork for the modern German gay rights movement.

Originally filmed without sound and later supplemented with an ironic voice-over commentary, the film blends fiction and documentary footage, manifesto and essay, culminating in a direct appeal for collective self-organization. Its experimental and open-ended form is as provocative and challenging as its wide-ranging critique.

Director: Rosa von Praunheim
Cast: Bernd Feuerhelm, Beryt Bohlen, Ernst Kuchling, and others

West Germany, 1971, 81 min., Color, FSK 16, German with Japanese subtitles

Luzi and Dietmar meet and fall in love in the port city of Kiel. She is an older, lower-middle-class secretary; he is a young worker from Berlin. Together they reenact the rituals of respectable bourgeois life that they have absorbed through upbringing and the media. They go dancing at a local restaurant, she shows him her allotment garden and family photo albums, and after a night together he helps her with the housework. They celebrate Christmas and embrace the comforts of domestic life.

Their idyll is abruptly disrupted when some of Dietmar’s former criminal associates arrive and kidnap Luzi to force him back into their illicit activities.

In his second feature film, Praunheim employs the aesthetics of ‘camp’, a style that was still largely unknown in Germany at the time. Closely linked to the history of drag performance and, before that, to modern British gay subculture, camp is a parodic practice that embraces exaggeration and bad taste as tactics of queer resistance. By pushing the aesthetic and moral conventions of mainstream culture to their extremes, camp exposes and subverts them. The Bed Sausage is one of the earliest and most distinctive examples of this sensibility in German cinema.

Director: Rosa von Praunheim
Cast: Luzi Kryn, Dietmar Kracht, Steven Adamczewski, and others

West Germany, 1976, 80 min., Color, German with Japanese subtitles

In this film, Rosa von Praunheim travels to New York, a city he regards as both a place of longing and an alternative to what he saw as the “sterile German cultural establishment.” He documents his encounters with artists and personalities from New York’s underground scene, who, in Off-Off-Broadway theaters, clubs, and private apartments are creating an uninhibited and highly vital culture often under precarious conditions, free from conventional taboos.
Among the film’s most prominent figures are William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Fernando Arrabal, and Robert Wilson. The “emigrants” of the title are represented by German-speaking exiles and emigrant artists from the pre-war and wartime periods, including Greta Keller and Grete Mosheim, both living in New York. In this way, the film combines a portrait of the contemporary avant-garde scene with reflections on the experiences of German-speaking exile.

Director: Rosa von Praunheim
Screening courtesy: Underground Cinema Film Festival.

The screening is held with an introduction by film scholar Tetsuya Shibutani.

West Germany, 1987, 87 min., FSK 16, German with Japanese subtitles

In 1920s Berlin, the nude dancer Anita Berber became notorious for her eccentricity and uncompromising lifestyle. In retrospect, she has come to embody the turbulent era between war, inflation, sexual liberation, and drug-induced excess. Rosa von Praunheim frames his homage to this radical cultural icon through the story of an elderly woman who is admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
The patient, played by cult actress Lotti Huber, believes herself to be Anita Berber. Her fantasies evoke the visual world of expressionist silent cinema and are brought vividly to life through the striking cinematography of Elfi Mikesch.

Director: Rosa von Praunheim
Cast: Lotti Huber, Ina Blum, Mikael Honesseau, Rosa von Praunheim, and others
Screening courtesy: Eurospace