The Bed Sausage

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

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

Tetsuya Shibutani
Born in 1965, he is a Professor in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Nihon University. His research specializes in German cinema and cultures of visual representation. He has published extensively on German film, with a particular focus on the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He has also translated Fassbinder’s plays "The Bremen Freedom" and "Garbage, the City and Death" into Japanese, and has created Japanese subtitles for a large number of German films.