Since the Weimar era, German cinema has played a leading role in
the innovation of gay and lesbian cinema, with the tantalizing
sexual illegibility and gender instability of German films of the
1920s anticipating the queer sensibilities of the 1990s.
From such cross-dressing Weimar comedies as "Viktor und Victoria"
to the transgender fantasies of Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, and
Hans Scheirl, this filmic tradition explores the unconventional
erotic, its directors inventing a visual language that goes beyond
the trivialization and sensationalism of mainstream representations
of gays and lesbians. This cinema crosses the boundaries between
such classifications as male and female, gay and bisexual, normal
and pathological, insisting that such transgressions cannot be
entirely tamed, regulated, or closeted. Previous scholarship,
reading this national cinema as sociopolitical commentary, has
tended to ignore what falls outside a realist, hetero-normative
paradigm. In this book, the author aims to rectify this neglect by
rewriting German cinematic history queerly.
She reexamines the Nazi movie star Zarah Leander via her gay
fandom, showing how this actress haunts the drag performance of
femininity in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She argues not
only for the persuasiveness of the gay underground in the New
German Cinema but also for cinema's pivotal role in German gay
liberation. Other topics include the queering of nationality in the
films of Monika Treut and Rosa von Praunheim, the fetishistic
medium of experimental filmmaking in the works of Michael Brynntrup
and Matthias Muller, and the androgynous appeal of "dyke noir
animation." In conclusion, "The Queer German Cinema" juxtaposes the
voices of several German filmmakers as they reflect on their art in
terms of a counter-politics.
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