“The girls are making fun of you because no one ever sees you,” they say, inviting him to a bordello, where two women in lace gowns try to kiss him. We see him reading as five classmates sneak up behind him, raising their hands in unison and clapping them down on his shoulders-a threat of future violence delivered in the guise of friendship. "As a university student, Körner led a lonely and reclusive life, devoted only to his studies,” an intertitle then tells us. Then a teacher walks in and bursts into outrage: Max is supposed to be doing his assignment alone-the standard punishment, it would seem, for untoward tendencies. In a flashback to his years as a boarding-school teen-ager, he looks over a text with his roommate, Max, and drapes his arm around the younger boy. In "Different from the Others," we watch as Paul loses his faith in the power of companionship. Yet there is a special kind of shame and suffering that comes from living life half-openly, from knowing what it is you’re not really allowed to have. When Anita Loos, who wrote the novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” visited the city in the twenties, she observed that “any Berlin lady of the evening might turn out to be a man the prettiest girl on the street was Conrad Veidt”-the silent-screen leading man who played none other than Paul Körner in “Different from the Others.” Weimar night life was infamously decadent: men dressed as women flocked to the Silhouette women dressed as men favored the Mikado and the Eldorado drew gender-benders of all types. If you were careful enough, you could evade the shadow of Paragraph 175, an infamous law that forbade “unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex or of humans with beasts.” And it was relaxed censorship laws that allowed “Different from the Others” to be made in the first place, along with later gay-themed films such as “Pandora’s Box” (1929), whose seductive countess was one of the first onscreen lesbians, and “Mädchen in Uniform” (1931), which takes place in a brutal, erotically charged all-girls boarding school. On the surface, tolerance prevailed in Weimar Germany. The film makes another argument: that hatred can fester even in the interstices of liberal democracies. “It’s not abnormal, because there is no abnormality.” “Years before Alfred Kinsey, Hirschfeld was arguing that homosexuality exists on a continuum,” Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of the U.C.L.A. print of “Laws of Love”-that a reliable version of “Different from the Others” was completed, using detailed Nazi censorship records as a narrative guide, and with images substituted for the missing scenes.
Great romantic gay movies archive#
Film & Television Archive bought a 35-mm. In the eighties, film restorers began trying to piece together the original, but it wasn’t until this winter-six years after the U.C.L.A. Luckily, the good doctor had included some forty minutes of the footage in a long scientific film called “Laws of Love,” which was shown in Russia in the late twenties or early thirties and remained for decades in the Krasnogorsk archives.
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"Different from the Others," which was written by the gay sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the Austrian director Richard Oswald, tells the story of one who “suffers not from his condition, but rather from the false judgment of it,” as another intertitle reads. By 1933, when the Nazis stormed Hirschfield’s Institute of Sexual Research, also in Berlin, every known copy of the film had been destroyed. Their alliance, a perfect meeting of passion and pedagogy, seems indivisibly strong-but, by the end of the film, we have learned that it is otherwise, owing to the self-hatred and cruelty that homosexual love can inspire, even in Weimar Berlin. Paul responds by offering Kurt his great open palm.
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“My deepest wish would come true if you were willing to be my teacher!” an intertitle reads. Kurt Sivers, round-faced, excitable, has seen all of Paul’s concerts, and he approaches the master nervously, hands clutched to his chest. Then an unlikely event sets him on a new course: a young music student has come calling. He is Paul Körner, a violin virtuoso, and, in his silk housecoat, surrounded by heavy drapery and Grecian statuettes, he appears to live a life that is resplendent but lonely.
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In it, a gaunt, handsome man plays the piano in his Berlin drawing room. There is only one hopeful scene in "Different from the Others," a silent picture from 1919 that is widely considered the first feature film about gay love.