“I have a responsibility to be provocative in my films”: Rosa von Praunheim’s activist cinema

Rosa von Praunheim has been described as the enfant terrible of the German New Wave and (by Variety) as Germany’s most commercial underground film-maker. “Hollywood was the primary focus for a double perspective on Germany – on the one hand as an image of redemption and unparalleled technical proficiency, and on the other, as the propagator of ideological and economic imperialism” (Timothy Corrigan, New German Film). This love-hate relationship was played out in the film cultures of all the Western European countries. In recent years, the ideological critique of capitalist American society (which has its cinematic roots in the critiques of 1930s documentary film-makers), and the independent oppositional film culture that went with it, has all but disappeared from Europe (if only to be continued in Asian film cultures).

Rosa von Praunheim’s contemporaries (e.g., Wenders, Fassbinder) moved from an oppositional anti-bourgeois stance to commercial success and a certain ‘softening’ of content. Until recently, however, von Praunheim’s films have remained resolutely oppositional. He is, with a few others (such as Haroun Farocki and Straub/Huillet), one of the heirs of that originally politicised movement. Von Praunheim’s films are characterised by an anti-aesthetic. They offer few cinematic pleasures to the viewer. As Tony Rayns has put it: “Rosa will never be much prized by cinephiles”.

His famous Berlin soirées where guests are quizzed on intimate details of their sex lives give a clue: he’s very much an ethnographer of sexual life. As a gay man, his passion and interest is focused on the gay scene but, as his recent film Survival in New York shows, he’s very much at home in intimate conversation whether with straight or gay people. At one point, we almost see one of the (straight) couples having sex as the boyfriend talks about leaving the U.S. judiciary to run a strip club! And it’s this bizarre chronicling of life that is stranger than fiction that pervades his work.

His is an activist cinema – “home movies for the gay movement” (Vito Russo). He aims to shock and outrage, to confront an audience with the reality of gay (men’s) lives. As he put it recently, “My films provoke extreme reactions, and I’m rather proud of that. I still feel I have a responsibility to be provocative in my films. It’s what I did for the gay movement in the 1970s and I need to remind people now that we can keep on fighting even if the odds seem hopeless”. His films are not particularly reflective or analytic and are often weakest when they try to be so.

His cinema is also strongest when it is the most personal. In the early 1970s, he worked with Gregory Markopoulos, and one can clearly see the influence of the previous generation of explicitly gay movie-makers from the radical U.S. post-war underground and experimental cinema – Kenneth Anger, Tom Chomont, Jack Smith, etc. Gerard Courant wrote of Army of Lovers: “It succeeds imperfectly where perhaps RVP didn’t expect it: one can’t talk of homosexuals (or any other social, racial or sexual category) in terms of groups. The only possible representation is to say ‘I’. This is what RVP attempts and from time to time succeeds: ‘I am a homosexual who speaks about my sexuality’”.

This emphasis on the personal is complemented by that on diversity. His almost ethnographic concern with differences of experience and practice would – if he were intellectually that way inclined – have made his work a fitting complement to that of Foucault. However, he’s a self-declared philistine: “I’m very anti-academic, anti-theoretical. I don’t care about film theory… it only takes two hours to learn to use a camera and not three years to study theory and aesthetics and all this shit”.

Von Praunheim is a prolific film-maker – a recent filmography noted nearly forty films which he has directed (including TV programmes and shorts). Starting in 1967, his film-making career spans 1960s Sexpol, gay liberation and, of course, the coming of AIDS. As such it begins to have a valuable archival dimension documenting another era in sexual mores, particularly important given all the gaps in the record of gay cultures. It Is Not the Homosexual… and Army of Lovers now take one back to a completely different era when sexual experience was part of a testing of the limits of human experience. Dividing his time between Berlin and New York, Rosa von Praunheim has developed two distinctive styles: fiction films based in Berlin and largely New York-based AIDS activist films. The following notes give some indication of the interest and importance of his films today.

It Is Not the Homosexual… chronicles the coming out of a young man who arrives in Berlin from the country. It follows him through a series of tableaux representing the varied options the gay world offers: street-cruising, bars, monogamy and multiple relationships in a collective. His various encounters present the film’s audience with a catalogue of gay stereotypes: effeminate, garish, promiscuous and predatory men whose only concern with each other is as sex objects. When shown in New York it caused a row among gay activists. “It very much recognised the repression which exists, but criticised the inaction, the lack of political intervention of the oppressed. I think gay people do get used to that oppression. They complain about it, but live within it nevertheless, rather than living in freedom”.

Since the film portrays a gay life style diametrically opposed to that which gay men envisage for themselves, and seems to perpetuate the most repugnant prejudicial attitudes towards gay behaviour, audience response was openly hostile. A discussion with one such audience following a 1973 screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is screened as a companion work, Audience Response to It’s not the homosexual. As Vito Russo put it: “In 1972, American gays expected a gay liberation film from Germany… instead they found a film which attacked them mercilessly”. 

Army of Lovers is an idiosyncratic collage of interviews interspersed with still photographs and newsreel footage of marches and rallies, as well as agit-prop gay theatre, gathered over a ten-year period. In the introduction to the book of the film, von Praunheim writes that on his first visit to the U.S. he had no idea at all of the American gay liberation movement. That ignorance produces dislocation, irony and ambivalence – subjects aren’t assumed to speak truthfully.

Von Praunheim attacks the dominant culture as the source of gay oppression but goes on to say that since most homosexuals embrace that culture, they invite censure: “Most gays are very conservative. They vote for governments that will protect the status quo. To push gays into action you have to confront them. When they saw my films, many gays felt hatred and anger for the first time, though it was directed at me, myself and at the films. But that’s the reaction I wanted. It’s a very important step forward. I think Anita Bryant was one of the best things that has happened for the cause of gay liberation. She forced even conservative gays to come out of their closets. But now self-criticism has to be pushed even further. No sentimental shit about gays as poor little victims”. 

City of Lost Souls is about a group of Americans living in Berlin: rock singers, dancers, acrobats, black gay, trans-sexual, Jewish, “I felt I just had to make a film about this group of unusual friends. Their spirit and their fantasies demanded it. We began shooting videos in my apartment. We shot more than thirty scenes in the course of a single night. They were all pretty bizarre, because what they showed was life being lived, not some fabrication. They were shameless, direct, vital. Later I transcribed them from the video-tapes, shortened them and rearranged them, took a selection of photos from them and put the whole lot together in the form of a screenplay”.

Tony Rayns has described it as von Praunheim’s first halting experiments in editing, and a first attempt to keep storylines going in tandem. It also illustrates the Warholian influence in his fiction, and its rootedness in actuality, in the documentary side of his work.

Similarly, Anita: Dances of Vice is a fictional reworking of the life of one of the lesser known German sexual radicals: “Her very eccentric and courageous life inspired me to do this movie… In a very conservative period, it’s very important to remember people who had this kind of burning desire to try things out, to go to their very limits”.

Survival in New York charts the daily lives of three German-speaking women who emigrated to New York from Europe: Ulli, Claudia and Anna. Anna spent seven years as a New York stripper before becoming an educational therapist in local schools. Claudia only begins to enjoy the city when she comes out as a lesbian. Ulli, with an almost kitsch Swabian accent, finally settles down with a disturbed Vietnam vet. It’s a simple film – about the fascination of America, and New York in particular, for Europeans, as a place where one can escape the restrictions of class and provincialism, and discover new identities for oneself. Its realism about the difficulties of living in New York qualify its fascination for the European viewer fed on the myths of the U.S.A.

Von Praunheim’s most recent work is a trilogy of AIDS-related films: Silence = Death, Positive and Feuer unterm Arsch (Fire Under Your Arse). Positive documents the recent work of the Act-Up movement and contains important debates between the anger of activists and those who seek to embrace holistic approaches. Silence­Death is weaker, a rather rushed series of glimpses of the lives of AIDS-affected artists which doesn’t do justice to their work. Fire Under Your Arse, currently in production, aims to bring AIDS issues back home to Germany where awareness is behind both the U.S. and the U.K.

Modern tragedy, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, has to follow different rules from the Greek models our cultures have relied on for so long. Aristotelian catharsis is no longer appropriate. We cannot extrapolate from the individual story to the totality. Von Praunheim avoids the traps of identification and catharsis which the recent Oscar-winning documentary, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, suffers from. In the process of communicating with its wider (mainly heterosexual) audience, the film demobilises gay audiences. Von Praunheim’s concern is to activate and mobilise, hence the title of his forthcoming film for the German gay movement.

Rosa von Praunheim’s approach to the AIDS crisis has been testimonial; interviews and coverage of the gay and lesbian communities’ political response. As he himself says, he is too much of an anarchist, distrusting power and responsibility, for his films ever to be representative or to lay down a political line. “I want to make films about our strength and vitality, films that give those of us who feel weak or marginalised, power. I want them to be about the strength to fight on”.