Opening screening: two cult classics: von Praunheim’s outrageous debut and the film that galvanised Germany’s gay rights movement + Intro

We open the season with two of Rosa von Prauheim’s early cult classics, his beloved low-budget debut The Bed Sausage (1971) about an odd couple and their petit-bourgeois predilections and his provocative It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971), the film that scandalised a nation, helped spark the gay liberation movement in Germany, and made von Praunheim unapologetically (in)famous overnight. The programme will be introduced by Paul Clinton, author and Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London.

After the introduction, we will first screen The Bed Sausage (81 min.), followed by It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (67 min.) after a short intermission. During the break, there will be plenty of time to purchase a drink from Café Berlin in the building, which you are welcome to bring into the cinema.

Paul Clinton is a writer based in London. He is Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, previously having been senior editor at frieze magazine and Royal Academy Fellow in Critical Practice. His writing has appeared in Art Monthly, Art Review, frieze, Mousse, Numeró and the London Review of Books. His talks include at Hayward Gallery, MOMA New York, Palais de Tokyo, Staedelschule Frankfurt, Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery.

About the Films

The Bed Sausage

Luzi and Dietmar meet and fall in love in the northern port city of Kiel. She is an older, lower-middle-class secretary; he is a young labourer from Berlin. Together they enthusiastically act out the rituals of respectable domestic life they have absorbed from their upbringing and popular culture. They go dancing at a local dance hall, she proudly shows him her allotment garden and family photo albums, and after a night of passion he helps her with the vacuuming. They celebrate Christmas together and settle into the routines of everyday bliss. But their idyll is abruptly disrupted when Dietmar’s old criminal associates arrive and kidnap Luzi in an attempt to drag him back into their world.

Shot in just ten days on a budget of 50,000 Deutschmark for the German broadcaster ZDF, The Bed Sausage was Rosa von Praunheim’s first feature film and quickly attained cult status, with audiences famously reciting favourite lines along with the characters during screenings. Von Praunheim cast his close friend Dietmar Kracht and his great-aunt Lucy Kryn, whose flat in Kiel also served as the film’s primary location. Both play heightened versions of themselves, embracing and exaggerating the petit-bourgeois milieu that von Praunheim affectionately exposes without ever ridiculing or betraying his performers. The result is a uniquely tender, absurd, and deeply funny portrait of everyday German life.

FRG 1971, colour, DCP (original format: 16mm), 81 min., with English subtitles

Screenplay, direction, production: Rosa von PraunheimWith Lucy Kryn, Dietmar Kracht, Steven Adamszewski.

It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives

Daniel leaves his provincial hometown for Berlin, falls in love with Clemens, and embraces the dream of bourgeois coupledom. Four months later, the romance is over. An affluent older man becomes his new lover, but this relationship soon proves equally hollow: Daniel is not a partner, merely an ornament. Searching for belonging, he plunges into the gay subculture of the metropolis. From beaches and bars to parks and public toilets, he follows its promises of freedom, desire, and self-realization. Yet beneath the worlds of fashion, sex, and fleeting encounters, he discovers emptiness, violence, and loneliness. Only through his encounter with a politically active gay communal household does another path emerge. Emancipation, he learns, requires more than sexual liberation. It demands solidarity, self-confidence, and collective action.

With his second feature film, Rosa von Praunheim became known overnight, also far beyond the gay community. Yet it was precisely within that community that the film provoked fierce debate. Its deliberately exaggerated portrayal of the leather and transvestite scenes, as well as its depiction of cruising culture, was criticised by some for reinforcing homophobic stereotypes. Equally controversial was its sharp attack on gay men who, in the film’s view, had settled comfortably into a conformist, consumer-driven niche existence. While the film was largely well received at its premiere at the 1971 Berlin International Film Festival, its planned television broadcasts triggered heated public controversy. Of the regional TV stations scheduled to screen the film in 1972, only WDR (West German Broadcasting Station) ultimately aired it. A nationwide ARD* broadcast followed a year later, though without the participation of Bavaria. But the transmission co

Description supplied by the event organiser.