Paul Legband and Julius Rhode | Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (A Man’s Girlfriend) / 1919 [Lost film]

nobody

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karl Grune and Beate Schach (screenplay, based on an anonymous biography by NOBody), Paul Legband and Julius Rhode (directors) Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (A Man’s Girlfriend) / 1919 || lost film

 

Based on an anonymous biography of 1907 penned by NOBody, A Man’s Girlfriend is described by some sources as a lost film, but evidently was shown by Mubi some time ago (at least it is listed among their films). IMDb and Mubi both attribute the film’s direction to Paul Legband and Julius Rode, listing Gune only as one of two writers, while others list Grune and Legband as the directors. So obviously there are a number of questions regarding this Austrian silent movie of 1919. The film had its premiere in October of that year in Berlin.

     The cast, who are not given character names in the IMDb listing include Hans Albers, Bendo, Siegfried Dressauer, Olga Engl, Erika Glässner, Max Hochstetter, Helmut Krauss, Rudolf Senius, Irma Sernau, Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur, Lotte Stein, and Manny Ziener.

   In comic form, the story of this film presents the memories of the author, who was born as a hermaphrodite, raised by her father as a boy and later by her uncle as a girl. After her death, her body was dissected, when apparently her/his hermaphrodism was discovered.

     Surely this was one of the earliest, if not the first full discussion of transgender sexuality resulting from hermaphrodism, the other films concerning themself with shifts of gender, with the exception perhaps of The Amazons (1917), having to with the humor of drag or intentional deception as in Lady Madcap’s Way (1913) Zapata’s Gang (1913), and Filibus (1915).

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (May 2022).