warning from a dead
man
by Douglas Messerli
Ryan Davis (screenwriter and director) Pink
Triangle / 2010 [18 minutes]
One has to give more than simple admiration to
a graduate student film—this from the University of North Carolina School of
the Arts School of Filmmaking—that explores the Nazi attempt to eliminate
homosexuality. This film appears to get most of its facts right, while
demanding it present itself as a complex costume drama as well as having
several scenes which shift in time, as the central figure, Harmon Lehmann (Jon
Parker Douglas), even more interestingly featured as a Nazi informer, has
flashbacks of memory which help explain how he has become the monster he now
is.
The
film has minimal dialogue, with the visual predominating, putting a great deal
of the film’s success on the acting skills of Douglas, who portrays the
conflicted informer Harmon. Even before the film’s first scene, in which Harmon
is forced to meet in a movie theater with the Standartenführer (Bill Moser) in
charge of the homosexual arrests, probably an underling of either Heinrich
Himmler or Reinhard Heydrich—the two major SS homophobes, Heydrich being the
one who demanded an early round up of all homosexuals—it is clear that Harmon
has already identified a great many of his former friends.
Among the pictures he is given to identify in this new batch, however,
is one which he himself took of two lovers, one already arrested and probably
killed, the other of Straussberg. The memory of the photo takes him back to the
bar in which it occurred and to his own meeting there with his lover, Deiter
(Davis Harper).
That memory, in fact, lures him back to the now abandoned house in which
Deiter lived, where he remembers their love-making and, more important for the
movie, their arrest. During their torture, Dieter refused to name names while
Harmon looked on, the Nazi inquirer threatening to slit his throat if he didn’t
speak. Harmon, presumably in order to save Deiter, screams out: he is willing
to give them the names of friends. It appears from the flashback, stimulated by
the Standartenführer’s insistence—when Harmon has not quickly enough named the
men in the photographs—that he observe yet another such session, that both the
young man in the present and Harmon’s lover Deiter’s throats were slit for
their refusals to betray other gay men.
The second witnessing of torture utterly changes Harmon, who now sews an
obligatory pink triangle on his shirt, cuts his hair short, takes up a gun, and
returns to the Standartenführer’s office to shoot him dead. The film seems to
lack some credibility in that fact that Harmon evidently escapes and at the end
of Ryan Davis’ film meets Straussberg in a train station to hand over the
photograph, a warning that he too is now being sought.
Many gay men survived through early escape—Basel, Switzerland being a
particularly important city for German gays. Others survived by entering into
lavender marriages with pre-war lesbian friends. But a large percentage, close
to 25% of those who were not arrested and sent to camps, committed suicide.
Los Angeles, August 7, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2023).
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