Ernest Thorp | Pas de Deux (aka Ken’s Ballet) / 1955

camp before we knew what it was

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Thorp (director) Faux Pas de Deux (aka Ken’s Ballet) / 1955

 

Somedays are just remarkable for the cinematic finds that one makes, and this is a special day in which I discovered the works of the very underground and unspoken works of apartheid-era queer film maker Ernest Thorp, making at a time in an almost unthinkable era of South African history, gay films that might have had him arrested and imprisoned.

    Little is known about Thorp (1911-1998) except what we learn from the revelatory essay by Ludwig Wagner “Redefining the Historical Timeline of Queer Film in South Africa: Ernest Thorp’s Nil Desperandum and South Africa’s First Queer Films,” noting that Thorp’s father Herbert founded the Durban Amateur Photographic Society (1921) and that Thorp himself was the curator of the Durban Botanic Gardens from 1950-1975.

     The short history we have, I quote from Wagner:

“Access to like-minded members and industry professionals through the society would explain how Thorp arranged for the queer and sometimes homoerotic footage he filmed to be clandestinely processed and developed.13 During WWII, while working as an apprentice horticulturalist, Thorp established himself as a prominent social figure in Durban. Unable to enlist in the Royal Navy during the war, he opted to “entertain as many visiting naval men as possible at his home in Durban,” becoming a “mentor” to many (emphasis mine).

     At the time, Thorp met Admiral Middleton, a commander of a British battleship anchored in Durban, who shared his interest in orchids and invited him to visit him back in England.15 On May 1, 1948, Thorp arrived in England aboard the Umtali. When, after a few months in Britain, Thorp could not secure passage back to South Africa, Admiral Middleton offered to transport Thorp back to South Africa as a guest of the Royal Navy as repayment for “the kindness he had shown to hundreds of sailors.” Thorp returned to South Africa in September 1948 after being given one of the Admiral’s cabins on HMS Jutland, part of a squadron visiting the Union. Thorp entertained the sailors on HMS Jutland during his return journey, showing “several films he had taken of places of interest” in South Africa.

    Thorp was an international authority on orchids and travelled the world collecting specimens. In addition to accompanying luminaries such as General Jan Smuts on plant-collecting trips in the Drakensberg, he had lunch with the King of Thailand at his palace. Thorp also met Queen Elizabeth—when she visited Durban along with King George VI and princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in 1947—taking her on a tour of the Botanic Gardens. Shortly before his retirement, Thorp presented a paper at the 7th World Orchid Conference in Colombia in 1972.20 Thorp was utterly discreet and private, always conscious of his position as curator of the Botanic Gardens. His students remember him being an “avid photographer and cinematographer,” showing them many films and slide shows of his international travels.”

     His major underground film, Nil Desperandum, which Wagner redated from the generally claimed 1960s, to 1949-1951, is discussed elsewhere in these volumes.

     Faux Pas de Deux is a dance between two males that might remind one of the works of 1900 by Alice Guy (Blaché), At the Floral Ball and Pierrette’s Escapades dance entirely by female figures, one playing the male part—except it was not at all unusual for women to dance with one another throughout the 20th century, while Thorp’s work has perhaps more in common with NormanMcLaren’s 1983 dance film, Narcissus, featuring two males dancing extensively together as the character of Narcissus explores his other counterpoint before falling in love with himself. But McLlarens’s, although openly gay in its expression, is a serious exploration of a known myth, while this 3-minute work, described by Wagner as a “curiosity,” features a man dressed as a ballerina who dances alone before—performing the entrée and adagio of the black swan pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Here, the work does not even have the dimension of Michael Bourne’s marvelous 2024 version of an all-male ballet, but rather, with the male dressed up as a female ballerina, whose lover arrives on a bicycle, it can only be perceived as a kind of camp performance long before there was such a concept, although as I have made quite clear in this volume, camp was long with us from the early 20th century even before we recognized what it was.

    The discovery of this film, Nil Desperandum, and other films, including those made by his lover

Salwyn Hurwitz represent major contributions to the archive of queer cinematic history, again reminding us that queer men and women everywhere were documenting, often in a very private manner, their lives and interests. There are certainly many, many of these works lost, but hopefully we will eventually discover others.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026).