Henrik Galeen | Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1926

man in the mirror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Galeen and Hanns Heinz Ewers (screenplay), Henrik Galeen (director) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1926

 

Generally, I have grouped films with the same theme and characters with the hope that their many variations read in context might reveal the LGBTQ subtexts of the works such as those centered around Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fable, and the Zorro films. But beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, the next three decades each produced a new reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “William Willson” titled The Student Prague beginning in 1913 with Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s expressionist work, and continuing in 1926 with Henrik Galeen’s far less stylistically-centered but equally expressionist film, and finally ending in another German director, Arthur Robison’s horror-film version of 1935. Accordingly, it seemed that these three similarly plotted movies told more about the decades in which they were released than in their collective interrelationships.

     Indeed the 1926 version closely follows the story of 1913, save for a few exceptions, with a scene-by-scene match, despite their obvious visual differences. One is tempted to say, in fact, that there is nothing new here, and what I referred to in my essay on the 1913 version with regard to the story’s importance for exploring the narcissus theme, the myth of the other trapped or closeted self, and the importance of the doppelganger myth in connection with queer literature all remain as revelatory aspects of this film as well.

      Galeen’s film, however, is far less focused on its theatrical sets, costumes, and lighting; and because of this, along with its more realistic rendering, seemed even clearer to me in its revelation of the handsome Balduin, (played by the great actor of early German cinema, Conrad Veidt) a university student’s problems concerning his secreted or closeted desires.

      As in Wegener and Rye’s work, Balduin begins the film sitting apart from his fellow student rabble-rousers, presumably unable to afford a drink, while they horse around, shout, and flirt with the local flower seller—no longer a gypsy in this telling—who herself identifies with and is attracted to the lonely Balduin. The others go over to him, attempting to cheer him up by singing and buying him a drink, yet he still seems to reject them, apparently too proud to accept their kind offers and obviously is stewing about the cost of his education, which leaves him little time and, most importantly, even less money to enjoy himself.

      But in this film it also appeared that Balduin was simply a loner of sorts, hardly the popular party-going individual we might have thought him to be underneath his financial problems. And I began to realize that I had made a presumption about the 1913 version that might not at all be true, namely that Balduin at the beginning of the film, the one who aspires to wealth and marriage to an heiress is the good man, while the man in the mirror is the evil being who destroys his life and results in his death.

      Interestingly the author of on-line sight Moira, which offered a well-written summary of the 1926 film, came to my earlier conclusion, writing:

 

The story here is essentially a borrowing from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “William Wilson” (1839) in which a man is thwarted at every step by his doppelganger – although in the Poe story it is the hero who is evil and the doppelganger good, whereas here it is the other way around and with the addition of a pact with the Devil plot.

 

      But watching it more carefully I begin to wonder whether that writer and I weren’t buying in to the basic heteronormative values that Balduin wishes to enjoy. Although the beautiful flower girl throughout the film makes it quite clear that she would be willing to become his lover or even simply go to bed with him, he immediately rejects her and later in the film most violently pushes her away, not so dissimilarly from the way he sends off his well-meaning student friends in the first scene.

     Our young student wants something else, a woman perhaps, but not just any girl but one of wealth and status, an “heiress” as he describes her to the intrusive Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) who bothers his sufferings by offering him what Balduin perceives as a cheap loan. He also sends Scapinelli away, again proving that he doesn’t seek money alone, but status, the entry into another social class than one into which he was born.

      In short, our “sweet innocent” university student is at heart a real striver who is not so much  interested in love but in social achievement, a fact which Scapinelli, who plays devil to this Faustian figure immediately recognizes, calling up the members of a fox hunt party which includes the wealthy Margit von Schwarzenberg (Agnes Esterhazy) and her current fiancé Baron of Waldis (Ferdinand von Alten) to make a wrong turn by leaping over the fences of the country drinking house and spilling Margit to the ground as her horse refuses to jump the fence at Balduin’s feet.

      Once he has introduced Balduin to the woman of his dreams, the heiress Margit, Scapinelli has no difficulty at all in convincing the enterprising student to abandon his own “other” self, his mirror image. The Faust reference in the 1920s was made even more clear given the fact that F. W.  Murnau’s masterful Faust appeared in theaters in the very same year. And recognizing that fact, we have to question the values of our young student in this version, who, although appreciative of the coins Scapinelli piles upon his desk, is really after what we would today call a “trophy wife,” someone who might induct him into the upper class from which all his life he has been excluded.

       Galeen’s film makes clear where Balduin’s sensibilities lie when the young man arrives at a party at the von Schwarzenberg mansion in a full-horse carriage and proceeds to dance a minuet with the girl’s elderly mother. He does not attend the affair as a secretive and would-be lover, a man sexually compelled to attempt to lure Margit away from her intended fiancé, but as a young newly endowed entrepreneur, a businessman out to transact a deal which will allow him to marry his fairytale princess. Even his secret missive demonstrates no passion, but simply a plea to meet Margit before her marriage to the Baron to see if he might find a way into her heart—in short, to make a deal.

       The Baron realizes, once Balduin’s intentions have been clear to him, he has only his title and his far more substantial wealth to offer Margit, whereas the now financially stable student has his beauty and youth as a lure to draw the girl to him. And accordingly, Waldis has no choice but to insult Balduin, forcing the younger man to challenge him to a duel which was seemingly the only way to properly settle insults in those days.

    The one gift, his single achievement before his deal with the devil Scapinelli, was the young student’s prowess as a swordsman. If there is any romantic hero within the social achiever we now see him as, it is as the young fencer, who early on wins a bet with an older challenger and further arouses the attentions of the romantic flower seller.

  Although Balduin immediately takes up the challenge to duel, Margit’s father, Count of Schwarzenberg (Fritz Alberti) quickly rushes to the boy’s side begging him not to kill the Baron, to which Balduin immediately agrees, obviously realizing that to kill the Baron would end any relationship that he may have that my help negotiating with the von Schwarzenberg family.

     But the mirror image, his real self—perhaps homosexual or at least disinterested in women, but even if not gay still a fun-loving but honorable young man—makes no such deals with respectability and, when Balduin, whose coach loses its wheel on his way to the duel, fails to show up, he takes his place, easily outwitting his challenger, resulting in the cad’s death.

    Of course, once Balduin realizes that his other self has queered the deal he has made with the wealthy family, he is now terrorized by his doppelganger who, like any young student with money might do, parties wildly—in this case perhaps with the intention of purposely doing-in his hypocritical “other”—carrying on to such a degree that, along with the killing of the Baron gets him expelled from the university. Balduin has every reason to fear his own shadow; and even more reason to be terrorized that he has so easily given up on his true self when, in attempting to explain his condition to Margit, he discovers that he has no reflection in her bedroom mirror, making it clear just how superficial he has been all along in not truly seeking her love but the role in the world which her love might offer him.

     In complete despair, he retreats to his room to be comforted by the flower girl, who in fact, has been part of his undoing, having revealed his note to the Baron which led to his death and to Balduin’s undoing. But, as I suggested before, Balduin brutally sends her away, not because of discovering the truth, but because of his complete disinterest in a girl who, had he been seeking heterosexual love, might have been the Gretchen or Marguerite of the opera—who asks that he give up his last symbol of the world of his false desires, Margit’s crucifix—now just a trinket which cannot save him.

       What Galeen reveals in the final show-down between Balduin and his shadow is that the man-without-a-shadow has terribly aged, becoming a hardened and howling older man, while his shadow self is still an attractive young student. And in some respects, his murder of his former self equally represents jealousy and revenge for that fact. Galeen handles the final shooting of Balduin far better than did the 1913 version. Here the shadow, returned to the mirror, pulls his own shirt open to prepare a naked target for the gunman, who when he shoots, observes the fragments of self fall into pieces of glass around him, some of the fragments still revealing his own reflection. At first, unaware of his own wounds, he seems to take comfort in that fact, that his “other” image is now trapped in the glass, but gradually he realizes that those fragments are the last images of a dying man, himself.

      The villain in this film, we suddenly perceive, is not the mirror image but the supposedly “real” Balduin, who we discover is really all image, while the mirror image has behaved as the full human being Balduin once was.

       Balduin, we realize in retrospect, was never meant to enter a heteronormative life, and even our belief that his attempts to find that world are admirable are proven to be mistaken. The student of Prague never properly learned the most important lesson of life, to be himself.

 

August 14, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

Guy Shalem | Gaysharktank.com / 2010

lost in space

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dennis Hensley (screenplay), Guy Shalem (director) Gaysharktank.com / 2010 [14 minutes]

 

On the new interactive website which allows strangers via webcam to meet up, Brian tries his luck. The first six or seven images to popup, which include a man in drag, a female couple seeking a

gift of sperm, a buff bare chest, a black man, and others are immediately sent into limbo. But he does give a “thumbs up” to a Roly-poly sort of ordinary man—Brian being also nothing great to look at—named Frank.

     When Frank suggests he’s versatile and into “nipple play,” however, Brian backs off, suggesting he’s not really yet ready to hook up, but is just testing out the site. In fact, Brian is not really sure he’s gay having only had an “incident” with his brother “Calvin,” after he touched his face.

    And just as suddenly the red-headed woman in drag is now in control of our viewing screen, knocking out person after person from view. She even encounters Brian’s wife trying to find out to where he might have disappeared. She spends the longest time with four guys on screen together.

     But when she begins to explain that she’s “looking for a long-term relationship and I’m dressed in drag because I’m sick and tired of dating guys when they discover I’m into drag quickly leave me,” the boys begin, one by one to drift off.

     This is after all a parody, in the manner of Saturday Night Live, so we might forgive this short film for featuring a black man peering into the house behind the man he has on-line to check out what he perceives as expensive artwork. He also insists that he’s not gay, but having been institutionalized he still has sex with men, but, he repeats, he’s not gay. Since the man with the paintings has a child, he quickly cuts the other discussant off.

     Brian, back on the screen, now hooks up with Salim, a bebopping Pakistani in the manner of Steve Martin’s “wild and crazy guy.” As Brian responds when Salim tells him he’s from Pakistan, “So you’re foreign!”

     The cheerful Gabriel Blow, ready to sing Cole Porter’s “Gabriel blow your horn,” is quickly blocked by a man who declares he’s depressed.

     Brian is now on line with our man with art and a kid, as he attempts to convince Brian to think of something like a long-term relationship with a child.

     The four guys are now on line with a transgender woman, who describes her newly constructed

 vagina as “toddler-new.”

    Salim also meets up with the four boys, delighted to see so many possibilities all at once. But when they begin to talk about his sweater as looking like it’s from Transylvania he begins to call them “bitch.” 

     And in the very next frame Brian’s wife, still searching, meets up with the foursome.

     Brian in communication with our drag queen is confused. “So you’re mainly a woman, right?” “No I’m a drag queen. I dress up in drag to entertain people.” Brian’s finally interested if she can keep her wig on along with the outfit and maybe tuck between the legs “we might be able to work our way up to a point that when your penis comes out, I could….” Goodbye Brian.

      Brian’s wife encounters the drag queen and a man about to show his penis.

      And immediately after Salim encounters the same guy with his Vaseline dispenser.

      A man with a teenage boy sucking a lollipop on his lap meets up with the foursome. Frank meets up with Brian’s wife. A black man with politics on his mind speaks momentarily to the man with the boy on his lap.

      Our drag queen meets up with Frank, immediately recognizing that they both have it difficult. “No one wants to date a drag queen and no one wants to date a ‘fatty.’” Frank argues that no one actually says that, reminding the drag queen that she can take her wig off, but he can’t remove his extra fifty pounds. “Well,” she interrupts, “you can if you….” “I come from a family of big people,” he insists. Her argument, “Honey, you’re fat. You got to stop eating.” “When I grew up, I didn’t get a ‘Have a nice day at school, honey,’ I got a chocolate cake.” And so it goes.

      Brian finally meets up his, Virginia, his wife. “Where are you?” she asks. “I’m home,” he insists. “I was in the garage working and next thing you know, this happened.” Virginia begins to cry.

    Slowly all of them begin to realize that there is no one out there that they truly feel good about. But then Frank meets up with the Broadway-singing Gabriel. Brian is back with Salim, even if his wife is now lurking in the background.

      The actors in this silly but sometimes quite funny parody of the 2010 website Chatroulette.com (I just checked; it still exists) are Geoffrey Arend, Lucas Bane, William Belli, Jordon Black, Alex Boling, Dan Bucatinsky, David Burtka, Drew Droege, Brian Gattas, Stephen Guarino, Brian Huskey (as Brian), Tony Johnson, Tar Karsian (as Brian’s wife), Clinton Leupp, Michael Medico, Tamara Mello, Brian Palermo, Sam Pancake, Jack Plotnick, Jai Rodriguez, Michael Serrato, and Roberta Valderrama.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Stephen Dunn and Peter Knegt | Good Morning / 2014

the day after

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Knegt and Oliver Skinner (screenplay), Stephen Dunn and Peter Knegt (directors) Good Morning / 2014 [10 minutes]

 

In a Montreal apartment, bottles are strewn across the counters and cigarette butts fill an ashtray next to a happy birthday card. The numbers 30 have taken a dive into a half-eaten cake. The loud

and annoying alarm-clock is calling out for the totally done-in man, still dressed, lying on his bed.

 

    The man (Peter Knegt), unnamed, has just turned 30, in case you haven’t guessed, and he will soon realize that he has a massive hangover from the night before when he visited a bar into the late hours and then invited someone else back to his apartment.

     But then, quite unexpectedly, he hears a voice, “Are you doing okay?”

     He looks down from his bedroom loft and sees a young boy sitting on his couch, who reports “You were really drunk.”

      He manages to bring himself down the ladder to find out who the boy is. The boy (Oliver Skinner) asks him “Do you remember coming back her with you.”

      [Since there are no character names, and the actors are also the writers, from here on I’ll refer to them by their first names.]

      All Peter can manage is a question: “How old are you?”

   “I’m 17.” Fortunately, in Canada the age of consent is 16. But our fresh birthday boy is still astounded and somewhat troubled.

     Oliver tries to console him, arguing that there are only 6 years between them, Peter evidently having told him it was his 23rd birthday party, a misapprehension Peter now attempts to correct.

      And no, they didn’t have sex, Oliver explains. They made out at the bar and the birthday boy invited him to his place; but instead of making drinks, “you went to the bathroom and started puking your guts out.”

      The cutey has even made them toast. (All Peter had in the fridge was bread, hot sauce, and beer.)

      Oliver observes that Peter’s apartment is small.

      Peter responds: “Where do you live, like in a dorm room?”

     It turns out that Oliver lives with parents, but it’s okay, he assures his senior. They know that I go out, and besides he again repeats, he’s 17. His parents have known he was gay since he was 13.

      But the discussion has really turned to a kind of father-son disquisition. When asked by Oliver when Peter realized he was gay, he responds: “I was a lot older and I didn’t go out to gay bars at 17.” And it’s clear as well, Peter is now of another generation. For his comments don’t even faze young Oliver, as Peter now begins questioning him about his dating life.

     Oliver doesn’t date, but hangs out with “This guy from school.” He goes to the bars with him, but his friend always leaves with someone else.

      “Then why are you friends with him?” Peter enquires like a dutiful elder counseling a youth.

      It later becomes evident that Oliver would like a relationship with the elusive friend.

   In the bathroom Peter encounters the mess of his last evening. And we realize that instead of challenging a young boy who’s stayed with him, so Oliver claims, just to make sure he was all right, he might rather be asking himself some serious questions such as why on his 30^th birthday is he attending a bar alone? Why has he drunk so much alcohol? And, most importantly, why he has invited a 17-year-old boy to come home with him?

      Moreover, we soon discover, Peter has taken this tiny apartment a few months earlier when he broke up with his lover. Why has he not yet found someone else, someone who at least might celebrate his 30th birthday with him.

    When the boy’s phone rings, Peter recognizes the tone to be from Grindr, he suggesting Oliver is perhaps a little young to be using Grinder, especially, after grabbing the phone from his hands he discovers the boy’s message: “You wanna get fucked?” Peter insists he delete that message, but the boy resists his advice, repeating he’s 17, Peter arguing he should instead meet a boy at school or something.

     So this short film goes, as the two struggle through their age differences almost as if Peter were 60 and Oliver aged 10. Neither quite able to understand the logic of the other. Its amazing, but obviously true that the 13 years between them might as well be a chasm.

  When Peter explains that he and his boyfriend broke up after 4 years, Oliver finds it rather “awesome,” wanting to know why they broke up.

     Peter refuses to explain except to note that if Oliver ever finds someone with whom he wants to live together, “you should both delete Grindr,” suggesting that either he or his boyfriend had sexual meetings outside of the relationship which either Peter or his boyfriend could not tolerate.      

     Finally realizing that his probing questions of the young boy he’s found on his couch are perhaps out of order and truly meaningless, he sends the boy on his way.

     But after Oliver leaves, he checks him out on Grindr—which Peter has denied he uses—discovering on the meet-up service the boy describes himself as “Sweet Sixteen.” Peter quickly sends him a message: “Hope you have a good morning, Sweet Sixteen.” 

    The film challenges us to ask questions that neither of the men on either side of their generational divide really dare to ask of themselves. Although Peter has begun to challenge Oliver, he hasn’t really managed to reflect back upon himself. And for the young 16-year-old, the elder’s questions seem—as such challenges from their elders generally means for all youth—something basically to be ignored.

     The problem as one ages, even at the still quite young age of 30, is that, as Action puts it in West Side Story, you were never the same age as someone who now claiming to be 17. Each generation knows that their time is only their’s alone and they have to live it in a way only they can and desire to. Nothing stays the same. You can only live in the moment you are in, no matter how much you might desire to go back again and set things straight or help others not to make the same mistakes.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Ken Harris | Hare-abian Nights / 1959 [animated cartoon]

bugs performs at the palace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Maltese (screenplay), Ken Harris and Ben Washam (animators), Ken Harris (director) Hare-abian Nights / 1959 [animated cartoon]

 

This 1959 7-minute cartoon is basically a shaggy-dog story that recycles work from other Bugs Bunny cartoons, including Water, Water Every Hare (1952), Bully for Bugs (1953), and Sahara Hare (1955).

     On his way to Perth-Amboy, Bugs winds up in a desert palace where the local Sultan is seeking new talent. Alas, both of the acts, including a band called Timbuk Two Plus 3 and an Elvis impersonator, displease the Sultan, and are sent to the crocodile pit underneath which they performed.

     Bugs arrives just on time to be the next in line. Billed as a storyteller in the manner of Scheherazade, Bugs tells of his adventures on the way to the Sultan’s palace, the first involving a bull who, after knocking Bugs out of the ring, is bested by the rabbit when behind the

red cape he places an anvil.

     Soon after he meets up with Rudolph the Monster, who Bugs immediately calms down by portraying a effeminately gay hairdresser with limp wrists, a slight lisp, and the repetition of the word “interesting”: “My stars, if an interesting monster can’t have an interesting hairdo, I don’t what the world’s coming to. I meet such interesting people.”

 

      After trying out several hair styles, Bugs declares that the red-haired monster needs a permanent, whereupon he hooks up the Monster to several tubes of dynamite and leaves him for “another customer.” The explosion does away with any hairy covering the red-haired monster previously had upon his head.

     The third story involves Yosemite Sam trying desperately to get to Bugs hidden away in a castle, including by attempting to pull out a brick at the bottom on the wall only to be met up with a cannon. He then tries terribly tall stilts to the battlements of the castle tower whereupon he meets Bugs, ready to shoot the rabbit, only to fall backwards to the ground.

     It turns out the Sultan is actually Yosemite Sam, and obviously is not at all impressed with his imitation of Scheherazade. He presses the button to send Bugs to the pit, only to discover that it doesn’t work (Bugs and turned the power off). Furious with the situation, Yosemite Sam gets on the small stage angrily demanding that it open up, whereupon Bugs turns the power back on. Even the youngest of Bugs Bunny fans knows where that will end.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2024 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

Douglas Messerli | Two Silent Remakes [Introduction]

two silent remakes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Although silent films had been dismissed, ignored, and maltreated, the large majority of them having even been destroyed through their being printed on nitrate and neglected. For example, 16 of the great director Alfred Hitchcock’s silent films have been lost or only survive in only fragments. Some of the greatest of silent filmmakers’ and actors’ works of the silent era have been lost including the 1917 Theda Bara production of Cleopatra, one of the first of science fiction films, Bruce Gordon and J. L. V. Leigh’s The First Men in the Moon (also 1917), the 1910 short version of Frankenstein, and the 1926 movie The Great Gatsby are among the many hundreds of films lost. It is estimated by perhaps 70-90% of silent films have gone missing.

                                        Poil de carotte, 1925

     Of those that remained, filmmakers of the 1920s and throughout Hollywood history turned to them again and again as sources of movies which, once sound came into being, they could readily pirate, plot intact, and remake in a manner that would further appeal to their audiences. On occasion, films were remade numerous times; one only need think of King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Student of Prague, or the numerous remakes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, several of which I recount in this very volume of My Queer Cinema. But just as many lesser-known films were also remade in the 1920s and long after, the endless sea of films from the first decade of this century and the 1920s brought to the screen over the following decades.

                                      Poil de carotte, 1932

     Some of these remakes of been written about, a few of them even extensively. But most of the attention to the films has been focused on the remake rather than the original, and often—and I know that those who dislike silent films will be surprised by my saying this—the original silent film was far superior to the talkie remake. And even if technically they were inferior, as I have noted about the earlier versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, some of silent films were much closer to their original sources and were far more adventurous regarding their themes, costumes, and dialogue than were the late large studio productions. Even when they were helmed by the same director as in the case of Julien Duvivier’s Carrot Top I describe below, the works of took chances and were more visually expressive than what came later.

      In this special gathering, I discuss two versions of Julie Duvivier’s Carrot Top, one from 1925, the second from 1932, both before the heavy hand of the Hollywood Production Code might have had any effect (European films were also affected by the code, particularly if they were attempting to market their films in translation in US). And I also compare the two versions of Ben-Hur, both grand Hollywood productions, the first from 1959. I believe the differences I noted might help in a new interest in and attention to how films are retransformed over the years, even in as short of a period as a single decade.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2025