"Different from others" is one of the first films that defended homosexuality
GAYLES.TV.- «Anders als die Andern'('Different from others«, In Spanish) was filmed in 1919. It took advantage of the abolition of censorship a year before, during the ephemeral Weimar Republic, a peculiar period of the German history that began in 1918 and finished with the arrival of Hitler to the power. In that brief time, the director Richard Oswald counted on the collaboration in the script of the sexologist Magnus Hirschgeld, which had developed the third sex theory.
Almost the entire team that made it was homosexual. One of the successes of the film was the choice of the main actor, Conrad Veidt, who would become only a year later the first German expressionist film superstar starring in "The cabinet of Dr. Caligari«. The photography was carried out by Max Fassbender that two years earlier he had made one of the first film adaptations of «The Portrait of Dorian Gray", from Oscar Wilde. The objective of the film was to generate a state of opinion favorable to the elimination of paragraph 175 of German legislation, which converted the homosexuality in crime.
The scandal that caused this movie progay was one of the reasons why the 1920 was re-introduced censorship in Germany. The article 175 of the Penal Code and it was considered a crime when “in an objective way the sense of public pride is damaged and in a subjective way there was lustful intention to awaken the sensuality of one of the two men or a third”. «Different from others»Clearly was up against homophobic laws that punished homosexuals with penalties such as castration with the clinical justification that homosexual relationships could be dangerous to public health. Due to this positioning, the film had little commercial diffusion, and after only one year it was banned (although its exhibition for medical purposes in small circuits was allowed). And is that Magnus Hirschfeld was a well-known doctor in Berlin at the time, a precursor of gender freedom, who even set up a platform to end the controversial article 175 and who had the support of intellectuals such as Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann o Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.
«Different from others»Tells of the homosexual relationship between a violinist and his apprentice. Paul Körner is a music teacher who teaches the young Kurt Sivers. Little by little a love relationship is emerging, which must be hidden from the eyes of society. Here you can see the trailer of an essential film to understand the history of the gay movies:
Sources: Film library of Catalonia, Gay movies online, Wikipedia, 20 minutes
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