Happy 80th Birthday, Rosa von Praunheim!

25 November

Without question, Rosa von Praunheim occupies a unique position in German cinema, weaving the autobiographical with public life and a cinematic vision like no other filmmaker. He is a pioneer and leading activist in the gay and lesbian movement in Germany, a controversial public figure, bearer of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, a tireless filmmaker, the author of non-fiction books, a theatre director and a writer; he was also a university lecturer on film directing until 2006. He is considered an important representative of post-modern German film in the documentary, auteur and avant-garde genres, and a pioneer of queer cinema. His films are purposely amateurish and shrill, deliberately overstepping the boundaries of bourgeois taste. His work comprises more than 150 short and feature films, books, audio dramas and theatre pieces, videos and short contributions for television.

Born Holger Mischwitzky in Riga, Latvia, in 1942, Rosa von Praunheim grew up near Berlin and in Frankfurt. After belatedly discovering that he was adopted in 2000, he documented his search for his roots in the very personal Meine Mütter - Spurensuche in Riga (“Two Mothers – The Search Began in Riga”) in 2006. 

In 1961, Rosa von Praunheim, as he now called himself, began to study painting. Caught up in the student movement, he broke off his studies and worked on experimental films, photo series, manifestos. He made his film debut with the short film Von Rosa von Praunheim (“By Rosa von Praunheim”) in 1967. His first feature-length film, a low budget production with amateur actors called Die Bettwurst (The Bed Sausage, 1970), quickly became a cult film in the queer scene. That same year, he presented his landmark film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation in der er lebt (It’s Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives), which created huge waves and established Rosa von Praunheim as an icon of the German gay movement overnight.

Homosexuality and its history continued to be the determining theme in his work, in Der Einstein des Sex (The Einstein of Sex, 1999), Männer, Helden, schwule Nazis (Men, Heroes and Gay Nazis, 2004) and Berlin Callboys (2012), to name but a few. Beginning in the 1980s, he dealt with the distressing AIDS outbreak in the first German feature film on the subject, Ein Virus kennt keine Moral (A Virus Knows No Morals, 1986). 

Recurring subjects include strong female personalities, as in Unsere Leichen leben noch (Our Corpses are Still Alive, 1981); social outsiders (Ich bin meine eigene Frau / I Am My Own Woman, with and about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, 1992); and time and again, New York (Überleben in New York / Survival in New York, 1989).

On his 70^th birthday in 2012, his former film students Tom Tykwer, Robert Thalheim, Axel Ranisch, Chris Kraus and Julia von Heinz dedicated a very personal homage to him, the film Rosakinder. On that same occasion, television channel RBB broadcast a 700-minute series of short films by the filmmaker, titled Rosas Welt (“Rosa’s World”). This was a novelty in German television: never before had so much broadcast time been dedicated to a single documentary maker.

In 2019, von Praunheim received an award from the well-known gay and lesbian Pink Apple Festival in Zurich for his life’s work; in 2020, the Max Ophüls Preis film festival in Saarbrücken presented him with an honorary award “for his achievements in German-language cinema and as a pioneer of the gay movement in West Germany.” 

Friendship of Men (2018), D: Rosa von Praunheim

Was Goethe gay? What about his contemporaries? Inspired by Robert Tobin’s book “Warm Brothers. Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe” (2000), Rosa von Praunheim pursues this and other questions in fictional and documentary scenarios. The film is not so much a dogmatic reinterpretation as a space for new ways of thinking.

The film received the best feature film award at the LICHTER Filmfest Frankfurt in 2018.

Image © missingFILMs