Cross Dressing in Silent Film: Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man! (Ich mochte kein Mann sein!, Germany, 1918)

Leave a reply

This post was contributed by Rosalyn Croek, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Cultural Studies

Birkbeck Arts Week 2012 was a chocolate box of assorted events for an arts enthusiast to pick from, a platform for students and tutors across the arts courses to engage in a more open setting, tutors expressing the very latest research through a particular theme or object for their session.  At the close of the week, this event doubled as good old-fashioned Friday night entertainment, wine and a silent comedy screening which resounded to much laughter in the room at 43 Gordon Square.

Silke Arnold-de Simine introduced the film, this event in part a launch for the book she has co-written with Christine Mielke on cross dressing in German film comedies from 1912 to 2012.  The book is only available in German but others can consult a chapter Silke wrote in the most recent Blackwell’s Companion to German cinema, about Weimar cross-dressing comedies and their Hollywood remakes. Did you know Some Like It Hot has a German original?

Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man! (Ich mochte kein Mann sein!, Germany, 1918), centres on tomboy Ossi who enjoys poker, smoking, and drinking, shunning the delicacy expected of her and mocking the authority figures of her uncle, her strict and corseted governess, and new male guardian Dr Kersten.  Her preferred activities denied to her as a female, she decides to dress up as a man, making for a humorous scene when she is fitted out for a tailcoat at the shop.  Her disguise is actually completely successful; she revels in female attention and in a twist drinks with Dr Kersten at a nightclub – with the two sharing a kiss. The comedy owes much to Ossi’s ‘physical and exuberant acting style’.

Director Ernst Lubitsch went to Hollywood, Silke explained, but star actress and producer of cross dressing cinema in her own right, Ossi Oswalda, real name Oswalda Stäglich, sadly died in poverty in Prague. 

Silke explained the mechanism of cross-dressing comedy in film and prior to that popular theatre by asking us to think of familiar film Mrs Doubtfire (1993), where, as well as gender, variables age, class and nationality are also changed.  ‘The comedy stems from the accumulated and exaggerated discrepancies between appearance and behaviour, on the one hand, and the allegedly authentic identity on the other hand’.  She continued, ‘stories centring around disguise and mistaken identity can be seen as playfully countering anxieties concerning the successful fulfilment of social roles and mobile identities.  They can equally be geared to subvert or to provide symbolic reassurance, questioning or confirming the boundaries of social conformity’.

Nowadays, Silke reminded, we are more accustomed to men cross dressing as women but in the early twentieth century, women cross dressing as men was also prevalent, roles played by Weimar stars like Asta Nielsen and Elisabeth Bergner.  Men dressing as women was considered problematically associated with homosexuality, but women dressing as men was more socially acceptable and even becoming quotidian as women had taken over some men’s jobs during World War 1. That social change could feel threatening to men however, particularly to already-defeated German men, and thus well a time at which ‘I don’t Want to Be a Man’ might ring true – certainly Ossi learns that being a man has its difficulties. Silke also highlighted an alternative interpretation, centring on Magnus Hirschfeld’s widely-accepted contemporary theory The Third Sex, that ‘I don’t want to be a man’ could be read as ‘I don’t want to be a heterosexual’.

The film, Silke closed, was a success with critics and cinemagoers at the time, and was certainly successful with us too.

■

Charleys Tanten und Astas Enkel. Hundert Jahre Crossdressing in deutschen Filmkomödien (1912-2012). Trier: WVT (Filmgeschichte International. Ed. by Uli Jung)

Cross-dressing and National Stereotypes: The German-Hollywood Connection. In: Companion to German Cinema. Ed. by Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2012, pp. 379-404.

Loose Muse: Four Women Poets

Leave a reply

This post was contributed by Emily Best, who will be starting an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck this September.

A week before the Orange Prize winner is announced, the debate rages on about whether there is a “canon” of women writers. Last week in a little room at 43 Gordon Square four lady wordsmiths made their case in favour. Loose Muse is a collective run by Agnes Meadows and runs London’s only all-female writing open mic night at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden. It’s not just poetry: women writers of all genres and experience can take part. Last week’s event was a showcase for some of the finest she-poets in the capital to showcase their work amongst a small audience, discuss their poetry and open up the floor.

The event opened with Kate McLoughlin, whose poetry collections Plums is a response to William Carlos Williams’ great American fridge-note-poem This is Just to Say. Kate’s fifty-eight variations on a reply to Williams, which also allude to Picasso’s reimagining of Velazquez’ Las Meninas, explore the variances and nuances of domestic interaction. Kate moves beautifully and sensitively from flippant to epic, on occasion nearing parody, engaging wholly with Williams’ poem (and in turn addressing the critical tradition that surrounds it) but at the same time reclaiming what Williams leaves unsaid and open-ended. I couldn’t help thinking as I listened, is that what these women are doing? What so many people do? Establishing a new tradition; a new canon; picking up where others have left off.

Following Kate was Agnes Meadows herself. I immediately warmed to Agnes – a force of energy in the room, inspiring and welcoming. As she talked of Poetry Café and the work of Loose Muse I knew that in front of me was a woman genuinely committed to the promotion of women poets. I was very happy to discover that her poetry had the same enthusiasm as she did for the project. Reading from  At Damascus Gate on Good Friday, This One is for You and Woman, Agnes went from recounting the fear of sleeping through bombs in Palestine in They’re Bombing the Port again at Gaza to the pain of watching a sibling get your man in Juliet’s Sister. The passion and sensitivity in these poems tell of a woman who has lived and of a poet who feels and writes to the tips of her fingers.

In a complete change of pace, Sally Blackmore came next. Sally had to give up work five years ago and, wanting to use the time usefully, started writing and painting and took a creative writing course at the Open University. Her son, who is in the army, recently got sent to Afghanistan and Sally found that her new-found gift provided a tool for dealing with this. To begin with, I couldn’t believe that Sally had only been writing for five years. The first poem she read, Soldier, had a bittersweet wariness and grace to it that seemed borne of a mind that had always worked in verse. Here was a woman who took pain and fear in her hand like a proverbial nettle and refigured them as something good.

The final poet on the bill was Camilla Reeve. Again, Camilla brought a different energy to the room. Though Camilla has an aura of earnest seriousness about her, her poetry had a lyrical, tender and humorous quality that reminded me a little of Jake Thackray. Where Kate had acrobatic wit and Agnes had exuberance Camilla, like Sally, had contained dignity. Winter Angel was a particular favourite and, on further research, I discovered Dark Bird Turning and fell a little bit in love. Camilla’s poetry concerns itself with trajectories of emotion and the rudiments of relationships between people and places and things. It is entirely and only what it needs to be.

In a nice epilogue to the event, the floor opened up to poets in the audience. Somewhat ironically the two volunteers were both men and I was intrigued to see how this would work. Criton Tomazos read some extracts of what he announced to be nonsense poetry – Unspecified Space-Time was my favourite – playful, witty and at once hesitant and determined in a style reminiscent of Cummings. Criton was followed by Marcin Gozdzik who writes all his poems on a smartphone, each one lasting precisely the length of his tube journey. In his poems that seemed to concern themselves mostly with his being a bad boyfriend, Marcin was affectionate and self-effacing with a detached irony. These two gentlemen, bravely standing in a room of confident women poets whose womanliness defined their union, proved that there is a voice to be welcomed no matter how many chromosomes you have. More importantly though, they demonstrated what the four women proved, each in their own way – every voice is there to be reclaimed and used as necessary and at a time when women are still fighting for those voices, reclamation is as important as ever.

Jokes, Laughter and Literature

1 Reply

This post was contributed by James Brown, from Birkbeck’s External Relations Department.

One of the first books I owned was Allan Ahlberg’s Ha Ha Bonk joke book. A collection of mostly bad puns and word play. As a child, I used to bring terror on holiday in joke book form, by forcing family members to relive my favourite jokes until they pleaded for mercy – a kind of verbal waterboarding. The title of the book is a promise that the jokes will make you laugh so hard that your head will fall off, which is a rash promise given quite how subjective jokes are. Standard fare is “What happened to the man who stole a calendar? He got twelve months.” Ha ha. Bonk.

But, as Adam Smyth (Birkbeck lecturer in Renaissance Literature) explained at Jokes, Laughter and Literature (part of Birkbeck’s Arts Week) joke books and their popularity or otherwise are nothing new. In 1600, twelve years after his death, Tarlton’s Jests was published as a collection of the jokes of Richard Tarlton. He was a renowned clown and actor of the day, who is said to have been a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, and whose witticisms and songs were extremely popular at the time. Unfortunately, his humour may not have found favour with William Shakespeare. An original draft of Hamlet has the Prince warning Yorick of the perils of overacting clowns, performing jokes that the audience already knows. Tarlton had been a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the theatre group for whom Shakespeare wrote much of his work, and Yorick is said to be based on him.

Lecturer in Modern Literature Kate McLoughlin went on to talk us through the three main theories in philosophy for why people find jokes funny. Perhaps Shakespeare is indulging in Thomas Hobbes’ theory of superiority, which is that generally we laugh at other people’s misfortune. In Tarlton’s case, he’d just died, and misfortune doesn’t get much more misfortunate than that. But misfortune in itself surely can’t be enough. I went to an open mic night at a comedy club recently, where the floor was open to anyone brave enough to give five minutes of their best jokes. I’m in awe of anyone who has the courage to stand in front of a room full of strangers asserting that they’re funny enough for you to want to pay to hear their jokes, but the results were mixed; for some, the loudest response to their one-liners was the sound of dreams being ruthlessly crushed. Those who didn’t raise a laugh were misfortunate; but sadly weren’t funny.

On the other hand, Immanuel Kant’s Incongruity Theory has it that finding something funny revolves around derailed expectations, with the best punch lines being unpredictable. It would be interesting to find out how Kant thought his theory stacked up against an episode of My Family, but by the time the sitcom was written Kant had died a couple hundred years ago, as indeed had some of the jokes. But neither does the theory explain why catchphrase comedy is, or at least has been, so popular – where knowing exactly what a character is going to say, and the anticipation of it, is from where much of the audience derives humour. Sigmund Freud’s theory of what humans find funny is the relief theory, that we funnel energy from sexual repression or pent-up emotion; as a ritual to ward off tension. It’s certainly true that laughter can release tension, but is that the same as saying that jokes are what causes relief?

American journalist HL Menken said that “a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there”. I’m no more qualified to say what makes people laugh than a giraffe is to breakdance. Perhaps it’s easier to say what’s absolutely not funny. To return to the comedy club, it’s relatively easy to define what’s not funny. A full two years after its creation, one of the aspiring comedians opened their set with a line about how the iPad sounds like it’s a feminine product.

Ha ha indeed. But definitely no bonk.

The Writers’ Hub: Self-Publishing – Vanity Fair or Brave New World?

Leave a reply

This post was contributed by Catriona Jarvis, an alumna of Birkbeck’s MA Creative Writing.

Attendance was high and the audience attentive at this Room 101 panel discussion deftly chaired by Julia Bell, senior lecturer on the MA Creative Writing at Birkbeck who introduced us to the panel: Orna Ross, Irish writer of both novels and poems and founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors; Alison Baverstock, writer and lecturer on the MA in Publishing at Kingston University, and Karen Inglis, children’s author.

It was extremely heartening, not only to hear from such a talented and successful all-woman panel, but also to hear their unanimous message that self-publishing works, and that it is most certainly not the option for those who can’t cut the mustard. Far from it! It puts the author in the driving seat and brings her closer to her readers.

Orna, who was a journalist before becoming a published novelist, (encouragement for those of us who have been many other things and are now striving to become published novelists…), unhappy that publishers were, in her view, selling to retailers such as supermarkets and chain stores rather than readers, wrenched her two-book deal away from Penguin and e-published instead.

Perceiving the need for a non-profit organization to represent and support writers, Orna launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the latest London Book Fair. She had last been there as a writer and felt there was a gulf as the only writers there seemed to be the celebs. This year, however, there was a big ‘e-section’ and a most definite sense that there is a place for both e-publishing and other self publishing, with flexibility for authors to move between self-publishing and the more traditional route.

Although we are watching the re-arrangement of the deck chairs, they are not on the Titanic, says Alison Baverstock. Self-publishing is not just for those who comprise slush piles. There are huge numbers of good writers out there, but publishing houses are culling their lists. In what is now a vast proliferation of media, authors are required to market themselves. But she was firm that the industry is not on the run and certainly not dead. Rather, this cloistered world is opening in order to share the bread and wine and this is an exciting time. Writers need to have a blog and be seen and heard on Utube and twitter (NB. Alison reads book reviews on twitter). (Caution: use one form of social network properly rather than all of them badly. Spend no more than ten minutes, three times a day networking). Above all there must be professionalism. Services are now available from those such as professional publishing for the self-funding writer and the Society of Editors and Freelance Proofreaders. As Alison pointed out, well-managed publishing is invisible and any self-publishing must be highly professional. One option is to build a profile through self-publishing and then turn to the traditional publishers for professional publishing and marketing services (although most authors do not come into public view until their third book…). In what is another big change of policy, the Society of Authors will now admit you if you have self-published and sold at least 200 copies of your work in a year.

Karen Inglis wrote The Secret Lake and Eeek! some ten years ago and they sat on her hard-drive. Although Bloomsbury had liked what she wrote they said it was too short for a children’s book. She writes professionally, works on web design and has a blog (have a look at wordpress blog – it is free and easy to use!). She took the plunge and self-published with the benefit of help from The Advice Centre for Children’s Writers, both in hard copy (on demand) and online(see for example ‘lightning source’). A freelance artist found via the internet designed her book covers. She sells about 100 copies per month via Kindle, (Kindle also provides a lending library service, free to the reader with a small fee to the author). She designed the layout, picked the typeface and did all her own PR (for example through her local paper and her local bookshop- Waterstones). Be under no illusion that it is very hard work, but it brings 70% royalties instantly; there is no such thing as ‘out of print,’ and you are not ‘remaindered’ after a few weeks. (Caution: check the terms and conditions of any contract with great care).

Julia reminded us of the writing community that has grown from Tindal Street press.

Do not under-value your work. At 2.99 it equates to a greeting card, but at £4.99 it remains under the psychological £5.00 (or $5 barrier).

The writer was a resource to be mined but is now a partner with the publisher.

It is a nonsense that self-publishing is vanity, says Orna: vanity is embodied in intention.

It was also hugely affirming to hear from Alison that what fascinates us is what we want to read about, and that self-published authors are happy people.

Keep writing.

Get out there.

Catriona Jarvis (not out there yet…)

MA Creative Writing (Merit) Birkbeck, 2009