Different from the Others (1919)

Saw Different from the Others, a very early German film which is about the pointless suffering of homosexual men due to blackmailers and societal understanding.  It feels funny to call it a propaganda film, but it has that feel: half educational, half narrative, there's always a learned professor to explain to the shocked audience-inserts that these men are harming no one, and that their love is as valid as anyone's.

The film was silent and I watched it with an ambient album on in the background, full of crashing waves and windy forests.  It made the whole thing much more dismal than it perhaps otherwise would have been.  The gay main characters suffer a lot and although you're supposed to feel pity, it was much more visceral for me than I think it was intended to be.  If I had been alive in 1920s Germany, I for sure would have been blackmailed or just so deeply closeted as to be functionally asexual.

Alas, worse things were to come.  This film was a plea for understanding in 1920.  Twenty years later, the Nazis would take over and do their best to destroy this film, and to destroy histories of gay and trans folks that had been collected in Germany.  Now of course, the reactionaries are claiming transsexuals are a brand new phenomenon.

So this film was pretty sad.  It's in rough shape due to the efforts of the Nazi party, and anyway contains some dated information: they conflated gender and sexual attraction back in those days and theorized that a homosexual was a sort of mild case of transsexuality.  The most main character is a fairly florid and femme violin player which is very interesting to see in silent black-and-white (and is still fairly progressive - I can't think of another film with a sympathetic femme male protagonist (edit: it's been a while.  Does Breakfast on Pluto count?))  The film is sort of an oddity.  It's very clear about its message which gives it a propaganda-ish feel and, unless you're interested in gay history, there's not a ton else to recommend it.  It's interesting as a time capsule and very sad.