Programme Notes: Queer Cinema from the Eastern Bloc

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Programme Notes: Queer Cinema from the Eastern Bloc

Here in the decadent, capitalist West, much of 20th century queer cinema was constructed around the fact that same-sex depictions were taboo, whether explicitly such as in Hollywood’s Hays Code, or implicitly, simply through making it financially impossible to get films with LGBT+ themes made.

Queer cinema in Communist Eastern Europe had largely different contours. No utopia, films focused on or even passively including LGBT+ characters are largely few and far between. Outside of Yugoslavia, whose ‘third-way’ mode of socialism essentially created a cinema industry of career freelancers, the rest of Eastern Europe largely built its post-war film industries around top-down nationalised structures: film was a social and cultural good, by and for everyone (which also meant it was required to transmit politically expedient moral and historical lessons, and LGBT+ rights were rarely high up on that list).

But for all the assumptions that Communist-era filmmaking was a politically-restricted sphere (true), it also provided many of its film artists plenty of freedom, more than their Western counterparts in some respects. The scripts got approved and funded, and the films got made. It was only after that they and their creators ran into trouble. The differing lives of these films since release shows how authorship, intent, and censorship don’t always resolve in easily readable ways, even from the distance of history.

Another Way, adapted by Erzsébet Galgóczi from her own semi-autobiographical novella, deals with a blossoming lesbian relationship between Éva and Livia, both investigating corruption in an agricultural collective after the Soviet Occupation of Hungary in 1956 (a topic known to turn even the coldest amongst us into rampaging sex fiends). The state central distributor and authorities in Hungary were not happy with the film, but on the basis of the director Károly Makk’s long-term reputation as one of the country’s finest auteurs, it got selected for Cannes, where it won best actress for its lead, Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak. The cultural capital generated by a Cannes selection probably insulated the film from outright censorship at home.

The film though is more interested in the politics around its two lovers – the negotiations and skulduggery of what can and can’t be published, debated in smoky, wood-panelled rooms by ageing, wrinkled men with palinka in hand, the women stating their case but often pushed aside by a culture of fear and mediocrity. It’s a culture felt all the more sharply in the wake of the Soviet Occupation, frightened by the Hungarian Revolution’s demands for a more liberal, democratic version of socialism. Makk’s work is largely regarded as broadly humanist, but he’s often more focused on how politics affects and intervenes in human relationships, a viewpoint which meshes well with Galgóczi’s own melding of the personal and the political.

Coming Out, directed by Heiner Carow, another well-respected director of his era, also had its strange relationship with the state: after all, the GDR created Die Busche, the state-owned Gay and Lesbian Disco! Pretty much all East German films were funded through DEFA, the state film studio. As Kyle Frackman explains in his book on the film, Carow enlisted a sociologist, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist to contextualise the project to the bureaucrats at the BFI, uhm I mean DEFA. Still he had to go above the director of DEFA (who told Carow he’d never allow such a film to be made) to Kurt Hager, a major figure in the Socialist Party and a voice known to be more amicable to the topic, who twisted the right arms. Negotiation, bureaucracy, the need to present an ideologically-appropriate project: has anything actually changed in European state-funded filmmaking since?

The film’s production was helped in part by the fact that the GDR had quickly embraced LGBT+ rights in the 1980s, even running anti-prejudice classes for young males in military service. Coming Out premiered on 9 November 1989, the very same night the Berlin Wall fell and this incredible historical happenstance gives the film a sense of a moment trapped in amber. Despite a traumatic opening scene, it is otherwise a gentle and sweet story about, well, coming out. It’s use of real-world locations gives it a verisimilitude as well as genuine historical value; some of the supporting cast were well-known figures of the East Berlin LGBT+ scene. Coming Out is a portrait of a world on the brink of disappearing – it was not by any means a socialist utopia, but the rampant commercialisation of LGBT+ culture on the other side of the Wall quickly alienated many East German queer folk when they arrived to experience it first-hand.

If both Makk and Carow had to struggle to get their films made, at least they got seen. Despite being finished in 1990 in the supposedly more open final days of Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union, Hussein Erkenov’s debut feature 100 Days Before the Command was banned outright until 1994. In contrast to the traditional narrative structures of Coming Out and Another Way, 100 Days Before the Command offers a far more surreal, poetic vision of homoerotic longing, set amongst a group of conscripts in the Red Army. Hazing rituals, sadomasochism, and plenty of lingering shots of naked male bodies present the film as a sibling of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999), though 100 Days precedes that film by almost a decade. Adapted from a 1987 novel by Yuri Polyakov (which itself dealt with topics kept schtum until the loosening of censorship), Erkenov supposedly submitted a dummy script which also allowed him access to military training facilities and even serving soldiers as extras before swapping and shooting the film.

Polyakov rejected the finished film, decrying it as an aberration of his novel. The author however, has become a favoured figure in Putin’s regime whilst Erkenov has largely toiled in obscurity. His most recent feature, 2014’s Order to Forget tells of the Khaibakh Massacre of Chechen villagers in 1944 by Soviet soldiers. Funded partly by Ramzan Kadryov’s authoritarian government in Chechnya, it nevertheless earned the ire of Kadryov’s benefactor Putin and was banned in Russia. Elsewhere, Erkenov’s 2018 documentary entitled Ukraine – My Love suggests an auteur unwilling to abscond to the mainstream of Russian political belief.

Granted, the end of Communism functioned in different ways across each Eastern Bloc country, but amongst this programme of films it is an irony that it’s the director whose career started at the end of Communism is the one whose career has suffered most from censorship. Carow and Makk, both elder statesmen by the time of Communism’s fall, had their battles with the funders, but both had considerable successes to mitigate their losses.

Censorship, power and authority, all perforate in different directions, with the ruling ideology only ever a vague guideline as to what is and isn’t acceptable at various times. Hard-fought rights over acceptance and discrimination can be rolled back at a moment’s notice when it’s deemed politically expedient; one only has to look at the banning of puberty blockers for trans teens by the current Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting to see how direct and effective transphobic politics has been in the UK as a comparison. Progress, we must remember, is never straight!

Fedor Tot and Siavash Minoukadeh, Queer Cinema from the Eastern Bloc curators

22 January 2025

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