Great Freedom, Genet and Foucault
One of the most ambitious and incisive queer films of the year, Great Freedom - which won the Jury prize in Uncertain Regard sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival and was Austriaâs official selection for Best Foreign Language Film - offers an incisive evocation of the lingering impacts of institutionalisation on the psyche. Rarely is a film so restrained in its anger over injustices of the recent past, which many societies who call themselves progressive would wish to forget. It stakes its claim amongst the works of great queer artists and theorists who have explored the romantic potential of the prison, while offering a moving critique of the criminalisation of sexuality, and a rigorous exploration of what it really means to exercise our liberty. And in a year which saw lockdowns continuing around the world, a film illustrating the lasting mental scars of incarceration may have acquired an unintended significance.
West Germany, 1946. Paragraph 175 - a century-old penal code which criminalises homosexual activity - is still being well and truly enforced by the watchful eyes of the state. We first meet our protagonist, Hans, a libidinal and tortured neâer-do-well through the voyeuristic eye of a camera hidden in a public bathroom which is being used for a police sting operation aimed at rounding up homosexuals. Adrift within civil society, the gay men of West Germany - like many others of their time - are finding love on the margins in public bathrooms; squalid homosocial spaces whose alternative use as a cruising spot perhaps only reinforced the contemporaneous perception of homosexual depravity. Men make eye contact with one another at the urinals, before moving into the stalls, whose offer of privacy is eventually discarded in favour of intoxicatingly risky out-in-the open encounters. A strange mechanical quality hangs over the scene, as fornicating men are viewed dispassionately by the quietly whirring camera. We, like the West German state, are surveilling their bodies with no regard for their interiority. Hans enjoys a sequence of amorous encounters in the bathroom stalls, but being watched seems to be part of the fun, as we realise when he briefly flicks his eyes into the lens of the camera. The next thing we know, he is pulled before the German court to answer for his crimes, and heâs carted off to prison, which we quickly surmise is a familiar environ for him.
The film speaks to the present moment which may appear to be something like the end of history for the gay populations of Western Europe, as preventative HIV treatments and sex positivity permit casual, polyamorous sex lives, and paths to normative lifestyles of marriage, kids and career have been well and truly beaten. But Great Freedom dares to ask how it is that we can forget the injustices heaped upon our forebears who suffered through the criminalisation of homosexuality. How can we forget the physical and psychological scars wrought on their bodies and minds by decades of unimaginable institutional oppression?Â
The gay male erotic image has long been fashioned on societyâs margins, and the film captures something of the libidinal charge long examined by queer artists in the relationship between the oppressed and their oppressor. The film contributes to the long cannon of queer works which locate and luxuriate in the inherent sexuality of the abjection and longing found in that most homosocial environment - the prison. Queer filmmakers, writers and artists have long probed the tense eroticism of indulging desires in the places where they are both aggressively fed and ardently policed. Jean Genetâs horny screeds such as Our Lady of Flowers, written (and rewritten) from behind bars find an erotic charge in the connections between criminality, repression and sexual longing. The work of queer artists such as Tom of Finland take a fascistic visual enjoyment in the BDSM aesthetics and hardbodied, uniformed, ubermensch figures that he makes his subjects. Films like East Palace, West Palace overtly explore the sexual dynamics of authority. But perhaps the most influential queer chronicler of the prison is the legendary French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose pioneering works - Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality - coalesce around the ideas of restriction of both the flesh and the mind. For a certain group of queer artists, therefore, the prison takes on an almost catholic quality - a place of love, shame and denial. This is certainly the case in Great Freedom. And so the film offers its own contribution to the plethora of queer works which have seen sexuality and violence as intertwined political, psychological and aesthetic experiences.
The filmâs non-linear structure charts Hansâs time through several stints of incarceration. The disorientation created by the filmâs fragmented timeline helps capture an endless temporal space of incarceration - the drudgery of routine and the boredom of the familiar are compounded by the filmâs focus only on Hans in his time behind bars. One begins to scarcely be able to imagine a time before, after, or outside the prison. Over time, Hans develops intimate relationships with a number of men by encouraging them to defy daily cell checks in order to be snatch a few extra hours together, huddled under blankets in the freezing night air of the detention centre. These tender moments in the prisonâs cells and yards conjure thoughts of Genetâs staggering short film, Un chant dâamour, in conception if not execution. Where Un chant dâamour is an aesthetic exploration of the agony and ecstasy of imprisonment, Great Freedom is a much more pragmatic, procedural film. It is enamoured of the ability to find beauty within the prisonâs oppressive concrete and wire structures, but not so absorbed with the erotic charge of separation that animates Genetâs sumptuous film, where smoke exhaled through vents provides a sensual caress to the muscular cellmates caught in suspended arousal by their agonising separation. As Hans and his loversâ breath mists in the freezing air, one feels the pain, beauty and sacrifice of their forbidden love. Both films teem with sexuality and longing, but the Great Freedomâs narrative and psychological intent takes stock of the suffering, while Genet subsumes any such thoughts into the hardbodied autoeroticism of the lonesome cell inhabitant.
This psychological burden of imprisonment is captured perfectly by Franz Rogokowskiâs lithe physicality as Hans. He is an instinctual and melancholic anchor, perfect for a story about tenderness found amongst the ruins. His angular jaw, his hollow cheeks, his haunted eyes, and his cleft lip suggest a man who has been routinely beaten down by life. He peers out cautiously from under his brow while his hunched shoulders reveal the psychological scars of a life spent at the physical mercy of authority. But his toned body and defiant, self contained emotional life reveal his resilience, his libidinal sexuality and at times, his free-spirited jouissance. He carries a rage and a confusion that runs up against the cold, unfeeling walls that constrain him, yet he carries a romantic longing and vulnerability which leads him to look for beauty in the darkest of places.
Throughout, the camera tracks economically through the space of the prison, juxtaposing characters against walls and wire fences which fill the entire frame behind and around them. The prisoners are all kitted out in ironically sky blue shirts and ocean blue trousers, creating an escapist sense of solitude and calm within the bloody red bricks and greyish blue plaster of the prison. And in the midst of this bleak setting, love still finds a way.Â
A lost love is remembered in a sunny scene shot on grainy film stock, in a sequence rife with nostalgic longing. One of few sequences set outside the prison, and like the opening filmâs opening moments in the public bathroom - it has a sense of unreality thanks to the mediating device of a film camera, as the memories come back to Hans as if they were a film he shot himself. But where the earlier scene in the bathroom has a fixed composition and dispassionate gaze which captures the normalcy of a good public fuck, the second sequence tells something of Hanâs romantic interiority - the easy lustfulness of those verdant summer memories now lost to time.
The central relationship of the film is that between Hans and his cellmate Viktor. Early revulsion and disgust towards Hans as a homosexual softens once Viktor notices the serial number tattooed on Hansâs arm, a reminder of his time imprisoned in a contraption camp during the Third Reich. Through the tattoo we understand that the new German governmentâs continuity with the earlier Nazis in their incarceration of homosexuals. For many, the dawn of a new era in Germany offered no respite from persecution and imprisonment. And so Viktor offers to tattoo over the mark, a tender and sensual act of care between men which caries with it the needle's stinging pain. And thus two men begin to forge something like love in the concrete walls of their prison. And while Hans searches for the carefree days of his lost love in the younger men he pursues, with Viktor he finds an older protector to guide him and offer a steady reassurance.
The filmâs closing moments conceal a gut punch which offers the filmâs most straightforward statement of its critical intent. Paragraph 175 is to repealed, and Hans is to be freed. Newly liberated, Hans enters the dimly lit, cavernous halls of a sex club littered with copulating bodies; a place for hedonism and self-reinvention through anonymous sexual encounters. But Hans - contemplating this newfound freedom to indulge his passions openly - is overwhelmed, and out of place. He runs to the nearest shop front and throws a rock through the window, before lighting up a cigarette to the sounds of the storeâs alarm. He calmly waits for the police to cart him back to the clink. It is a wryly humorous reversal of course which turns the filmâs apparently happy resolution on its head, and casts all the misery that came before in a newly tragicomic light. The filmâs denouement is an ironic statement of ability to use our freedom to shape our lives how we see fit - even if that is by willingly resubjecting oneâs self to incarceration.
In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, Foucault offered an infamous analysis of Jeremy Benthamâs Panopticon as the prison par excellence, in that it encourages the prisoners to regulate their own behaviour, by obscuring the guards from view, so prisoners are never certain whether theyâre being surveilled. They therefore begin to act as if they are always being watched. In this way, the prisonâs regulation of the prisoners leads to the prisoner regulating itself. This is the affliction Hans suffers from. As Foucault writes in the book:
â[The prisoner] assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles [of prisoner and guard]; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.â
The filmâs strength is in how it captures this effect - the reflexive relationship between the subdued inmates and the psychosocial barbarousness of life inside an inescapable institution. This is not a prison story of pride and resilience, but one of the necessary and total capitulation to your tormentors.Â
Historiographers of Foucaultâs work frequently point to the moment where he moves from writing about systems of control and bodily regulation - as in Discipline and Punish - towards the ideas the new forms of reinvention and freedom offered by the nascent and permissive neoliberal societies in the late 20th Century. This is the society Hans finds himself entering. These societies offered a freedom from the overreaching and regulatory states of the mid 20th century - and moved towards more flexible and internalised systems of control. In academic circles, this time - tied inextricably to the onward march of gay liberation in the period - was seen as offering a new horizon of self definition, actualisation, and alternative lifestyles within functioning social systems. But what Great Freedom dares to ask, is how are those oppressed by the previous order, who have spent their life accommodating and learning to live under the long arm of the state that despises them, supposed to actualise and connect? When their lives have been spent confined by physical and psychological walls of state institutions, how should they know how to be without them? It offers scathing inditement of the moral crimes that governments have inflicted on persecuted minorities for decades. And it captures the overwhelming terror that the falling away of familiar structures can incite, however painful they might have been to endure.
In this way, the filmâs illumination of the psychological impacts of physical oppression is a firm rebuke to anyone who would like to consider gay liberation passĂ©. Such concerns are sadly still relevant today, as we see in the current struggles across the Anglo-sphere to end conversion therapy, a practice which at its core is an attempt to control the mind by regulating and harming the body. Already illegal in many US states, it was recently outlawed in Canada, and legislation is currently being tabled in New Zealand and the UK. But in all countries, conservative forces have opposed the ban, and there are no guarantees these laws will pass.
And so the struggle for freedom - the human desire to be able to live openly and comfortably in the world and within oneâs own self - is delayed for another day. And it is this struggle which Great Freedom captures beautifully, with clarity, humour and eroticism.
