Trans Lives in Early Film

Different from Others - film (1919)

The history of transgender film begins before the introduction of the term transgender in 1965, it begins before the prefix trans- is first used to describe gender variance in 1910, in fact it begins even before film started to take shape in the 1890s. To understand the early history of transgressive gender expression in film, we must first look to theatre.

Theatre has a long recorded history of cross-casting men in female roles and women in male roles. These roles are referred to in theatre as travesti, a term I will also use to refer to film performances. It differs from cross-dressing in film because cross-dressing is the act of a person who typically dresses in the clothes of one sex dressing in the opposite clothes for a limited time, travesti is for the entire length of the piece. Male to female travesti in theatre at end of the 19th century and the beginning of early film is often treated as joke, as a comedic role, much like pantomime dames still seen in British theatre, but at this time female to male travesti in theatre is beginning to become part of the dramatic mainstream, with popular actors like the American Maude Adams (made famous for playing male roles in L’Aiglon and Peter Pan and who is regarded by contemporary theorists as a queer woman) and the French Sarah Bernhardt (who originated the title male role in L’Aiglon and cemented her fame in both France and the United States playing Hamlet.)

While most 1900s theatrical stars dismissed film as a passing fad, Sarah Bernhardt wholeheartedly embraced the new medium. The earliest cinematic adaptation of Hamlet is in fact a scene performed by Bernhardt that premiered in 1900 as one of the central attractions of the 1900 Paris Exposition. The audience would be attracted to such a film by the performance of an esteemed actor like Bernhardt performing an intellectual and high culture play like Shakespeare, the fact that Bernhardt was playing a man was not noteworthy, especially compared to the high culture world of Shakespeare coming from a medium already associated with mass culture. While Sarah Bernhardt went on to play numerous other male roles in theatre, Hamlet is the only filmed record of this era of transgressive gender in media.

Similarly inspired by theatrical traditions, several films of the 1910s inspired by Italian commedia dell’arte and operatic traditions of cross-dressing and travesti. Renowned composer Gioachino Rossini wrote the opera Tancredi in 1813, the title character or Tancredi, an exiled male soldier hopelessly in love with a young noblewoman, was written to be sung by contralto voice type, so while an explicitly male character has been played by female opera singers since it’s premiere. A hundred years later, Pierrot the Prodigal was released to wide commercial success. Pierrot the Prodigal, while a comedy about the stock pantomime character is similar to Tancredi as an explicitly male character that is in this inception played by Italian heartthrob and starlet Francesca Bertini.

Arguably the most famous cross-dresser of all time, Joan of Arc had fascinated and inspired artists since their death in 1431. By 1928, the year of the release of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, eight cinematic portrayals had already been made across France, America and the US. The Passion of Joan of Arc is set apart by its commitment to historical accuracy rather than a commitment to narrative storytelling, basing itself on historical transcripts of the trial of Joan of Arc. According to these transcripts taken at the time, Joan of Arc was tried and executed for cross-dressing and the heresy it was supposedly evidence of. (“For nothing in the world will I swear not to [...] put on a man’s dress.”)

Regardless of this, most artistic and cultural depictions of Joan of Arc present her as intrinsically feminine as the “Maid of Orléans”, as exemplified in the American epic Joan the Woman, released just over a decade before The Passion of Joan Arc. Comparably this American Joan has shoulder length curled hair cut in a feminine bob style, and wears a skirt to battle. In The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer’s direction and the lauded performance of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in the lead role, instead choose to amplify Joan’s masculinity, showing her with the close cropped hair and breeches not only typical for soldiers of the time but signifying masculinity to audiences in 1928. In 1936, only eight years after the release of the film, Joan of Arc was first discussed through a queer perspective in a biography by Vita Sackville-West. More recent queer and gender non conforming representations of Joan of Arc are featured in Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors and Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan. Dreyer’s film clearly presents and discusses Joan as a trans-masculine character, while coming to no explicit conclusion on her identity, making it clear that Joan was an AFAB person who chose to dress is male clothing and was punished for it.

A year later in 1929, the G. W. Pabst directed Pandora’s Box was released, the character of Countess Geschwitz in the film is often acknowledged to be the first explicitly lesbian character in cinema history. Unlike other early lesbian and sapphic characters, Geschwitz is characterised by her gender variance, she wears men’s clothes, partakes in male activities like smoking and fulfils a male role in her attraction to women. Even outside of her sexual attraction she is a masculine character and could be defined as a butch lesbian character. On the other hand, Lulu, the protagonist of the film is a deeply androgynous and fluid character, with several clear female and male characteristics, not only in her way of dress but her outward expression. Her gender expression appears to depend on what helps her achieve her perceived “deviant” ambitions. Wedekind, the original creator of the character noted that “Lulu is not a real character, but the personification of primitive sexuality.”

A pattern emerges amongst female bodied actors portraying male characters, and that is that it only occurs once in their career. Francesca Bertini only played a male character once in Pierrot the Prodigal (1914) Betty Bronson only played a male character in Peter Pan (1924) and even Sarah Bernhardt, acclaimed for playing multiple male roles on stage only transgressed gender once on the silver screen in Hamlet (1900). But to every rule there is an exception, and when discussing travesti and cross-dressing cinema and transmasculine characters, one name comes up again and again, and that is the Danish actor Asta Nielsen.

Asta Nielsen (Hamlet - 1921)

After making a single film in Denmark Asta Nielsen became an overnight European phenomenon, within a year she had moved to Berlin where she had been offered a contract and a studio exclusively for the making of her films. Her popularity in German silent cinema is credited to unique “boyish” appearance and portrayal of overtly sexual women, but Nielsen did not just play boyish or masculine women, she played male or transmasculine. First in Youth and Madness (1913) as Jesta, a playful young person who in an attempt to help their fiancés financial struggles spends most of the film dressed up as a man, engaging in male behaviour and even seducing a woman. Similarly in Zapata’s Gang (1914) Nielsen plays an actress who ends up dressed as a man for the majority of the film, getting up to hijinks and seducing a young woman who appears not to care when in the finale they are revealed to be female. While both these protagonists begin and end the film as women, they spend the vast majority of the film presenting and living life as men. In 1916’s The ABCs of Love, Nielsen again dons male garb, this time as a young romantic who, disappointed in her fiancés lack of manliness, dresses as a man to teach her effeminate husband how to truly live life as a man. Out of the three “cross-dressing” films made by Nielsen, The ABCs of Love can most clearly be recognised as a transgender film about an AFAB person exploring and experimenting with what it means to become a man.

While these previously mentioned films are light-hearted, Nielen’s final male role (and one of her most well-known) is a drama. The very same drama Sarah Bernhardt had played twenty years earlier. In 1921 Asta Nielsen played Hamlet, as a silent film, the exposition is explained via intertitles explaining to us that this Prince Hamlet, while assigned female at birth, has been raised and lives as a man in order to secure the line of succession to the mediaeval Danish throne. Here Nielsen plays a man who has been raised as such, who has been educated as stuff and who chooses to live his life as such even though he is still anatomically female (as revealed in the finale of the film). In Germany in 1921 we are presented with an empathetic explicitly trans-masculine character struggling through their life and their gender identity (in this interpretation of Hamlet one of the prince's key crises is his fight between his masculine and feminine natures) in a way even modern audiences are starved of.

Inspired by these continental films and earlier theatrical traditions, female masculinity first hit America in 1930 with the immigration of German film star and bisexual woman, Marlene Dietrich. In her first Hollywood film Morocco, Dietrich plays a cabaret performer who as part of her act performs as a male impersonator (drag king). While performing her act Dietrich’s character flirts with and kisses a female audience member in one of the earliest sapphic kisses in mainstream film, but also in an early representation of a gender non conforming character. These representations of trans-masculine people passed through national borders and these lives and characters were openly presented to mass audiences in the era of silent films.

While these early films mentioned can easily be seen to have transgender or transsexual characters or themes inside of their narratives, it has to be noted that it was during this era of film that the first transsexual and gender-non-conforming people were first seen on screen. The film was Different From The Others, a 1919 feature film funded by the Institute of Sexual Science and co-written by Magnus Hirschfeld (the man credited with introducing the prefix of trans- in transvestite and transsexual.) In the film a successful homosexual artist is blackmailed because of his sexuality. The film is noted as one of the earliest explicit and empathetic portrayals of queer lives and characters. In a short scene, Hirschfeld appears as himself, leading a public lecture on sexual diversity where he shows images of transgender men and butch women as well as transgender women. Hirschfeld was keen to use this film to advocate for the rights of sexual minorities, specifically targeting German legislation that criminalised homosexual activity. The film was banned by a specifically created board of censors only a year after its release. While films with adult or queer content were routinely banned for youth consumption in the Weimar Republic, Different From The Others is one of the very few German-made films known to have been censored inside of Germany. Even now the film only exists in extracts and fragments.

The open portrayal of transgressive gender in European Expressionist cinema was allowed in mainstream film because of the liberal and progressive climate it was produced in. This era of the 1910s and 1920s was quickly overcome and overshadowed by the rise of fascism and dawning of war across Europe. European cinema fell into decline and Hollywood prospered with the introduction of sound film in 1927 and the development of colour film throughout the 1930s. Several of the films discussed are lost or only exist in fragments preserved by various film institutes leaving limited visual evidence behind of this interwar period of queer liberation on screen.