Great Free­dom

Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty was legalised in West Ger­many in 1969. Sebas­t­ian Meise’s Great Free­dom is set almost entire­ly pri­or to this date, weav­ing togeth­er prison time spent dur­ing and after the World War Two. These dates merge togeth­er almost indis­tin­guish­ably, tak­ing place in iden­ti­cal cells and yards that fade in and out of our consciousness.

An exclu­sive­ly male cast of war­dens and pris­on­ers come and go, all revolv­ing around the con­stant of one gay man. Meise intro­duces Hans Hoff­mann (Franz Rogows­ki) in a micro­cos­mic mon­tage of sex­u­al encoun­ters in a pub­lic bathroom.

Grainy footage shows acts lat­er read out in court as ille­gal under the homo­pho­bic statute Para­graph 175 – raw dis­plays of pas­sion reduced to clin­i­cal Latin descrip­tors. The Super 8 Kodak film recalls the stark sex­u­al real­ism of Fass­binder, an allu­sion that recur­ring­ly punc­tu­ates the film to ground it in actu­al and cin­e­mat­ic queer history.

Great Free­dom is told almost exclu­sive­ly through its visu­als. The film was shot by Crys­tel Fournier, who also did the cin­e­matog­ra­phy for the first three fea­tures direct­ed by Céline Sci­amma. The sen­si­bil­i­ty of queer­ness is often more pow­er­ful than explic­it depic­tion, embed­ded with­in the aes­thet­ic fab­ric of the film itself. The female gaze Fournier has devel­oped through her col­lab­o­ra­tions with Sci­amma allow her to avoid fetishis­ing queer char­ac­ters on screen.

Meise’s aim is to move beyond the focus of the sex­u­al act itself, that which the law has fix­at­ed on, to present a more human depic­tion of homo­sex­u­al desire. His focus then is on touch and non-bod­i­ly forms of inti­ma­cy – Fournier clos­es in on sub­tle ges­tures like half-met glances and brush­es of hair. Hans chainsmokes through­out, the trad­ing of cig­a­rettes a euphemistic sym­bol dat­ing from the Hays Code mem­o­rably used by Jean Genet in his 1950 prison-set short film Un Chant d’Amour.

These moments of sen­su­al­i­ty are extend­ed gen­tly, often framed by mol­e­c­u­lar open­ings in cell doors and walls. Sub­stan­tial peri­ods of time are spent with Hans in soli­tary con­fine­ment, flood­ing the audi­to­ri­um with dark­ness, only to be alle­vi­at­ed by a shaft of light and a pack of fags thrust inside.

Like the veiled codes gay peo­ple were forced to use by an oppres­sive legal sys­tem, queer­ness is com­mu­ni­cat­ed by the film through syn­onymi­ty and insin­u­a­tion. The ele­ments of Great Free­dom revolve ad nau­se­um – Hans becomes almost reliant on the prison sys­tem to remain sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fied, iron­i­cal­ly pro­vid­ing a space in which it is eas­i­er for him to meet oth­er gay men.

It’s a pow­er­ful role for Rogows­ki, one of the most com­pelling actors work­ing today, who played sim­i­lar­ly enig­mat­ic roman­tic fig­ures in Tran­sit and Undine by Chris­t­ian Pet­zold. While oth­er men move through then out of the pic­ture, Rogows­ki holds every­thing togeth­er with an exquis­ite deft­ness that is often emo­tion­al­ly overwhelming.

What Great Free­dom so expert­ly cap­tures is inevitable fail­ure of queer­pho­bic reha­bil­i­ta­tion. Hans’s sex­u­al­i­ty is innate, a part of his essence, which will nev­er change or fade away. This mes­sage may feel his­toric, but Meise shows the impor­tance of a potent reminder.

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