If you want to know how to go through life without blockages, you cannot avoid Rosa von Praunheim. This man is constantly at work, he has made more than a hundred films, painted even more pictures, written books, directed at the theater and shocked the heterosexual establishment on the side. Someone like him can’t afford any writing or creative blockages, someone like that always has ideas – even if they’re ideas-finding ones. He employs a young man who watches him get creative every day from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Berlin filmmaker, author and gay activist claims in a phone call shortly before his 80th birthday. Because he doesn’t always feel like working either: “Sometimes I’d rather peel carrots or ride my bike to the Tiergarten.” But if someone sits around with him and gets paid, he has to do something. “That would be a shame otherwise.”
So a little tip for everyone who suffers from writer’s block: Engage viewers and let them watch you while you work. However, you should be at least as centered as Rosa von Praunheim, who likes to reveal a lot about himself. He also appears regularly in his works, even when they’re not about him at all. Like in his latest feature film “Rex Gildo – The Last Dance”, which addresses the singer’s alleged homosexuality. The filmmaker, who grew up as Holger Mischwitzky in Frankfurt’s Praunheim district, occasionally tells anecdotes from his own life and finds parallels between himself and the hit star. He always wants to be involved, he says: “I think it’s a very honest thing.” In the Gildo film, he also stars three aging fangirls concerned about the Rex legacy. They chant: “Rosa von Praunheim, you are an old pig!”
The Bayerischer Rundfunk refused to show his film – and made him so famous
Even those parts of the republic that don’t know his films see him as an old sod: In the wild early years of private television, he outed celebrities like Hape Kerkeling and Alfred Biolek as homosexual (which harmed him more than those affected), went to film parties or receptions he in pink clothes, with penises or cow’s udders on his head. “Being noticed is very important as an artist,” he says. And he attracted attention early on, in the late 1960s, when he was still studying painting at the Berlin University of the Arts. The first short and experimental films were followed in 1971 by the feature films “Die Bettwurst” and “Not homosexuals are perverted, but the situation in which they live”. He brings the camp aesthetic to Germany, the films are provocative, parodic and deliberately amateurish. At that time, they unfolded enormous clout: When the “homosexual” was broadcast on ARD, the Bavarian radio switched off, after which Rosa von Praunheim was known nationwide.
“It is not the homosexual who is perverted, but the situation in which he lives” was Praunheim’s breakthrough.
(Photo: WDR/Pro-Fun Media)
He is considered an icon of the German gay movement, and his films sparked the founding of numerous homosexual initiatives in the 1970s. They are invited to festivals worldwide and shown in the Museum of Modern Art. In New York he got to know the US underground film movement, where he shot again and again in the coming decades, including the documentary “Tally Brown, New York” (about the Warhol superstar of the same name) that won the Federal Film Prize in 1979 or the 1990 resulting “AIDS trilogy”. Eccentric older ladies like Lotti Huber or Evelyn Künneke become his muses, girlfriends and leading actresses. His gaze is loving, he approaches his counterparts with great curiosity. He makes films about pimps, porn stars or gay Nazis, and he is primarily interested in their own contradictions.
And then there is the other Praunheim, who has sympathies for the “last generation” (“If they want to survive, they have to kick our ass”) and who, as a professor for directing in Babelsberg, filmmakers like Tom Tykwer, Chris Kraus , Axel Ranisch or Julia von Heinz introduced them to the profession. He publishes poems and diaries, his first novel was published this year. He has just staged his 50-year-old film “Die Bettwurst” as a musical, and galleries in Munich and Berlin are showing his paintings. So it almost seems as if he can go through life without blockages even in his ninth decade. There are many ideas, he says: “I’m looking for someone who will give me a million so I can make ten new films.” This Friday the restless Rosa von Praunheim will be eighty years old.