DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS

i had a wonderful time tonight @ 
THE OUTFEST LEGACY PROJECT screening of~ DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS.

billed as a gala benefit  for the legacy project for LBGT film preservation, the event was hosted by michael urie, with a performance by darren criss. this years award went to producers craig zadan & neil meron. the award was presented by sean hayes

This special Sneak Preview screening with live musical accompaniment will be the first time in almost 100 years that the director’s vision was screened to an audience.

for the last 7 years the outfest legacy project in partnership with UCLA has restored, preserved & archived 20.000 GLBT films, including my film~ hustler white!
for more info~ OUTFEST LEGACY PROJECT

special thanks to kim yutani

Different From The Others  is a German film produced during the Weimar Republic. It was first released in 1919 and stars Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel.

The story for Anders als die Andern was co-written by Richard Oswald and Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld who also had a small part in the film and partially funded the production through his Institute for Sexual Science, with the aim of presenting the story as a polemic against the then-current laws under Germany's Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense.

The cinematography was by Max Fassbender, who two years previously had worked on Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray, one of the earliest cinematic treatments of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Director Richard Oswald later became a director of some considerable note, as did his son Gert. Veidt became a major film star the year after Anders was released, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Anders als die Andern is noteworthy as one of the first sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals in the cinema. The film's basic plot was used again in the 1961 UK film, Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde. Censorship laws enacted in reaction to films like Anders als die Andern eventually restricted viewing of this movie to doctors and medical researchers, and prints of the film were among the many "decadent" works burned by the Nazis after they came to power in 1933.

The film, which co-starred and was co-written by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, refers to Hirschfeld's theories of cross-dressing. The theory states that homosexuals were heterosexuals"handicapped by an excess of female hormones." The film's blackmailer attends a drag club, and various scenes in the film document transvestism, a word invented by Hirschfeld. The film, which suffered from censorship, was shipped, as 40 different copies, throughout Germany by Oswald. The authorities found the films and quickly controlled it, allowing it to be shown only to doctors and lawyers. The Nazis destroyed the majority of the prints and no complete copies of the film are known to exist.