Location: Deutsche Kinemathek (Halle), Mauerstraße 79, 10117 Berlin

Admission: 7 euros, reduced rate 5 euros. In german spoken language.

Wolfgang Theis is a founding member of Schwules Museum, a film scholar, and an exhibition curator. As a student, he worked as a docent at the Berlin Museum, where, from 1982 to 1984, he organized the exhibition “Eldorado: On the History and Culture of Homosexual Women and Men in Berlin” together with Andreas Sternweiler and Manfred Baumgardt. The Schwules Museum emerged in 1985 as a continuation of this project. According to his own account, Wolfgang Theis curated between 80 and 90 exhibitions at Schwules Museum, including the exhibition “Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Years of the Gay Movement” as well as tributes to Marlene Dietrich, Jean Genet, and Rosa von Praunheim. For over 30 years, Wolfgang Theis also headed the photo archive of the Deutsche Kinemathek.

As part of the exhibition “Inventing Queer Cinema” at the Deutsche Kinemathek, Wolfgang Theis, director Birgit Bosold, and archive staff member Romain Pinteaux will discuss film archives and film exhibitions at Schwules Museum. For long before the Kinemathek itself began examining its own holdings through a queer lens, Theis curated 25 exhibitions on queer cinema there between 1988 and 2020. In 2007, the text accompanying his exhibition “Nobody is Perfect—Film Idols of Lesbians and Gays” noted the special affinity many queer people have for cinema: “Actually, Clark Gable is too sentimental, Sigourney Weaver is a lousy actress, Jean-Claude van Damme is probably homophobic, and Jodie Foster still hasn’t come out—nobody is perfect, least of all our idols. But after all, we go to the movies to let ourselves be lulled into believing in another world.”

Moderator: Toby Ashraf

A collaboration between the Deutsche Kinemathek and the Schwules Museum

Photo (c) Alica Bonauer (2019), Schwules Museum Archive