Ep Race
Tribute to Magnus Hirschfeld and Lionel Soukaz
The Openers are pleased to join again this year at the Cinémathèque de Nice for a double tribute to the occasion of the exceptional screening of a small rarity of queer cinema, Race d’Ep. Tribute to his director, Lionel Soukaz, a faithful figure of In♣Out, who left us last February. Also tribute to the militant sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld whose film offers a beautiful evocation.
RACE D’EP
of Lionel Soukaz
France • 1978 • 1h35 • documentary
with Elizar Van Effenterre, Pierre Stone, Gilles Sandier, Guy Hocquenhem, Michel Cressole, Copi
An activist film shot at the time of the great post-depenetration homosexual liberation movements, Ep’s Race (“pederaste” in verlan) is a reconstruction, in four stories, of the archetypes of the gay unconscious over more than a century. First 1900 or “The time of laying” through memories of an old model evoking Baron Von Gloeden and its young Mediterranean ephebes. Then 1930 or “The Third Sex: From the Crazy Years to Extermination” thanks to the story of the lesbian secretary of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the Institute of Sexology in Berlin. Then 1960 or “Sweet sixteen in the sixties” and the utopian sexual release for “young men-fleurs”. And finally 1970 or "Royal Opera" and two men's walks on the banks of the Seine for a night of Parisian dredging.
Lionel Soukaz co-wrote the script with activist and journalist Guy Hocquenghem, who plays in the film. A scandalous jury during his release, Race d’Ep was ranked X, but could be projected in an expurated version thanks to the mobilization of intellectuals Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Châtelet and Gilles Deleuze or playwright Copi.
“It may never be more than Lionel Soukaz’s, contemporary cinema deserves more the language name or writing of the reality that Pasolini had granted him. » (René Scherer)
Follow-up to a meeting with Marc Lamonzie, PhD student in contemporary history at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne and specialist in male homosexuality from the late nineteenth to the Second World War
Magnus Hirschfeld
Born in 1868 in Kolberg, is a German doctor, inventor of modern sexology and one of the founding fathers of homosexual liberation movements. He fought against the persecution of German homosexuals under paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. Consistent with Adolf Hitler’s taking of power in 1933, the Nazis attacked and looted his Institute of Sexology, founded in Berlin in 1918, and his important library fed their first self-dafés. He is an exile in France. This first very aesthetic feature films the forced "healings" of homosexuals in the 1920s in the UK. Documented by the book “ Curing Queers” by Quentin Dickinson, he refers to the controversial work of Eugen Steinach, an Austrian endocrinologist famous for his experiences of “care” homosexuality. Magnus Hirschfeld used Steinach’s theory to anchor a new biological model of homosexuality, claiming that gays were neither sick nor depraved but formed a third sex, a separate and autonomous group of organically feminized men.