The Arabian Nights in Weimar Cinema: Recontextualizing Campy Fantasies of Gender, Sex, and Ethnicity in Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and Ernst Lubitsch's Sumurun (1920)

Gueneli examines the adaptation of the Arabian Nights into filmic narratives in the Weimar Republic by asking how these films participated in and shaped modern discourses on gender, sex, and ethnicity. What fantasies, anxieties, and dreams did these Arab, “exotic” tales fulfill for audiences in Weimar Germany, where debates about colonial dreams and the simultaneous loss of colonies, as much as about women’s liberation and the LGBTQ+ population’s voicing of social, political, and sexual interests saturated the public sphere? Gueneli analyzes Lotte Reiniger’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun (1920). She argues that the films’ deliberations on these questions provide reactions to modern Germany’s changing socio-cultural and -political fabric. Gueneli discusses these films from the perspective of gender and sexuality and pays particular attention to the interplay between ethnicity and the cinematic use of campy/drag performances. Looking closely at the use of costume (fashion, props, jewelry) and the staging of desire (mise-enscène, casting, performance), Gueneli claims that through the occasional use of a campy mode/campy drag performance the films include more nuances in their depictions of gender, yet, at the same time, create a ranking among the implied ethnicities.