Lecture in English language.

In a 1929 issue of the British film journal, Close Up, queer modernist Oswell Blakeston enthusiastically catalogued Valeska Gert’s few appearances on film (Joyless Street, Alraune, Nana, Wood Love), proclaiming that he would “walk miles to see a picture with the Gert any day of the week.” Describing the “Rabelaisian” quality of Gert’s grotesque dancing, Blakeston argues for the singularity and specificity of her screen performances: “the camera adds something to the Gert, gives fresh angles on her static poses….” In this lecture, Paul Flaig will explore Gert’s cinematic legacies by considering this unique fusion of grotesque pose and recorded motion. Following Gert’s 1925 essay, “Grotesker Film,” it will situate her performances in these and other films within a transnational, inter-historical network of grotesque comedy spanning American slapstick (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton), Weimar contemporaries (Bertolt Brecht, Raoul Hausmann) and later artists marked by her work (Judith Malina, Jack Smith, Federico Fellini). 

Dr Paul Flaig is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is author of the recent monograph, Weimar Slapstick and Hollywood Comedy Transformed (Bloomsbury 2025), co-editor of the collection New Silent Cinema (Routledge/AFI, 2016) and co-director of the German Screen Studies Network. He has written widely on silent film, animation, screen comedy and Weimar cinema and is currently preparing with Dora Osborne and Molly Harrabin the publication of a new journal, German Screen Studies (to be published by Berghahn starting in 2027).

This lecture is a part of the series Valeska Gert and her Afterlives. FU Berlin / AdK / DAAD: Celebrating 20 years of the Valeska Gert Professorship.