Queer Camera: Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Prater Violet

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay locates Christopher Isherwood’s radical energy in the use of emergent visual technologies to curate a space for queer desire in his works Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and Prater Violet (1945). Isherwood subverts the heteronormative cinematic discourses by pausing them and preparing Instantaneous Photographs out of small moments that engage in a play of stillness and movement. The pauses enable the narratives to constantly draw attention toward themselves as well as the namesake narrators who voice their queer desire in those moments. This presents to us the unique esthetics of Isherwood wherein the visual does not only serve the novelistic in being a narrative strategy but becomes an epistemological mode through which the visual constructs queer subjectivity, in a world witnessing the rise of fascist forces. In short, the “queer camera,” seizing the grand narrative of history, forges queer time and queer voice, and, thereby, an alternative history that acknowledges queer presence.