Daniel Humphrey - One Summer of Heterosexuality: Lost and Found Lesbianism in a Forgotten Swedish...

n r f H t r x l t : L t nd F nd L b nn F r tt n d h F l

Daniel Humphrey

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 13, Number 1,2007, pp. 33-61 (Article)

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ONE SUMMER OF HETEROSEXUALITYLost and Found Lesbianism in a Forgotten Swedish Film

Daniel Humphrey

But what if the “goods” refused “to go to market”? What if they

maintained among themselves “another” kind of trade?

— Luce Irigaray, “When the Goods Get Together”

In 1967, as the demise of the MPAA Production Code allowed for a new open-

ness in American cinema, an unprecedented wave of Hollywood films with homo-

sexual themes went into production. Reporting on the phenomenon, the New York

Mattachine Society’s newsletter pointed to The Killing of Sister George (dir. Robert

Aldrich; 1968), among others, and attributed this historic breakthrough, in part,

to the impact of the underground film movement responsible for Andy Warhol’s

My Hustler (1965) and Chelsea Girls (1966) and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising

(1964). A second cinema, however, was also mentioned as an influence, one that

has yet to be adequately recognized for its role in the origins of queer American

feature filmmaking. While only one example — Mai Zetterling’s scandalous Night

Games (1966) — was given, “the success of Swedish films” was cited for inspiring

Hollywood to jump “on the bandwagon” of the new wave of homosexually focused

cinema.1

This connection may seem surprising to present-day historians. Swedish

cinema has been regarded as bold but essentially heterosexual in spirit. Upon

arrival in the United States, I Am Curious (Yellow) (dir. Vilgot Sjöman; 1967)

shocked the U.S. Customs Service, which seized it as “the most explicit movie ever

to be imported here.”2 Still, there was no element of queerness to it. Indeed, as

Don Kulick puts it, Swedish imports “most commonly represented sex by linger-

GLQ 13:1

DOI 10.1215/10642684-2006-013

© 2006 by Duke University Press

34 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN ANd GAY STUdIES

ing on clean, fresh svelte women who without hesitation or guilt had intercourse

with their clean, fresh, svelte boyfriends. The ‘Swedish sin’ was healthy, natural

good sex.”3

Nevertheless, as the Mattachine newsletter suggests, Swedish filmmaking

did play a role in the emerging queer consciousness of North America and Great

Britain in the mid-twentieth century and the cinema borne from it. This essay

explores how Sweden, or really “Sweden,” functioned as a national imaginary

within the minds of queer U.S. filmgoers.4 Through a forgotten Swedish import,

Time of Desire (Hästhandlarens flickor, dir. Egil Holmsen; 1954), I adumbrate the

ideological struggles circulating around, and emerging from, Sweden’s resonant

image of a sexual and, most distressingly to some, socialist utopia. The modes of

relationality in this cinema and its geopolitical “discursive surround” can be pro-

ductively remembered and revisited in the twenty-first century.5

The ways in which Sweden as a whole, and the films of its best-known

cinematic ambassador, Ingmar Bergman, factored into homophobic discourses

of McCarthyism and the Cold War, ultimately emerging in the kind of counter-

discourse suggested by the Mattachine newsletter, were largely indirect, often tak-

ing form in a suspicion of passivity that can be read both politically and sexually.

“Sweden Won’t Choose Sides” proclaimed a nearly half-page headline in United

Nations World just after World War II.6

The full conflation of what was seen as Sweden’s political and economic

abnormalcy and a kind of sexual abnormalcy most obviously took shape around

the Swedish civil servant Dag Hammarskjöld, who became secretary-general of

the United Nations in 1953. Rumors that the unmarried forty-seven-year-old intel-

lectual was a homosexual began circulating as soon as he was nominated for the

post. Most biographers now consider Hammarskjöld to have been asexual. None-

theless, as one puts it, “The homosexual rumor was resurrected from time to time

by various detractors when he was under political attack.”7 Such accusations usu-

ally took the form of innuendo; for example, “comparisons [were] sometimes made

of him with Lawrence of Arabia, whose homoerotic tendencies are well-known,”8

or the odd rumor, reported in the New Yorker, that Hammarskjöld once went skiing

with a “volume of Proust . . . under his arm.”9 Perhaps most insidiously conflat-

ing Sweden’s political stance with a failure of heterosexual masculine potency,

the Chicago Daily Tribune described Hammarskjöld upon his emergence on the

international stage as “a political neuter.”10 As the term suggests, imaginings of

Sweden took form not simply around ideas of homosexuality or heterosexuality,

masculinity or femininity, but somewhere queerly and inscrutably in between,


LOST ANd FOUNd LESBIANISM 35

imaginings reflecting a nation aligned neither with the worldwide communist revo-

lution nor with Western capitalism and colonialism.

The era’s fledgling lesbian and gay press occasionally remarked on the con-

troversies, usually in the form of quotations from nongay publications that could

function as self-parodies. The Los Angeles–based One noted the early battle in

Sweden for homosexual rights, reprinting a number of reactionary quotations by

Ronald Clark from the British periodical, The People:

Perhaps I’m just a typically prudish product of the “decadent west.” . . .

[Nevertheless] I deplore [Sweden’s] open acceptance of homosexuality. . . .

[Sweden’s National League for Sex Equality chairman] Hr. Ove Ahlstrom

is a man who openly boasts of the League’s 400-membership figure for

Stockholm alone. And, as he was careful to explain, Lesbians are also eli-

gible for membership in what I regard as his weird and horrifying League

of the Damned.11

A veritable apotheosis of such hysterical discourse is found in Kathleen

Nott’s 1961 account of Sweden, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in which she posits a

nationwide conspiracy of homosexuals in all segments of society and at every level

of the establishment. Nott contends that the cabalistic group has systematically

been preying on the country’s underage males, many of whom had supposedly

been recruited into a huge “boy-prostitution” ring.12

Consistent references to perversity peppered the reception of a number

of the country’s exported films that were not gay- or lesbian-centered. One word

repeatedly invoked in U.S. presentations of Bergman’s films was “strange.” Törst

(1949) first opened in the United States in 1956 under the accurately translated

title Thirst but was inaccurately advertised as “the off-beat story of a strange rela-

tionship . . . condemned by the world.”13 When it was rereleased at the height of

the director’s fame, the distributor elicited a sense of the perverse more directly,

retitling it Three Strange Loves. Sommaren med Monika (1953), first released

stateside in 1956 as a dubbed exploitation film titled Monika: The Story of a Bad

Girl, also reappeared at the height of Bergman’s popularity in 1960 as, simply,

Monika, but with the tagline “The Story of a Strange Girl.”14 A promise of strange

forms of love in foreign-language films may well have been offered to simply sug-

gest a distinction from Hollywood offerings, but the term did have a specific con-

notation at the time. As Jenni Olson points out, strange regularly functioned in

film advertisements in the pre-Stonewall era as a code word for queer sexuality.15

From the opposite angle, if queerness was implied in not-especially-queer


Swedish film, “Swedishness” found itself attached to gay-themed cinema with no

connection to that country. For example, One’s review of the West German gay-

centered film Anders als du und ich (dir. Veit Harlan; 1957) — released in the

United States as The Third Sex — repeatedly referred to it as being Swedish for no

self-evident reason.16

Where there is cultural smoke, of course, cinematic fire can sometimes

be found, and the Mattachine newsletter was correct to suggest that several finan-

cially successful Swedish-produced films shown in the United States in the 1950s

and 1960s did explore homosexuality in progressive, oftentimes radical ways.17

Furthermore, a handful of these films would influence Hollywood’s examination

of the topic in succeeding years. Torment (dir. Alf Sjöberg; 1944), the first film

released in the United States with Bergman’s name attached (as screenwriter), is

rife with homoerotic tension, as its schoolboy protagonist finds himself in a sado-

masochistic struggle with a despotic male teacher ostensibly over the affections of

the young female lover they share. Although the film’s homoerotic undercurrents

have been overlooked in recent analyses of Bergman’s oeuvre, they were not upon

its first release. The New York Times was quick to note the “schoolmaster’s mon-

strous sadism” and “particular obsession toward this boy,” condemning the film

outright for its “dour and unhealthy tone.”18

Few subsequent Bergman films would offer the palpable sense of homo-

sexual desire found in Torment. Virtually all of them, however, feature a trenchant

expression of the dysfunctionality in virtually all modern sexual relationships and

gender configurations. In these films male and female homosexuality often found

itself used as a compelling variation on the theme of heterosexual misery. Not

surprisingly, this practice aroused the suspicions of conservative heterosexual

spectators as well as the guarded curiosity of queer ones. For example, the Chris-

tian Science Monitor compared Three Strange Loves to Torment, dismissing it as

“virtually a case history in sadism.”19 In contrast, the lesbian periodical the Lad-

der reprinted a description of the film found in the program book of Los Angeles’s

Coronet Theatre in order to alert readers to a potential new Sapphic classic: “The

story of 3 women and their strange love lives. One is an adulteress, the second has

lesbian tendencies, and the third is love-starved.”20

Bergman’s sexual provocations reached a climax with The Silence (1963),

an international succès de scandale that provoked both conservative moralists and

queer Americans throughout 1963 and 1964. Focusing on a promiscuous hetero-

sexual woman and the repressed lesbian sister who harbors incestuous longings for

her, the virtually plotless film was, and remains today, a cunning Rorschach blot

of modern art, revealing as much about its spectator as it does about its charac-


ters. The two vacationing women rest in a vast gothic hotel after the lesbian-coded

one becomes too ill to travel. The heterosexual, Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) — who,

it is implied, may have previously engaged in a sexual relationship with her homo-

sexual sibling, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) — throws herself into a debasing affair with a

bar waiter (Birger Malmsten), largely, it seems, to punish her anguished sister. At

the film’s conclusion, the sullen and self-hating Anna takes her young son — who

has accompanied the sisters on their trip — home to Sweden, leaving the ill Ester

behind to recover or die alone.

Prior to the film’s local premiere, an article in the Los Angeles Times used

The Silence and its Swedish box office success to make ludicrous, if predictable,

generalizations: “Most Swedes are spiritually troubled. . . . Swedes love symbol-

ism.” Again assigning blame to what the author admits is a “superbly organized”

welfare state in which “poverty is unknown,” this article also claimed that Swe-

den’s material plenitude and social security have created a nightmarish cultural

mood well demonstrated in Bergman’s latest film: “[There is] an ennui from which

one of the few escapes is sexuality, the last field of adventure where government

regulations do not apply.” It is only in this context that the film’s taboo subject is

revealed: “The two women hover on the brink of an unnatural relationship,” the

author intones. “Boredom and disorientation grip them and they escape in various

forms of eroticism.”21

The homophile press took a more responsible perspective.

The Silence, by Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, has literary content as well as

sex. Despite the spare dialogue, every line counts in this baffling film. One

of the main characters is a lesbian tormented by desire for her heterosexual

sister. Though the lesbian offers a rationale for her choice in sexuality, this

film is not about lesbianism.

The Silence explores several alternatives. On one hand we are

shown acceptance of alienation when the heterosexual sister says in effect

that it is so nice not to understand her male lover. On the other hand we are

shown the terrible love/hate that may come from understanding, as between

the sisters. The Silence has prompted endless speculation in the press as

to its meaning. Ladder readers are invited to share their impressions of the

meaning and pattern in this beautiful and controversial film.22

Perhaps because of lack of response, the Ladder did not follow up with readers’

reactions, but feminist and queer spectators would eventually hotly debate the

film as either yet another unfortunate portrayal of a neurotic lesbian or a deeply


compassionate film about a homosexual woman in extreme and unenviable

circumstances.23

If The Silence remains today within the art cinema canon, another queer

film from Sweden, one that was once as controversial and acclaimed as Bergman’s

film, has vanished from memory. With acting that is often wooden or histrionic

and a cloyingly dated musical score, The Time of Desire is unlikely to earn the

admiration audiences feel for canonical queer “masterpieces” like Mädchen in

Uniform (dir. Leontine Sagan; 1931) or Victim (dir. Basil Dearden; 1961) or even

the aesthetic respect afforded The Silence.24 Nevertheless, the lessons this lost

film teaches seem far from quaint or retrograde today. Furthermore, the level of

sophistication shown in its critique of Western social and sexual ideologies obliges

one to rethink the chronology of much mid- to late-twentieth-century feminist and

queer thought. That this film has been so utterly sidelined today, while the image

of a sexually neurotic Sweden remains in place, suggests that the impact of right-

wing Cold War ideology still mars film history and queer history. Its rediscovery

from virtual oblivion and, more important, its reclamation as a work of importance

for Cold War – era queer culture also demonstrates the value of cultural studies

to both queer historiography and film studies. Without an engagement with what

some might simply dismiss as the “ephemera” of the archive (Mattachine news-

letters and yellowed copies of early queer publications such as the Ladder and

One), the film discussed in the remainder of this essay might have remained com-

pletely lost to English-speaking scholars.25

Imported to the United States in 1957, The Time of Desire, like The

Silence, focuses on a seemingly incestuous relationship between two adult sis-

ters. Despite its current anonymity, it had a significant presence in American art

film culture and queer film culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s (fig. 1). It

broke house records in its original Los Angeles engagements,26 and at one point,

it could be found playing at four different theaters across Manhattan.27 Even in an

art-house circuit accustomed to relatively frank or “adult” sexual content within

its films — content that would encourage the abolition of the Production Code for

U.S. studio releases in 1967 — The Time of Desire was a potential bombshell.

Although it would play without recorded controversy in Los Angeles, New York,

Boston, and Washington, DC, it was the subject of censorship in Chicago, where

it was banned “on grounds it is immoral.”28 The New York Mattachine Society’s

newsletter again offers evidence of its popularity within gay and lesbian culture.

The September 1960 edition encouraged readers to see what it described, with

some amazement (and in clear contrast to the subsequent, tragic The Silence), as a

“lesbian love affair with a happy ending.”29 A month later, the organization would


make the film available to its members

in the privacy of its own meeting place

with a special screening. Announc-

ing its “Second Annual Film Festival,”

the society promoted the screening

with the distributor’s tagline — “the

story of people trapped in ‘The Time

of Desire’ ” — further describing it as

an “explosive, daring homosexual film,

beautifully photographed in Sweden.”30

In Los Angeles, a lesbian critic

was less than certain of the film’s les-

bian theme. The Ladder’s Laurajean

Ermayne wrote, “I know much has

been made of the Uranian elements of

this Swedish picture, but personally I

couldn’t see it. All I saw was two frolic-

some young jamsters, but I’ll admit

it was a treat watching them hug each

other in their nightgowns and disport

themselves in the lake a la buffniks!”31

The discrepancy between these

reactions points to long-held truisms

about differing East and West Coast atti-

tudes toward the role of motion pictures.

The East is often thought to focus on the artistic side of cinema, while Southern

Californians are expected to gravitate toward its more entertaining aspects. As

the Mattachine review mentions, Ingvar Borild’s cinematography is remarkable.

It evocatively uses the Swedish landscape to convey the characters’ psychology

as well as the film’s themes in a manner comparable to the silent classics of the

country’s director emeritus, Victor Sjöström. Its skeptical look at heterosexuality

(represented in the film by an unappealing male suitor played, again anticipat-

ing The Silence, by the ubiquitous Birger Malmsten), coupled with an out-and-out

celebration of the sexual bond between the two sisters, supports society’s claim

that the film is “explosive.” Importantly for today’s more assimilationist politics, in

which gay marriage seems the dominant issue of the era, the homosexual desire

presented in The Time of Desire represents a challenge to normative patriarchal

family structures. Most valuably, the film presents without judgment — indeed, it

Figure 1. Display advertisement for The Time of Desire, Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1957


celebrates — a relationship that breaks two of Western culture’s most recalcitrant

taboos. It thereby articulates a sharp alternative to the heteronormative oedipal

logic that has structured much of the classical cinema as well as many of the

social beliefs that have influenced the Freudian and post-Freudian periods.

Nevertheless, to brush aside Ermayne’s sincerely felt pleasure in watching

what she saw purely as a “treat” betrays the film’s spirit as well. Indeed, so many

of the film’s elements operate against the grain of the tragic impulse that it would

be fair to regard the film as a comedy, particularly a descendant of the boudoir

farce. Ultimately, focusing too fully on the film as either high art or low comedy

provides, at best, a partial understanding of the film’s unique character.

A brief outline might cause contemporary progressive readers to expect the

worst and assume The Time of Desire is little more than what the Ladder’s review

suggests: a shallow sex comedy. More distressingly, it can seem to be a comedy

characterized by dubious sexual politics. Focused on Lilly (Barbro Larsson) and

Ragni Lilja (Margaretha Löwler), attractive sisters who appear to be in their late

teens or early twenties, the film’s plot unfolds during a summer in which Ragni is

seduced away from her incestuous relationship with Lilly by Algot (Malmsten),

a young man with a disreputable past who has just returned to the country from

Stockholm.

As late as the 1990s, the theme of a sexually immature woman experi-

menting with homosexuality before settling into heterosexual “maturity” has been

commonplace in both mainstream cinema and pornography. The fact that The

Time of Desire offers a pat psychological explanation for the initial lesbianism,

in the form of the sisters’ untimely and seemingly traumatic loss of their mother,

further encourages suspicions about the film’s ideological position. But The Time

of Desire’s ending differs strongly from comparable narratives. After becoming

pregnant with Algot’s child and receiving a marriage proposal from the father-

to-be, Ragni realizes that she does not love him and ends the relationship. As

Variety puts it, Ragni “returns to her first love. . . . Finale has fire-and-brimstone

preacher, Ingemar Phallin gaze upon unconventional trio of sisters and illegitimate

child ride past the church, with remarkable tolerance.”32 This denouement alone

would place the film in a tiny group of progay or prolesbian films from its era.

In terms of its ideological perspective, The Time of Desire is best

approached through its transition from page to screen. Based on a 1935 short story

by Artur Lundkvist (1906 – 91) and published in his anthology Himmelsfärd,33 the

film finds in its source an obvious response to D. H. Lawrence’s 1922 “The Horse-

Dealer’s Daughter.”34 Lawrence’s melancholy tale describes a young woman who

finds herself engaged to a country doctor after he has saved her from suicide.


The seventeen-page story is genuinely disturbing, despite what one might mistake

as a “happy ending,” since Lawrence takes great pains to convey both the utter,

uncanny, implausibility of the characters’ suddenly recognized love for each other

and the unresolved, partially unarticulated forces behind the young woman’s rash

attempt at self-destruction. The story begins with the young woman, Mabel, and

her three brothers as they are forced to sell their family’s horse-trading business

and go their separate ways after their father’s death. Mabel’s brothers have encour-

aged her to move in with an absent sister, Lucy, whom the reader presumes moved

away earlier to raise her own family. For reasons left mysterious, however, Mabel

refuses. If Lawrence leaves Mabel’s feelings toward her sister opaque, he is clear

about her long-standing devotion to her dead mother. Just before her enervated

suicide attempt, Mabel visits her mother’s grave.

The account of this obsessively devoted daughter methodically attending

to the burial plot and gravestone is described in detail, but Mabel’s subsequent

suicide attempt is more briefly recounted. She is spotted by a young local physi-

cian, Dr. Fergusson, who, we are told, had previously given her little thought but

who now finds himself intrigued as Mabel moves through the fields toward a pond:

“She stood on the bank for a moment, . . . She never raised her head. Then she

waded slowly into the water” (317).

In the pages following Mabel’s rescue, Lawrence develops his theme.

Alone with Fergusson, the young woman awakes and realizes that she has been

undressed by the doctor while unconscious. Having an overwhelming and none-

too-pleasant epiphany, the heretofore (heterosexually) passionless Mabel begins

kissing and clinging to the doctor. Fergusson, although at first revolted, soon finds

the attraction to be mutual. “He had no intention of loving her,” writes Lawrence,

yet he finds that in some unaccountable way he does now love her. The story con-

cludes with Fergusson declaring, “I want to marry you . . . quickly — to-morrow if

I can” (325).

As romantic as the turn of events might have seemed, these final develop-

ments carry an undercurrent of dread, and since its publication, this account of

a woman’s traumatic entry into heterosexual “maturity,” one that hardly makes a

convincing argument for its psychic harmony, has inspired reams of analysis and

was clearly echoed on-screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).35 But whereas

the attempted suicide in Hitchcock’s film involves a romantically obsessed “Scot-

tie” (whose last name — Ferguson — echoes that of Lawrence’s hero) and a “Made-

leine” who is deceptively acting the part of a mother-obsessed potential suicide

victim, “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” presents its shift into heterosexual desire

more simply: as sudden, tragically essential, and inevitable. Like a newborn


infant, Mabel is literally delivered (and by a doctor!) from a womblike pond that

promised her an eternal place with her mother in death. For better or worse,

Fergusson “rescued her” from a feminine form of (non)existence into the realm

of patriarchal authority. While “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” is not a feminist

work, it cannot give any assurance or encouragement to readers looking for a vali-

dation of heterosexual romance. In Lawrence’s appraisal, the male-female couple

represents an unhappy compromise: one becomes reconciled to a life unlike what

one wanted, and only as the result of a sudden madness.

There can be little doubt that Lundkvist’s story, “Hästhandlarens Flickor

eller Varandras,” is a direct response to Lawrence. Like Lawrence, Lundkvist

focuses on a rural family of horse breeders, in which two daughters, having suf-

fered the much-earlier death of a deeply loved mother, are forced beyond mourning

into a form of adult sexuality. The titles are the most obvious connection between

the two, although even in this respect, Lundkvist offers a telling alternative. The

first two words of his title can be translated as “The Horse-Dealer’s Girls.” This

designation is plural, suggesting that Lundkvist might well have been wondering

about Mabel’s sister, Lucy, who is alluded to but absent, and that a tale like this

would be much more interesting if it focused on two daughters rather than one.

Furthermore, the fact that Lundkvist used the word flickor, which literally means

“girls,” rather than dotter, the Swedish word for daughter, suggests an identity

position outside family structures and obligations. Beyond those distinctions is

Lundkvist’s provocative subtitle, “eller Varandras,” dropped from the title of the

subsequent film but pertinent nonetheless. The film quite appropriately could have

carried the original title and been translated accordingly: “The Horse-Trader’s

Girls, or, Each Other’s.”

Having read Freud (along with Jung and Marx), Lundkvist was undoubt-

edly familiar with psychoanalytic theories positing a socially determined oedi-

pal process in which a child is obliged to give up her or his first love object, the

mother.36 Freud offered a newly complicated outline of his thinking about a wom-

an’s development in “Femininity,” which had been published in Scandinavia the

year before “Hästhandlarens Flickor” appeared.37 It is plausible that Lundkvist

was inspired to develop his revision of Lawrence’s story with Freud’s understand-

ing of “the abundance and strength of a little girl’s sexual relations with her

mother” in mind.38 But whereas Freud offered no alternative to a process in which

the pre-oedipal daughter is forced to turn her desires away from her mother and

toward her father before finally focusing them upon another man, Lundkvist offers

another possibility.


Unlike Mabel and Lucy, Lundkvist’s Ragni and Lilly function as mutual

support for each other. They may have found themselves torn from their mother,

but they maintain the love they had for her with each other (as Lundkvist’s title

proclaims) in a relationship that radically contrasts with Lawrence’s tragic deter-

minism. Lundkvist’s revision seems to come from his strong commitment to fairly

radical social values “that have been described,” according to Steven P. Sondrup,

“in terms of intoxication with life, primitivism, ecstasy, and sexual romanticism.”39

These themes, vastly influential within certain artistic movements of the 1920s

and 1930s, would reappear prominently in the late 1960s and 1970s in the writ-

ings of feminist scholars returning to psychoanalytic theory.

Picking up Freud’s ideas in “Femininity,” as Lundkvist seems to have

done, Luce Irigaray developed the implications of an infantile, incestuous les-

bian desire in her groundbreaking essay, “Body against Body: In Relation to the

Mother.” In constructing her argument, Irigaray reinterprets the Oedipus myth as

well as the murder of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia to suggest that much of male-

dominated civilization’s discontent comes from subtle, always disavowed forms of

guilt, shame, and confusion caused by Orestes and Electra’s formative matricide.

This, for Irigaray, is the origin of misogyny and the oppression of women through-

out the ages.

A civilization built upon matricide creates its own set of questions, par-

ticularly for the female subject. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan, Irigaray suggests

that the father replaces the mother’s “womb with the matrix of his language,” sac-

rificing the material body for “an empire of language that so privileges the male

sex as to confuse it with the human race.”40 Rhetorically, Irigaray wonders where

the traces of the long-forgotten, dead, and replaced mother might still be found:

“In what darkness, what madness, do they lie abandoned?” (15). For Lawrence,

they were in the cemetery where Mabel tends her mother’s grave, as well as in the

suicidal anguish that leads her from it to the womb/tomb of the drowning pool. Of

course, in a social order allowing no positive image of a maternal universe, any

trace of that dead mother is defined negatively. Irigaray explains,

And the relation to the placenta, that first home that surrounds us and

whose aura accompanies our every step . . . , how is that presented in our

culture? . . . the opening of the mother, the opening to the mother appear

as threats of contagion, contamination, falling into sickness, madness,

death. (15)


Lundkvist’s alternative scenario to this sickness, madness, and death would finally

be visualized in Holmsen’s film. These Swedish daughters, like their British sis-

ter, will go to a remote pond, but not to drown themselves. Rather, they swim and

make love joyfully.

Irigaray concludes her essay with a radical, if essentialistically formulated,

idea: because of the long-suppressed relationship between the bodies of mother

and child, “women always have an ancient and primary relationship to what is

called homosexuality” (19 – 20). This relationship finds an archetypal articulation

in the Swedish revision of Lawrence, presenting itself as a legitimate alternative to

the seemingly inevitable trajectory followed by Mabel. While Lundkvist’s version

offers clarity beyond that of Lawrence’s, it is Holmsen’s final account that takes

the story’s insight to its most radical point, since Lundkvist himself was not able,

in the end, to argue for a lesbian utopia. In his story, Ragni, like Mabel, remains

with her male suitor. Only in the film adaptation will she return to a permanent

position of bliss with her maternal sister.

In The Time of Desire’s first scene, following an establishing shot of a

horse ranch and its stables, Ragni suffers a nightmare. After she wakes, Lilly,

who shares her bedroom, hastens to console her. “At first it was all so marvelous,”

Ragni explains, describing her dream. “Mommy was still alive. She was holding

us by the hand and we were walking out along the drive, and suddenly she said

she was going to heaven.”41 At this point, they embrace in the first not-so-subtle

hint of the film’s doubly taboo-breaking project (fig. 2).

In a momentary distraction for the pair, their father’s attempt to sell a horse

can be heard offscreen. Referred to throughout the film simply by his last name,

Lilja, the father (George Fant) makes clear to the prospective buyer, Berg (Gösta

Bernhard), that he will not sell a prized mare cheaply. When Berg makes a low

offer, Lilja retorts, “What you want is a milk horse,” thereby connecting the film’s

maternal themes with its equestrian metaphor through an allusion to mother-

produced milk. Berg agrees to pay Lilja’s price, but only after warning the horse

dealer that he had better not be selling him what he refers to as another “crib

biter.” If the idea of a “milk horse” connects a mare with a mère, the reference to a

“crib biter” subsequently connects the maternal horse to an infant, suggesting the

possibility of being at once a child and a mother.

Up in the girls’ bedroom, the metaphors develop further as Lilly continues

to comfort Ragni by explicitly taking on a maternal role. “Be a good girl,” she

says, admonishing Ragni to stand still while she sews a button to her blouse. “Do

as Mommy says.” If this dialogue is embarrassingly explicit, Lilly’s actions are

only a degree less so. She bends toward Ragni’s breast and bites a dangling thread


from her blouse. Thus, from a relationship between a pair of “frolicsome” daugh-

ters to one of a sister who is also a mother, and from women to horses (potentially

both maternal and infantile) and back again, a surfeit of shifting, metamorphosing

metaphors suggests a strategy, both discursive and psychological, of constantly

changing roles and subject positions. But as it plays out, the film will not simply

offer a scenario in which a young woman functions as her sister’s deceased mother,

which, in and of itself, might constitute little more than a straight fantasy of neu-

rotic lesbian incest. Instead, it will suggest a new, fluid approach to identification

and subjectivity, celebrated in the film as a profoundly maternal and feminine

birthright.

In the subsequent scene, the community in and around Lilja’s ranch is

more clearly depicted, with the servants and farmhands characterized according

to traditional stereotypes. A middle-aged farmhand, named Charlie in the dubbed

version, gropes a younger, attractive maid only to be scolded by a woman of his

own age, who is seemingly his regular lover. If this scene perpetuates well-worn

clichés of an earthy servant class, subsequent sequences will suggest that the

Figure 2. Ragni and Lilly embrace in their room. The Time of Desire, Europa Film, 1954. Frame capture courtesy Motion Picture Department, George Eastman House


bourgeois/landowner class is itself erotically driven and that boundaries associ-

ated with class are, in fact, regularly broken, as Lilja engages in good-natured

consensual sex with a number of the female workers. When Lilja and Berg reap-

pear, having completed their transaction, the horse-trader’s daughters become sub-

jects of the conversation, with Berg suggesting that the young women will “make

good matches, when the time comes, for a couple of wealthy businessmen from

Stockholm.” To this, Lilja responds with a comment that seems utterly remarkable

within the film’s nineteenth-century setting. “Oh, that could be. They’ll decide for

themselves. You know what? I’ve never tried to tell them what to do.” Only a few

minutes into the film, then, a radical assertion has emerged in concert with the

theme of fluid identities. By connecting this horse-trader’s breedable chattel to

his potentially marriageable daughters, The Time of Desire points to a network of

oppressive economic and social structures that have stymied women across time

and across culture while simultaneously articulating a refusal on the part of the

film’s protagonists, father and daughters alike, to endorse such oppression.

“The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin’s classic consideration of both the

“political economy” of sex and the cultural construction of gender, could have

been written with the film in mind. Rubin argues that this economy and con-

struction are based on the maintenance of a series of taboos that The Time of

Desire challenges. Summarizing Claude Lévi-Strauss on the systematic exchange

of women in primitive societies, she posits “the incest taboo should best be under-

stood as a mechanism to insure that such exchanges take place between families

and between groups.”42 According to Rubin, the implications of overthrowing the

most basic of cultural taboos and abolishing obligatory heterosexuality and exog-

amy (and the concurrent taboo against incest) are not to be underestimated.

Since Lévi-Strauss argues that the incest taboo and the results of its appli-

cation constitute the origin of culture, it can be deduced that the world

historical defeat of women occurred with the origin of culture, and is a pre-

requisite of culture. If his analysis is adopted in its pure form, the feminist

program must . . . attempt to get rid of culture and substitute some entirely

new phenomena on the face of the earth. (176)

The primitivist Lundkvist might have welcomed such abolition, and the film

adapted from his story opposes a culture that would oedipalize women like Ragni

and Lilly.

One might argue that The Time of Desire offers a reactionary interpretation

of the pre-oedipal state, that it simply considers lesbianism to be an arrested state


of development. Ultimately, though, such a conclusion is in stark contrast to the

film’s spirit. If it repeatedly suggests a comparison between heterosexuality and

civilization, on the one hand, and lesbianism and untamed nature, on the other,

the film hardly does so in order to privilege the former over the latter. Eventually,

The Time of Desire offers an image of a new form of civilized, or at least civil,

lesbianism emerging from a sophisticated synthesis of order and nature: a differ-

ent Swedish “middle way” that, if noticed, could only have increased conservative

American animosity toward the sexually experimental country.43

This criticism of the social order is strongest in the film’s most commented

upon, and in many ways, most remarkable scene, one that, from another perspec-

tive, might have seemed to be its most disreputable segment: the sequence in

which the sisters swim naked in a country pond (fig. 3). It is this passage that the

Ladder highlights to argue for the film’s status as an erotic comedy, with “jamster”

sisters frolicking “a la buffniks,” but it actually becomes one of the film’s most

disturbing passages.

Figure 3. Lilly and Ragni kiss while swimming in a secluded pond. The Time of Desire, Europa Film, 1954. Frame capture courtesy Motion Picture Department, George Eastman House


Epitomized by an iconic moment in One Summer of Happiness (dir. Arne

Mattsson; 1951), scenes in which naked young women and men take to the waters

of a lake or a fjord were so commonplace in 1950s Swedish summer romance films

that they are as much a hallmark of the genre as a showdown at noon was in the

era’s Westerns. The Time of Desire’s example occurs after Lilly and Ragni have

left the ranch on horseback following Ragni’s nightmares and Lilja’s transaction.

Before arriving at their secluded swimming hole in the countryside, however, the

sisters must ride through town. There they pass a group of loafing, lecherous,

almost malevolent local men. Algot has yet to arrive in town to join the ne’er-

do-wells, but one man in the group, a brooding blond named Nisse (Nils Hall-

berg), already has his eyes on Ragni.44 Indeed, as soon as the sisters have passed,

he slips away from his friends and follows them. Here Holmsen sets up the first

of many visual juxtapositions, one of a series of comparisons that will continue

throughout the film and structure its meaning. While this scene does not offer a

contrast between nature and culture, one articulated later in the film, it is a juxta-

position that resonates strongly in concert with Irigaray’s thought. While the two

women swim in what Irigaray might well consider to be an embryonic pool, Nisse

spies on them from a shoreline characterized by violent rock formations.

Presenting a synchronic comparison between a feminine erotic fluidity and

masculine surroundings that seem both violent and petrified, the scene will even-

tually be matched by a pair of diachronic comparisons. Much later, when Ragni

succumbs to Algot’s overtures and makes love with him in a similarly private out-

door setting, it is not a pond that hosts their lovemaking but a dark cave. Thus a

new comparison emerges between primordial pool and cave — one prepared for

by the earlier comparison between the pool and its shore — that is reminiscent

of prehistoric man’s first shelter. While it suggests an evolutionary development

that might seem to be inevitable in its sense of historical “progress,” a profound

sense of trepidation, much like that found in the final pages of Lawrence’s story,

is present. In the cave, as Algot lies down with Ragni, the water motif previously

visible in the pond reappears. Now, however, it is in the form of rain dripping into

the cave in rivulets, suggestive of the tears of an earth mother forced to turn her

daughter over to a father’s demands.

To the director’s credit, the spectator is encouraged to take an unambigu-

ously antipatriarchal, antiheterosexist position. Holmsen shoots and edits the sis-

ters’ aquatic lovemaking so as to discreetly celebrate it while also managing to

denounce a traditional male gaze oriented toward voyeuristic pleasure. As Lilly

and Ragni swim among harmonious plant and animal life, the musical accom-

paniment remains idyllic, and the spectator is encouraged to enjoy the cinematic


voyeurism. But when Holmsen cuts back to Nisse watching from his hiding place

(tellingly surrounded by bare trees jutting from the jagged rocks), the score jars its

listeners with an eerie dissonance. Furthermore, an uncanny transition occurs in

the shot/reverse shot structure of the sequence, one that beautifully elucidates the

oppressive order against which the sisters rebel.

After a shot of Nisse (with his fishing pole jutting out in front of him),

Holmsen offers more idyllic images of the swimming sisters and the pond. Eventu-

ally, there is a dissolve back to the shore, accompanied by a particularly ominous

oboe on the soundtrack. But where one would expect to see Nisse again, he is now

absent. After returning to the pond and the sisters through a series of dissolves,

the spectator is suddenly faced with one of the most arresting images in the film.

We see an extreme close-up of Nisse’s staring eyes, superimposed upon an image

of the sisters’ vulnerable bodies in the water (fig. 4). As if articulating Lacan’s the-

ory of the ever-present gaze, and anticipating Laura Mulvey’s subsequent theory

of a masculine “look” built upon that gaze, the scene’s montage as a whole beau-

tifully juxtaposes maternal plenitude with a voyeuristic masculine/heterosexual

desire that seems as poisonous as it does ubiquitous. As the dark opposite of the

Figure 4. A superimposition shows Lilly and Ragni as objects of Nisse’s gaze. The Time of Desire, Europa Film, 1954. Frame capture courtesy Motion Picture Department, George Eastman House


dreamworld of the pond (virtually a visualization of Lacan’s “imaginary realm”),

Nisse’s position suggests the Lacanian “symbolic”: the realm of order and culture.

It is a realm presented here with an extreme sense of moral and sexual anxiety,

primarily for the spectator. As the film continues, with the pond waters turning to

rain while the harsh masculine land is replaced by images of a countryside that

seems to become increasingly cultivated and segmented, the workings of a civili-

zation born from this patriarchal “progress” will be exposed and challenged.

It makes sense within the cultural logic that Rubin delineates that Ragni’s

suitor comes from outside the provincial enclave of the film’s setting. Although

originally from the area, Algot’s return marks him as the kind of outsider required

for advanced kinship systems to form. Penniless and accompanied by rumors of

a criminal conviction in Stockholm, he is hardly the kind of man a father would

want as a son-in-law. But his arrival, immediately following the erotic interlude

between Ragni and Lilly, does evoke the structure of kinship, one reliant not just

upon the eradication of incest and homosexuality but upon the systematic practice

of an exogamy that works to spread kinship ties into expanded geographic regions.

Thus it seems logical for Nisse to encourage the visitor to take one of the commu-

nity’s young women for himself.

Nisse’s encouragement springs from personal motives, but they are less

clear than they initially seem. During the sequence in which Nisse spies on the

swimming sisters, the editing conveys his singular interest in Ragni. It comes

as no surprise, then, that he encourages Algot to seduce Lilly. Nisse is therefore

taken aback when Algot ignores his friend’s suggestion and focuses on Ragni.

What seems like a straightforward conflict between two men for the same woman

will bring up a number of curious, interlocking questions, each with their own

even more curious potential answers.

For instance, decades of casting choices, from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid

Bergman in Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz; 1942) to Grace Kelly and Gary Coo-

per in High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann; 1952), have made the blond/dark-haired

screen couple something of a norm in classical cinema. It seems so fitting that the

blond Nisse would be attracted to brunette Ragni and that the good-natured, dark-

haired Algot would gravitate toward the attractively blond Lilly, that when Algot

goes after the sister with similar, rather than complementary, features, it comes

as a bit of a shock. Beyond a mutual blondness, the actors Barbro Larsson and

Nils Hallberg each have rather long, angular faces, making Lilly seem virtually

a feminine version of Nisse. It hardly goes unnoticed then that Nisse is offering

Algot the gift of a woman bearing his own likeness. By romancing a woman with


his hair color, Algot suggests a lack of sexual interest in Nisse while also denying

his friend the sexual partner who most clearly resembles Algot.45

The force of this potential homoerotic/homosocial scenario also seems

to come from an unexplained rivalry between the two men. The moment Algot

arrives, Nisse regards his old friend with a curious ambivalence; the sudden smile

that crosses his face when he first sees Algot is terse. An obviously contentious

history between the two overshadows Nisse’s remarks to his friends as Algot walks

toward them: “Him and Paul and I were good pals. We used to have such good

times together, the three of us. Boy the girls we took out. Always drunk.” Later,

when we learn more about Paul Berger, the other member of the former threesome,

the mystery only deepens.

As the men walk into town, they approach a church, out of which come the

sounds of a singing congregation. When Nisse tells Algot that their Paul is now

the minister, Algot, with a glint of mischief in his eyes, leads the men into the cha-

pel. Paul (Ingemar Pallin), seeing Algot enter at the rear, is visibly shaken, and

the sermon he is delivering suddenly turns dark: “You must beware. Temptation is

always present. . . . You may find it at your own door. The devil is always trying to

extend his kingdom. A bad example has a dangerous power. . . . Evil can spread

among us quickly once it has entered our midst.” There is nothing in the sermon

suggesting past homosexuality between the three men is the “evil” to which Paul

refers, and it is ultimately a sign of The Time of Desire’s queer nature that one

never learns what “evil” might have led Paul to the ministry, Algot to leave town,

and Nisse to regard his return with such conflict. Since any explanation is pos-

sible, every explanation must be considered, and with this third man now shown

to be troubled by long-past events involving the three, the subsequent scene, in

which Nisse goads Algot to seduce a heretofore homosexually inclined woman, has

a darker meaning. Indeed, in order to pique Algot’s interest, Nisse explicitly tells

his friend that Ragni and Lilly are lesbians and challenges him to break up the

couple by suggesting that he doesn’t think Algot is “man” enough to do it. Finally,

linking this homosocial struggle with the more-advanced forms of circulation

involved in practices of kinship, Nisse suggests a financial wager. Algot agrees,

betting Nisse that he will be able to seduce one of the women.

For unspecified reasons, Ragni allows herself to be seduced by Algot that

next rainy day in the primordial cave.46 She slips out of bed and away from Lilly

to actively pursue him almost as soon as she realizes that he is interested in her.

Once Lilly learns of this, she follows the pair through the countryside and watches,

in romantic anguish, as Ragni and Algot seem to fall in love before her eyes. In a


shot/reverse shot sequence, Holmsen aligns the newly formed heterosexual couple

with civilization and the brokenhearted lesbian lover with untamed nature: Algot

and Ragni are photographed against a tilled field spreading out between a row

of power lines and a distant highway (fig. 5). In the reverse shot, Lilly is photo-

graphed against a background of wild foliage (fig. 6)

To cope with the shattering loss of her sister and lover, and, of course,

metaphorically, her mother all over again, Lilly joins Paul’s joyless congregation.

After Ragni’s capitulation to the homosocial matrix of capital circulation (presum-

ably Nisse paid Algot after losing the wager), another patriarchal triumph looms as

Lilly moves toward her own oedipalization in Lutheranism. In a vexing reminder

of her innocent water play with Ragni earlier in the film, Lilly turns her life over to

the ultimate patriarch by being baptized in a river. Coming out of the water follow-

ing her baptism, Lilly looks far from spiritually at peace and nothing like she did

when she emerged happily from the swimming hole with Ragni. She endures her

baptism on the verge of tears (fig. 7). Furthering the sad irony, Paul refers to her

with the same word Ragni would have used, saying, “Bless you, little sister.”

Figure 5. In a point-of-view shot from Lilly’s perspective, Algot and Ragni face an agrarian society. The Time of Desire, Europa Film, 1954. Frame capture courtesy Motion Picture Department, George Eastman House


By this point, a tragic conclusion to a process that has taken the specta-

tor from an Eden of maternal plenitude to the heartbreak of civilized patriarchy

seems foreordained. Lundkvist’s reimagining of Lawrence ended with Lilly and

Ragni separated and with Ragni and her child permanently in the arms of Algot,

but Holmsen allows patriarchy’s spell to be broken by having Ragni come to the

conclusion that subsequent generations of feminist theorists, Rubin, Irigaray, and

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others, would reach through intricate theoretical

arguments.47

After becoming pregnant, Ragni tells Algot, and like a true patriarch, he

welcomes the idea of fatherhood and suggests marriage. But before Ragni can

make a decision, or even fully absorb his reaction, Algot foolishly admits that

their relationship began, as he puts it, as “a bet between [Nisse] and me.” With

the sound of betrayal in her voice, Ragni responds: “Well, you showed them,

didn’t you?”

From this point on, the film inverts traditional gender stereotypes. A

woman tells her boyfriend that she is pregnant, and instead of having the man

Figure 6. In a reverse shot to figure 5, Lilly gazes at Ragni and Algot from the wild brush. The Time of Desire, Europa Film, 1954. Frame capture courtesy Motion Picture Department, George Eastman House


distance himself from her he remarks, “What I didn’t count on was that I’d fall in

love with you. And that’s what’s so wonderful because you’re in love with me too.”

Then, in a remarkable turnaround, Ragni stuns her male lover by replying that

she won’t marry him because she doesn’t love him. In a statement of surly self-

pity likely spoken in literature and film more often by women than by men, Algot

responds, “Maybe you just wanted a man and I happened to come around.” Then

the suddenly weakened and vulnerable man begins to cry.

As the film approaches its denouement, one final encounter between Ragni

and Algot makes a trenchant point about the centrality of motherhood, rather than

parenthood, as well as new forms of relationality in Holmsen’s implied future uto-

pia. As the two say good-bye sitting on a bench near the chapel (rejected by Ragni,

Algot decides to move back to Stockholm), Ragni continues to show herself as the

stronger, more independent person. “I know I’ve made you unhappy,” Algot tells

her, but Ragni responds: “You haven’t made me unhappy, not at all. . . . I’m not

ashamed to have a baby. It’s wonderful. And if you go away, I want you to know

that you’ve made me happy.”

Clearly, Ragni is being honest. Algot has made her happy, primarily by

Figure 7. Paul baptizes a despondent Lilly. The Time of Desire, Europa Film, 1954. Frame capture courtesy Motion Picture Department, George Eastman House


making her a mother, but also by indirectly helping her understand the nature

of her identity. She is a woman in a mother-daughter and now mother-daughter-

mother chain. As such, finally and most profoundly, she knows she is a woman who

loves women. As the film concludes, she returns to Lilly, telling her sister/lover, “I

guess you must have been lonely,” and “it’s all over now.”

There must already have been considerable laughter among the film’s first

queer audiences at the sight of the film’s male seducer reduced to tears over his

girlfriend’s happy return to her original same-sex relationship. It is the film’s pen-

ultimate scene, however, which propels it more fully toward the comic sensibility

that Laurajean Ermayne notes. After Ragni and Lilly have retired to their bed-

room, their father quietly ventures upstairs for a tryst of his own with a recently

arrived house servant. To his mild consternation, Lilja finds that she has already

partnered for the night with one of his own stable hands. As he rapidly changes

plans and moves toward the door of the second of the young female servants, his

chief stable hand ascends the stairs, apparently also in search of a woman’s com-

pany for the night. As the two men’s eyes meet, neither seems surprised to see the

other, as if such late-night adventures were common in this household. Decep-

tively motioning his stable hand toward the door of the already partnered ser-

vant, Lilja manages to clear the way to enter the bedroom of the other, presumably

still-uncoupled, woman. When the stable hand opens the first door and finds that

servant already engaged, he turns angrily toward Lilja, who roars with laughter.

Lilja then enters the second door, leaving his thwarted stable hand in solitary

consternation.

Audiences may not find this encounter as funny as Lilja does, but structur-

ally the scene allows The Time of Desire to conclude with its feet firmly planted on

comic ground. In doing so, the film pulls away from the tragic realm of so many

other pre-Stonewall films involving lesbian love. Instead, it offers the kind of rec-

onciliatory ending that has been the comic mode’s legacy since the Elizabethan

era. Furthermore, it contributes to a radical understanding of the dynamics of

family relationships across the generations, one shown in contradistinction to the

relationship between the same-generation family members, Lilly and Ragni.

In its dismissive review of the film, the New York Times moralistically

focuses on Lilja’s “successful pursuit of every female servant on the farm” and the

fact that “the widowed father more or less ignores” his daughters.48 From this per-

spective, the film can be said to offer a position on the intergenerational struggles

that seemed to characterize much of the era’s cinema, including Rebel without a

Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray; 1955) and Splendor in the Grass (dir. Elia Kazan; 1961).

Rather than suggesting that a father’s stronger involvement with his children would


solve many of the problems facing a disaffected new generation, however, the film

posits the opposite. This father comes across as a good father because he is, ironi-

cally enough, no father at all.49

To appreciate this aspect of the film, one must rely less on the Mattachine

Society’s critic, who considered The Time of Desire to be an art film, and more on

Ermayne, who celebrates “two frolicsome young jamsters” who “hug each other in

their nightgowns and disport themselves in the lake a la buffniks.” It is easier to

read the film today as a sex-positive exploitation movie, rather than a European

art film. The fact that the film, to some extent, eschews an identity as a work of

art cinema aligns it, in some ways, with “precivilized” (and thus antipatriarchal)

forms of relationality and perhaps with folktale traditions. None of this surface

“immaturity,” however, completely destroys the sense of The Time of Desire as a

work of literary and visual distinction.

An epilogue offers images that fit perfectly with a (probably more politi-

cally moderate) contemporary film arguing for same-sex parenthood. In it, we see

the sisters with what seems to be their, rather than just Ragni’s, new child. As

if defying busybody townswomen who predicted shame and unhappiness for the

unwed and “deserted” Ragni, the threesome take a Sunday carriage ride through

town and past a church service in which Lilly clearly has no remaining inter-

est. Looking out the window toward them, the still-ambiguous minister evokes his

namesake in his sermon. “As the apostle Paul says: ‘All of us have sinned. And all

have fallen short of God’s glory.’ ”

Cutting back to the carriage and a charming close-up of the infant, a spec-

tator can easily interpret Paul’s words queerly. As Lilly, Ragni, and the child can

no longer be considered a part of the minister’s congregation, Paul’s mention of an

“us” who have sinned can most accurately refer to the community rejected by this

radical family. And if that community has truly “fallen short of God’s glory,” the

glorious image of the child — whom it seems absurd to condemn with any notion

of “original sin” — represents a future utterly different from the one most moralists

would predict for such “illegitimate” offspring. Instead, the child can only repre-

sent a future in which a radical rethinking of maternity and homosexuality, as well

as a happily displaced patriarchy, can give birth to a new civilization far different

from the one previously preached about in church and in service to cultures of

patriarchal exchange.

The final moments of the film have a dark reversal in its more famous

“sister feature,” The Silence, which, despite its many insights and power, would

seem an appalling retreat if shown on a double bill following The Time of Desire.

If Anna, like Ragni, leaves her male lover behind, she also, unlike Ragni, leaves


her sister to die in solitude in a foreign hotel. Presumably, Anna’s deep self-hatred

and sexual ambivalence in Bergman’s film will direct her into other masochis-

tically driven heterosexual affairs, and she will never reconcile with the sister

she once loved. That Bergman’s vision remains in the film canon as a represen-

tation of human possibility (and for some, inevitable “human nature”), while

the film reflecting Lundkvist’s and Holmsen’s visions of another possibility (one

that, moreover, anticipates Irigaray and Rubin) has vanished, suggests a dis-

heartening defeat in a vital queer project: preserving a past that points toward a

better future.

Nevertheless, in an essay predating “Body to Body” and sharing with it a

utopian charge, Irigaray imagines a world that The Time of Desire’s denouement

posits as a possibility, one that can still, at the very least, be envisioned.

Exchange without identifiable terms of trade, without accounts, without

end. . . . Without a standard of value. . . . Where use and exchange would

mingle. . . . Where nature would spend itself without exhaustion, trade

without labor, give of itself — protected from masculine transactions — for

nothing: there would be free enjoyment, well-being without suffering, plea-

sure without possession.50

Seeming to sense how naive she might sound, Irigaray follows these

remarks with words offering a more nuanced possibility, one that may already exist

under our noses, just as The Time of Desire has existed unknown in our archives

for nearly half a century. These remarks suggest that we consider the film’s incest

as a metaphor for a kind of lesbianism that is every bit as radical as incest. They

suggest that we consider the film to be a fable of relationality celebrating incest

over exogamy. “Utopia?” Irigaray asks. “Perhaps. Unless this mode of exchange

has always undermined the order of trade and simply has not been recognized

because the necessity of restricting incest to the realm of pure pretense has for-

bidden a certain economy of abundance” (110). In other words, lesbianism, as a

metaphor for incest, has always offered the utopian vision of, not an arrested form

of development, but a refusal of a certain kind of development.

Feminists of the 1970s and 1980s said as much to a generation of students

and scholars. Artists and filmgoers once knew it, if more intuitively, as well, even

if their dream had to suffer under a pathologizing discourse yoked to the geopo-

litical struggles of a Cold War against which it could hardly flourish. But those

initial queer filmgoers seem to have known it with a more embodied sense of con-

viction. If mainstream reviews at the time were predictably quick to point out the


incestuous nature of the film’s central same-sex relationship in order to criticize

it, to dismiss it, or perhaps even to get off on it, it is remarkable that the Matta-

chine newsletter did not even refer to the incest as such. To it, The Time of Desire

was simply a “lesbian love affair with a happy ending.” In an era before the gay

rights movement became a profoundly assimilationist project, a queer spectator

must have seen the film’s incest to be so natural as to be unremarkable. Today that

alone seems to be a remarkable fact.

Notes

For their insightful assistance, I thank Douglas Crimp, Bill Nichols, and Sharon Wil-

lis, as well as the two anonymous readers of the original manuscript. I must also rec-

ognize the staff of the Rare Manuscript Collections at the Cornell University Library,

the Motion Picture Department at the George Eastman House (particularly Anthony

L’Abatte for his artful help capturing frame grabs from their archive print of The Time

of Desire), ImageOut: The Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival, and

the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Finally, I thank Caspar Andres for his assis-

tance translating Swedish-language documents.

1. “The Movie Scene,” New York Mattachine Newsletter, September 1967, 7 (emphasis

added).

2. Arthur Olick, assistant U.S. attorney, quoted in “Swedish Movie Is Seized by Customs

for ‘Obscenity,’ ” New York Times, January 19, 1968.

3. Don Kulick, “Four Hundred Thousand Swedish Perverts,” GLQ 11 (2005): 210.

4. I use the term queer throughout this essay positing a pre-Stonewall-era population

of filmgoers who, thanks to whatever nonnormative sexual identity they had, could

respond to both lesbian- or gay-themed cinema far more empathetically than could

the traditional heterosexual masculine spectator. While I do not deny the well-

articulated specifics of both lesbian and gay spectatorship positions, I do consider

such nonnormative positions to have been historically connected to the extent that

the films addressed in this essay could mean something analogous to each, something

fundamentally different than what they would have meant to a masculine heterosexual

spectator.

5. The phrase “discursive surround” is credited to Dana Polan in Barbara Klinger,

“Film History Terminable and Interminable,” Screen 38 (1997): 109.

6. Oesten Unden, “Sweden Won’t Choose Sides,” United Nations World, May 1948, 16.

7. Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjöld (New York: Knopf, 1972), 27.

8. Emery Kelen, Hammarskjöld (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 156.

9. New Yorker, “Like a Mirror,” April 18, 1953, 26.

10. Chesly Manly, “Swede Ok’d as Head of U.N.,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 1, 1953.


11. Quoted by Dal Mcintire, “Tangents/News and Views,” One 4 (December 1956):

21 – 22.

12. Kathleen Nott, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: A Private View of Sweden (London:

Heinemann, 1961).

13. Washington Post, display ad for Thirst, August 29, 1956.

14. New York Times, display ad for Monika, January 27, 1960.

15. Jenni Olson, The Queer Movie Poster Book (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004),

8.

16. L. de N., “Film Review: The Third Sex,” One 7 (October 1959): 18 – 19.

17. Four additional noteworthy Swedish films dealing with homosexuality are Hasse

Ekman’s Girl with Hyacinths (Flicka och hyacinter, 1950), Annelise Hovmand’s Sex-

tet (Sekstet, 1963), Vilgot Sjöman’s 491 (1964), and Mai Zetterling’s Loving Couples

(1964).

18. Bosley Crowther, “A Study from Sweden,” New York Times, April 22, 1947.

19. Melvin Maddocks, “Swedish Film at Brattle in N.E. Première,” Christian Science

Monitor, March 10, 1958.

20. Laurajean Ermayne, “The Sapphic Cinema,” Ladder 4 (April 1960): 7.

21. Roland Huntford, “The Noise over Bergman’s ‘Silence,’ ” Los Angeles Times, Decem-

ber 22, 1963.

22. Robin Richards, “Dramatic Arts,” Ladder 8 (June 1964): 8 – 9.

23. For feminist assessments of the film, see Joan Mellen, Women and Their Sexuality

in the New Film (New York: Horizon, 1973); Maaret Koskinen, Women in Film: An

International Guide, ed. Annette Kuhn with Susannah Radstone (New York: Fawcett

Columbine, 1991); and (most thoroughly) Marilyn Johns Blackwell, Gender and Rep-

resentation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997).

For queer discussions, see Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the

Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); and Raymond Murray, Images

in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video (Philadelphia:

TLA, 1994), 366. Robin Wood, although not yet out of the closet when he wrote about

it, offers an eloquent defense of The Silence and its depiction of Ester in Ingmar Berg-

man (New York: Praeger, 1969).

24. I programmed what seems to be the only public U.S. screening of The Time of Desire

since the 1960s for ImageOut: The Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festi-

val, which took place October 13, 2004, at the George Eastman House. The subtitled

print shown is archived at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The George East-

man House also archives a print of the English-dubbed version in its collection.

25. I have found a single brief mention of The Time of Desire in English later than the

1960s: Brian McIlroy, World Cinema 2: Sweden (London: Flicks Books, 1986), 83.

26. See Los Angeles Times, “New House Records Set by Swedish Opus,” August 9, 1957;

and Los Angeles Times, “Breaks Records,” August 13, 1957.


27. New York Times, movie listings, March 27, 1960.

28. Chicago Daily Tribune, “Swedish Film Banned Here as Too Sexy,” May 13, 1958.

The print of The Time of Desire at the George Eastman House also suggests censor-

ship, as footage of nudity and homoeroticism has been clumsily excised from it.

29. Untitled announcement, New York Mattachine Newsletter 5 (September 1960): 3.

Such a happy ending was as remarkable in a foreign film of the era as it would have

been in a Hollywood release. While the Production Code necessitated tragic endings

for “sinful” characters in films released under its authority, even the plots of produc-

tions beyond its influence often ended bitterly for queer characters. Within Swedish

national cinema in the Cold War era, the lesbian characters come to tragic ends in

Girl with Hyacinths, Thirst/Three Strange Loves, and The Silence.

30. New York Mattachine Newsletter, untitled announcement, 5 (October 1960): 4.

31. Ermayne, “Sapphic Cinema,” 7.

32. Kove, review of The Time of Desire (August 21, 1957), in Variety Film Reviews:

1907 – 1980 (New York: Garland, 1983), n.p.

33. Artur Lundkvist, Himmelsfärd: Noveller (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1935).

34. D. H. Lawrence, “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” English Review 34 (April 1922):

308 – 25.

35. Despite the obvious connections between Vertigo and “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,”

there seems to be no acknowledgment of the two stories’ connection in the consider-

able body of work on Hitchcock’s film.

36. Steven P. Sondrup, “Artur Lundkvist,” in Twentieth-Century Swedish Writers before

World War II, ed. Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams, vol. 259 of Dictionary of Literary

Biography (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2002), 148.

37. Sigmund Freud, Nytt i psykoanalysen: Nye forelesninger til innførelse i psykoanalysen

(New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis), trans. Kristian Schjelderup (Oslo:

Gyldendal, 1934).

38. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” (1932), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-

chological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1964),

22:121.

39. Sondrup, “Artur Lundkvist,” 147.

40. Luce Irigaray, “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” in Irigaray, Sexes and

Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 14.

41. Dialogue quotations have been directly transcribed from the George Eastman House

print.

42. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,”

Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review,

1975), 173. Rubin also reminds us that “the incest taboo presupposes a prior, less

articulate taboo on homosexuality” (180).


43. The commonly discussed idea of Sweden representing a middle way between fas-

cism and communism comes from the title of a best-selling book published before

World War II but revised and reissued to further popularity after the war: Marquis

W. Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way (1936; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press,

1947).

44. Variety’s review lists the character’s first name as Nils (the name of the actor who

plays him) in what is seemingly a mistake that has been repeated numerous times

since, right up to the current IMDb.com listing. In the film itself, the character is

referred to as Nisse and is so listed in the entry for the film in the Swedish Film

Institute’s national filmography. Svensk filmografi (Swedish Filmography) (Stockholm:

Svenska Filminstitutet, 1983), 5:401 – 3.

45. On the other hand, by choosing the sister who most closely resembles himself, Algot

gravitates toward a relationship, based in narcissistic desire, that has a very different,

yet equally homoerotic, component.

46. In a remarkable variation on the practice of employing the word strange to connote

queerness in pre-Stonewall culture, the U.S. advertisement for The Time of Desire

labels only the film’s heterosexual dalliance accordingly. Indeed, from a lesbian’s

perspective, the fact that Ragni unaccountably, if temporarily, “goes straight” mid-

way through the story might seem to be its only really inexplicable occurrence (see

fig. 1).

47. For the latter, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male

Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

48. Howard Thompson, “Screen: Swedish Sex,” New York Times, November 21, 1959.

49. I thank Douglas Crimp for this insight.

50. Luce Irigaray, “When the Goods Get Together,” trans. Claudia Reeder, in New French

Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 110.

Daniel Humphrey - One Summer of Heterosexuality: Lost and Found Lesbianism in a Forgotten Swedish...

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