Queer Derailment and Pederast Adoration in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael (1924)

Some critics of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael (1924) have cast the queer bond between the title character and the master painter Zoret as too frail to warrant a queer designation for the film. Especially Zoret's paternal commitment to Michael in conjunction with Michael's rejection of his guardian in lieu of a romantic relationship to an impoverished Russian aristocrat, Zanikow, was seen as cause to doubt queer aesthetic commitments in the film's narrative. Drawing on scholarship on queer phenomenology, queer failure, and pederasty, this article contends that there is a great deal of queerness residing in the film. It reads Zoret's ardent regulation of Michael's unideal behavior as a response to living life queerly in Weimar Germany in order to show how the paternalistic commitment is in line with pederast adoration, a relational dynamic that also gives access to other queer personal histories embedded in the film.