Communism Goes to the Movies... but the
Nazis Shut Down the Theater
Bertolt Brecht and Kuhle Wampe or To
Whom Does the World Belong?
Importance of cinema in the
- Before 1914, limited audience, bad technology
- Post-1918, huge improvements in quality of film
- Mass entertainment
- Theaters with 1600 seats
- In
- In
- German production competes with American imports
Charlie
Chaplin auf Deutsch
Fire up your netflix queue! Sit back,
relax, make some microwave popcorn, and enjoy some great
Experimental
films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)
Film's about female sexuality like G.W.
Pabst, Pandora's
Film's about the pleasures and dangers of
the cabaret, Josef von Sternberg, The Blue Angel (1930) (starring Marlene Dietrich)
And film's about the pleasures and
dangers of all-girls' schools, like Leontine Sagan, Mädchen in Uniform
(1931) (the actress on the right is Anni in Kuhle Wampe, Herta Thiele)
Communists understand power of this new
medium
Willi Münzenberg, "Conquer
Film!" (CR, 70-1)
- “Ferdinand Lasalle (late nineteenth century German
Social Democratic leader) characterized the press as a new major power.
The same can be said today of film. Indeed, in a few countries film has
perhaps already achieved a grater signifiance than the press.”
- Quoting from Clara Zetkin, another socialist turned
Communist, says that they must
“Film should reflect social reality instead of the lies and fairy tales about it with which the bourgeois mass cinema deludes and defrauds the working people….
The film with revolutionary content must therefore conveyknowledge of the class situation of the proletariat, develop proletarian class consciousness, awakn and strengthen resolve and the willingness to sacrifce for the revolutionary struggle.” - Münzenberg: Film “like the capitalist press, film too
will be used quite consciously by big capital for purposes of advertising
and brainwashinging the broad masses.”
Extraordinarily high costs of film
production: Constraints on who can afford to be a maker
- High degree of concentration in limited number of
production companies
- Concentration of media--film production, distribution,
newspapers, newsmagazines, radio, cinemas--in few hands
- Alfred Hugenberg, right-wing backer of Hitler is one of
the major media moguls
- Kuhle Wampe or To Whom Does the World Belong?
- How does the left compete? Only with difficulty
- Brecht enters into a collective, draws on
non-professional actors, makes use of Communist youth organizations
The story:
- Young Bönike rides through
- He comes home to a father who blames him for his fate
- His sister, Anni, joins the family for a tense dinner
- Young Bönike jumps out of the window, committing
suicide, but only after carefully taking off his wrist watch
- The family is evicted, and Anni walks the city,
unsuccessfully looking for an apartment
- The family finds a home in Kuhle Wampe, a
squatters' tent community on the outskirts of
- Anni gets together with Fritz, also a worker,and when
she gets pregnant, but he backs out of his promise to marry her
- Anni leaves--Fritz and her family--and moves in with a
friend who is active in a KPD sports league
- There is a very long sequence in which we see young
Communists preparing for a sports competition, then the competition itself
- Fritz shows up at the sports competition, he too sees
the light shinging from the KPD, and it looks like he and Anni will get
back together
- On the way home from the competition, Anni, Fritz, and
other young workers engage in a lively debate with middle class people in
their tram car. The subject is the price of coffee on the world market.
A poster
advertising the film
Anni, her
brother, and the mean, mean father and oppressed mother
So what's so great about this grainy
black and white movie that ends with a fifteen minute debate about the price of
coffeee on the world market?
- Technical innovation
- Use of montage, drawn from Soviet filmmakers
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- Montage: Use of many different pieces, songs, camera
jumping from one scene to another, unusual camera angles, documentary like
footage (
- Look at shooting script: See how often the scene
changes; explicit calls for close ups of hand; script on a wall plaque
- Explicit attempt to use dramatic film--not
documentary--to convey unambiguous political message
Too much for the censors:
- Charges that it defames the state by implying that
welfare cuts contribute to suicide
- The censor (according to Brecht, for a research paper,
I'd want to find the original source, not Brecht's account):
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The suicide
"does not seem human enough. All you have shown us is a man whom we can
safely say is a stereotype. Your jobless man is not a real individual, not a
flesh and blood man, unique from all other men, with particular sorrows and
particular joys and, in the final analysis, with a particular destiny. His
characterization is totally superficial, and you will excuse me as artists
for stating strongly that we are told too little about him. His actions are
merely used to make a political statement which compels me to protest the
film being approved. Your film tends to represent suicide as typical, not
merely as the measure of one abnormally disposed character, but rather as
thefate on an entire social class! You contend that society drives young men
to suicide in that it denies them the opportunity to earn a living... No,
gentlemen, you have not behaved as artists, not here. No one would have been
able to prevent you from showing the shocking destiny of one single
individual, but that was not what you were concerned with." (CR, 82) |
Brecht's response: "He had penetrated
far deeper into the essence of our artistic intentions than had our kindest
critics."(CR, 83)
And elsewhere: "We had the
unpleasant impression of being caught red-handed." (quoted in Brecht on
Film and Radio, ed. Marc Silberman [
- Footnote: Not a hit in the
- A very short run before it and Brecht were run out of
- Brecht will end up in US, then in front of the House
Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s (Click here to hear excerpts from his testimony, you can
hear Brecht's actual voice), then he came back to Communist East
Germany
How I spent my summer vacation: Another
snap from a visit to
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And a tribute to Brecht: Ready to
Singalong? Song of the United Front
If you had sung it after January 1933,
chances are you might have been beat up or arrested
What went wrong? How do we get from the
dreams of
- A very short version that I wrote for a collection of
documents on the Nazis (not required, but if you want a slightly longer
version that I can offer in the time that remains and another take on what
you learn in the Britannica reading)
- We already know, 1918, collapse of authoritarian regime
- Democratic regime plagued by problems
- Universal opposition to Treaty of Versailles
- Political and economic instability of early 1920s
- Kapp Putsch, left-wing putsch attempts, Hitler's
"Beer Hall Putsch," inflation and then hyper-inflation
- Amazing the
- And Nazis barely making an impact
- Nazi electoral breakthrough in 1930s
- Significance of the Great Depression
- Soaring levels of unemployment on which Kuhle Wampe
comments
- Nazis and Communists both criticize the "Weimar
System"
- For Nazis, "Weimar System" includes artistic
experimentation: All the art we've looked at is a symptom of the disease
- Trouble putting together a parliamentary majority in a
multi-party system
- And the Nazis
perfect their stump speech(es): Different messages for different
audiences, the Nazis know about rhetoric
- Enter Hitler