The Threepenny Opera

As I was looking through some of the lists of best DVD releases of the year, I was disappointed not to see the criterion edition of G W Pabst's 1931 classic The Threepenny Opera. It is certainly one of the most important DVD releases of the year and should be on any one's list. For a long period of time it was available only in bad prints and worse, the original negatives of the film were thought to be destroyed, until last year when it was restored in Germany. This DVD is in turn taken from that restoration and it looks and sounds absolutely stunning. It has already become my favourite German film from that era, along with perhaps Fritz Lang's M.

The film has a very long, complicated and interesting production history. The original Threepenny Opera, the musical theatre written by Brecht with music by Kurt Weill, was a sensational hit in Berlin, and later all over Europe, when it premiered in the late twenties. G W Pabst acquired the rights of the film but by that time Brecht had revised his own play to make it even more didactic and politically incendiary. Pabst and his writer Bela Balazs had their own ideas about how the play should look like on screen and it differed drastically from what Brecht had in mind. They not only left out a lot of scenes and changed the sequences but also completely rejected Brecht's stage treatment of the play. Brecht was furious and he sued Pabst and his producers which he ultimately lost. Most probably Brecht never saw the finished film. He took it as another instance of the perfidy of the capitalist culture and the fate of artists in modern consumer society - an example of how a work of art is processed to make it fit for mass consumption and entertainment. Yet as the two scholars on the commentary track, and indeed many scholars elsewhere, show how completely unfair and even preposterous Brecht's complaints really were. In fact, in the beginning of the commentary track when the scholar-duo Eric Rentschler and David Barthrick announce that they teach German Studies, Film Studies and Theatre at Harvard and Cornell respectively I began to expect another deluge of jargons (like the scholars on the Pandora's Box commentary track who claim to have "worked" on the film from more than twenty five years) but they do a really great job in rubbishing Brecht's criticism and at the same time convincing that it is indeed basically a "Brechtian" work, if not in obvious style then at least in its intention and final effect.

Brecht of course condemned all theatre which was based on make-believe and unreflective and emotional involvement of audiences in the plot and characters. In order to deny the audiences any kind of direct involvement with what is happening on stage - acting, set design, lighting, dialogues - everything had to be designed and written in such a way to remind the audiences that what they are watching is really a work of artifice and not to trick them into believing the simulacrum is real. Now on the surface Pabst's Threepenny Opera does seem to reject this Brechtian notion of audience estrangement mainly because of its "realistic" and large-scale studio sets and the expressive camera movement which is as far removed from the static mise-en-scene of theatre as it can be. (The Cinematographer of the film was Fritz Arno Wagner, responsible for some of the most iconic images of German cinema like Max Schrek in Nosferatu and Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's M.) In the film the realistic sets actually create a distancing effect because the staging of scenes and the acting is anything but realistic. Many actors actually came from the original production and they understood the basics of a Brechtian acting style. The film also keeps the revised ending that Brecht had written in which the underworld criminal, the capitalist and the police officer all come together to run a bank in order to steal people's money "honestly." It is not surprising that the Nazi's didn't like this film and had it banned. Politically the message of the film is that of despair and pessimism. Just after the coming together of the rich, the powerful and the criminal, Pabst shows a group of poor beggars after their unsuccessful march to the queen disappearing into the darkness with Kurt Weill's music swelling on the background.

The best part of the film, in my opinion, remains the music and the songs. Unfortunately Pabst could only incorporate eight of the original 20+ songs into the story but all of them are really memorable and are used brilliantly. Besides the marvellous Mack the Knife, in which the street singer recounts and illustrates a bunch of hideous unsolved crimes committed by Macheath, there is Polly singing why he had to reject every offer of romance and settle with someone unromantic, also the pirate song sung by Jenny in which she dreams of terrible revenge on everybody. There is also Macheath and Tiger Brown reminiscing about their good old days of imperial adventurism in India. (Brecht's secretary Elizabeth Hauptmann, whose original translation of the English play The Beggar's Opera formed the basis of the text, took the song from Kipling.)

There is a lot more than can be said about the film but more of that later. Suffice to say that it is a vital, important and endlessly fascinating and provocative masterpiece. A very good article about the film here. Also, a review of the DVD and an article on the criterion site which goes in detail about the background history of the origin of the play.

Pandora's Box

There is a lot that can be said about Pandora's Box and Frank Wedekind's plays on which it is based. Indeed there are few historical periods of modern era more widely and extensively studied than the Weimar republic, specially its contributions to arts and culture. The criterion DVD has a commentary by two scholars of German cinema Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane who announce in the beginning that they have "worked" on this film for more than twenty years. (It is actually all downhill from there. When they are not rehearsing the obvious, they fall down into a cliche-ridden academese, which sounds more like a sequence of buzz words from the academic discipline of feminist culture studies (too much superficial talk about the "gaze," and "agency"). Anyway, I think there is enough on internet and in books for the curious and of course watching the film without all the historical and theoretical baggage is a very rewarding experience in itself.)

After watching the film I read the original plays by Frank Wedekind too on which it is based. Though not as good as Spring Awakening it still is an extremely provocative piece of work. The only problem with it is that it is too rambling, overlong and highly repetitive. The stage versions are generally highly edited to make it more manageable. The film prunes some of the episodes from the play too, and very wisely so I think. The play follows sequence of events in the life of the eponymous heroine "Lulu" as it charts her decline and fall from a high-society temptress and a kept-woman in Berlin to a prostitute walking on the foggy streets of nighttime London eventually meeting a grisly end by the hands of Jack the ripper. The end is not really a spoiler because in one of scenes in the beginning of the play itself Lulu admits that she longs to fall into the arms of a sex-murderer. It is actually far from a naturalistic play and those looking for plausible situations or characters will be a little disappointed. The narrative is overly deterministic and all the scenes are there just to drive home a point, even at the risk of feeling heavy-handed and unreal.

The individual scenes in the play mainly underscore Wedekind's central theme about the essentially destructive nature of human sexuality. Lulu is presented as an embodiment of amoral (or rather beyond-moral) sexuality which only serves to wreak havoc in the lives of everyone she comes across. In scene after scene there are deaths, ruin, suicides and murders. She never plays any active part in any of these, she is always passive (that's what makes her different from a standard femme fatale). It is as if she destroys everything just by her very presence. Unlike traditional femme fatales her amorality is not calculative but entirely natural and un-self-conscious. It also helps that Louise Brooks, who is absolutely extraordinary in the role, is so different from the traditional image of femme fatale as portrayed on screen by the likes of Marlene Dietrich or Barbara Stanwyck. No offence meant for the fans of the either of the two (at least among the latter I include myself) but this role could only be played by Brooks. In fact Dietrich was initially considered for this role (a few years before The Blue Angel actually). With Dietrich it would have been a very different film altogether.

It is mainly because of Brooks that the film version of Lulu becomes a much more interesting character than she is in the play. Unlike in the play, in the film she is both, an abstraction and a very real and alluring figure, both at the same time. The film also departs in very fundamental ways in the final scene with the Jack the ripper. In the play it is a grand guignol scene, with shock, horror and brutal violence, while in the film it is a very moving and tragic scene. Jack is shown as a kind of tragic figure who struggles hard against his temptations when he is with Lulu but ultimately fails. There is also no gore, no blood - everything happens offscreen, all shown in a very indirect manner.

My only gripe with the film version vis-a-vis the play was the way it gives short shrift to the character of Countess Geshwitz. In the play there is an extensive subplot about her unrequited love for Lulu which is quite explicit in its portrait of lesbian sexual attraction, specially for its time. The film very disappointingly shifts her to the margins of the story, alongwith the whole lesbianism subplot which is barely noticeable. It is specially disappointing because otherwise the artists of the Weimar era are renowned for their revolutionary ideas about gender and sexuality.

Pabst instead adds a scene in the end showing the salvation army on Christmas which is not in the play at all which ends on a very hopeless note. It is as if he is saying that the only hope lies in somekind of desexualisation of the world as represented by Christmas and the Salvation army. Interestingly the original version of the film was deemed too shocking for the American audiences so they reedited the intertitles to show that Lulu herself joins the salvation army in the end! Now that would be a real optimistic and happy ending!

There's a lot of stuff to read about the film. For starters an essay here.