Brechts Kuhle Wampe: An Expression of Communism in the Weimar Republic

1 . Cf. especially the complementary comments on the misuse of sound and film in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory OfFiIm(NY, 1960) and Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film (NY, 1960) Grierson's argument for the social consciousness and social presence implicit in the film process is accessible in F. Hardyed., Grierson on Documentary (Berkeley, 1966) and the Rotha, Road and Griffith, Documentary Film (London, rev. ed.,., 1968). Both themes are developed briefly in John Howard Lawson's Film: The Creative Process (NY, 1967). Insights to the film process and the viewer's participation, even before the advent of sound, are suggested in Hugo Muensterberg's 1917 The Film: A Psychological Process. trns. recently by R. Griffith (NY, 1970). Refer also to the remarks of C. H. Roads and J. Grenville in the introductory remarks to the AHA presentation, which precedes this essay as "Film as Document." 2.The notes and graphs ofthe 1948 collections known as Film Form ant Film Sense are well known for their attention to these relationships. In 8 sketch printed recently in Notes of a Director, trns. by X. Danko (NY: Dover Paper, 1970), p. 156, Eisenstein describes more directly than elsewhere the relationship: "As a rule, Prokofiev and I bargain long and earnestly over 'which is to be first': whether he should write music for unedited pieces ofrepresentation which would then be edited accordingly, or would I complete the montage ofa scene first and have music afterwards. This is because the first has a more difficult task to solve: he must determine the rhythmic course of the scene." 3.Cf., Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley. 1971) p. 18 for a comparison of soul sound and the visual in the thinking process. 4.The viewer's awareness of separate orders of time and space rests on his perception of the similarity and contrast of shapes and sizes. Arnheim, Visual Thinking, pp. 274-283 refers to the model ofcognition as the mind circumscribing boundaries to an indeterminate ground. The meanings for the film process are suggested later when he discusses examples ofpeoples unexposed to film as demanding direction in order to comprehend the unique spatial and temporal relationships of film, for example, the necessity for a gradual zoom in order to indicate the relationship of a Jump cut between medium shot and close-up. Cf. also, Dracauer'a and Lawson's reference to the "indeterminancy" of film, op. cit. Slavko Vorkapic, "A Fresh Look at the Dynamics of Filmmaking," American Cinematographer (February, 1972), p. 182, refers to the "antipodal dimensions" of film and the "notation" of film order as lying in the craftsmanship itself. 5.Eisenstein indicated nine montage situations in Film Form and Film Sense, based on triads of the visual, sound and perception. Typologies may be created, however, according to the mutual emotional fields of filmmaker and filmviewer. BRECHT'S KUHLE WAMPE: An Expression ofCommunism in the Weimar Republic by David Schoenbaum Brecht's experience with the film was not, so far as we can tell, a very happy one. Pabst's film version ofThe Three penny Opera ended with a ferocious damage suit-by the indignant author. A projected film version ofMother Courage in East Berlin in the early 50's, this time with the author in charge, ended with the exit ofthe indignant director. At least by comparison, Kuhle Wampe (1932) must have been a success. In any case, there seems to be no evidence to the contrary, and Brecht himself reminisced happily enough about it in an interview published posthumously in East Berlin in 1958. It was, ifnothing else, the only Communist film produced in the Weimar Republic. It also showed with some success — and, by that time, the thoroughly misleading title Whither Germany? -in the United States. 22 The producers had the supplementary satisfaction ofgetting their products past an attempted ban — presumably by the authoritarian Papen government - and the reservations ofthe Prussian censor. According to Brecht's biographer Martin Esslin, the government took exception to the film's disrespectful treatment ofpublic authority. There was the implied connection between the young worker's suicide and the latest presidential austerity decree. There was the magistrate authorizing eviction ofthe suicide's...