Double Take: Béla Balázs and the Visual Disorientation of G. W. Pabst’s Dreigroschenoper

To call Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper a smash hit is an understatement. Despite a notoriously empty house on the night of the premiere in 1928 and mixed first reviews, the piece has become one of the most well-known pieces of twentieth-century drama. In its first season there were over fifty new productions (Hinton 50). The original production enjoyed a multi-year run in Berlin (first at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, then at the Komödienhaus theatre). In addition to the drama itself, a Dreigroschenfieber gripped Germany. Universal Edition, Kurt Weill’s publisher, released numerous versions of the music. Records were produced, a Dreigroschen-Keller pub opened in Kant Straße in Berlin, and one could even acquire Dreigroschenoper-themed wallpaper (57–58). Nero Film AG acquired the rights to film Brecht and Weill’s smash hit in 1930. The wild success of the stage production provided motivation enough for a film contract, and the musical aspects made it all the more appealing to production companies looking to exploit the new potential sound film provided. Yet the introduction of sound coincided with a catastrophic economic downturn. Over the course of 1928 to 1933 – that is, over almost exactly the time frame of this adaptation – cinema admissions dropped roughly one third (Ross 41). An adaptation with such wide appeal must have seemed a promising investment for Nero Film AG in times of such economic turmoil for the film industry.

What the company, and director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, did not expect was that this adaptation would be maligned for decades to come. From initial reviews to later scholarship, one review after another lambasted Pabst’s film as a “romantisierte Fassung” (Knopf 64) that “violates Brecht’s conceptions of epic theater” (Horak). Given this historical and critical context, Thomas Elsaesser writes, “To write about Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera [. . .] is to venture into a minefield of received opinions” (103).

This article seeks to tread this minefield while also introducing a new tool in the interpretation and reception of Pabst’s much-maligned film. While the debate surrounding this adaptation has questioned the film’s epic and Brechtian aesthetics, I would like to approach the film and its aesthetics from the perspective of another, often overlooked Marxist cultural critic of the Weimar Republic, Béla Balázs. Although Brecht and Balázs moved in the same social, artistic, and political circles in Berlin during the 1920s, and although they shared a number of biographical affinities, the two seem to have never worked together directly (see Petrie concerning their similar biographies). In 1930 Balázs released his second book of film theory, Der Geist des Films, shortly before being called upon to aid in writing the shooting script for Pabst’s Dreigroschenoper. Balázs’s theoretical considerations, as they concern the relationship between film and spectator, inform a reading of this film that at specific moments undermines the oft-discussed and impressive mise en scène to reveal an epic undercurrent to this film’s visual economy. The recurrence of reflected images in mirrors and glass develops into a visual leitmotif of spectatorial deception and spatial disorientation. Such visual disorientation purposefully undermines the conventions of narrative film. In subverting filmic conventions, Die Dreigroschenoper causes an explicit engagement with the layers of images before the spectator, including the very surface of film in a self-reflexive gesture that makes the spectator aware of spectating. Given Balázs’s unique theoretical considerations of the spectatorial experience of film – as will be outlined below – such moments cannot be overlooked. Elsaesser has already argued that “Pabst concentrates on the duplicity of representation itself, and of filmic representation in particular” (107). I will argue that Elsaesser’s focus on the duplicity of filmic representation, a common reading of this film, must be further extended and analysed, as such readings do not include theoretical considerations of the self-conscious consumption of film by spectators. Such self-conscious consumption of theatre as illusion is a key aspect of Brecht’s epic aesthetics and is inscribed in...