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Baal As an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play (first written in 1919 but revised several times after that), Schlöndorff’s 16-mm television film Baal (1969) is a bow to German cultural tradition and in particular to the anarchism of late expressionism and Weimar culture. Drawing once again from the stylistic approaches of the French New Wave, Baal unites these German and French sources to map a path forward to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. The film is at once a highly literary presentation of the Brecht text and an exploration of the newer, freer film vocabulary that had emerged from the international young cinema movements of the 1960s. The film follows Baal, a young, ingenious, and unstable poet-balladeer with a scandalous zest for life, love, and liquor, through multiple sexual encounters and cruel, shocking personal adventures that end with his premature death. Baal qualifies as a male counterpart to Frank Wedekind’s Lulu—equally manipulative , equally fascinating to both sexes, but more dissolute, depraved, deviant, and even outright criminal. In normal narratives, Baal would be a villain, but the character acquires quasi-mythical dimensions and associations to French poets François Villon and Paul Verlaine. The hero becomes a kind of hedonist demigod who reverts to simple mortality as his lonely death approaches. In the role of Baal, Schlöndorff cast Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose strident productions had made him a controversial figure in the Munich underground theater. Brecht for Hippies One motivation for Schlöndorff to adapt Baal appears to have sprung from the comparable sense of hedonism and anarchism that the youth culture of the late 1960s shared with Brecht’s figure. Brecht’s Baal is a hippie before his time, a dropout who both profits from and disdains middle-class society. The 7 78 updating is a natural one, for the spirit of the time had given the play new relevance . The New Left of the student protesters and their intellectual sympathizers , including filmmakers like Schlöndorff and Fassbinder, was discovering Brecht and adopting him as one of its political and cultural father figures. In the special case of Schlöndorff’s adaptation we can, however, trace the specific affinity for the young poet-bard Brecht, the anarchist of 1919—as opposed to the late 1920s doctrinaire Lehrstücke didacticist and the mature post–World War II playwright. A play like Baal, much like Schlöndorff’s A Degree of Murder, could thus be shocking to both the puritan Old Left and traditionalist conservatives . It radiated the sensualist vibes of the 1960s counterculture. Thematically, this shock value makes the film Baal a logical extension of both A Degree of Murder and Michael Kohlhaas. In terms of style and production values , however, the Brecht adaptation represents a venture into ultra-low-budget filmmaking. Schlöndorff has commented on this change: I wanted to get out of the structures of the film economy after I had just failed with the large-scale American production of Michael Kohlhaas. In protest I shot Baal with a hand-held 16mm camera, almost with a lay cast, without recognized actors— Fassbinder was not yet a known quantity. (“Nett” 102) It was a change made possible by the structures of West German public television in the late 1960s. Schlöndorff’s film becomes an exemplary document from German television history. Since the establishment of the West German noncommercial television network of ARD in the 1950s, theater-oriented programming, whether live or filmed, constituted nearly 65 percent of its scheduled fiction broadcasting (Canaris 184–85). Into the 1960s, only the middle class, the social stratum favoring the theater, was able to afford expensive PAL-format television sets; hence, theater adaptations remained a West German specialty. Catering to a select audience that had doubtless sampled Brecht on stage, such programming could also include the daring language of Baal. Schlöndorff saw this production as occupying a kind of middle ground between cinema and theater. He stated, “It is neither staged and performed in such a way that it also could take place on stage (as is the case with the usual television play) nor filmed in such a way that it could fill movie screen and house, but rather at best a living room” (Baal press materials 4). The production of Baal is a fascinating and deliberate antiestablishment experiment. The presence of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the lead—a figure Baal 79 who has always embodied a blend of...

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