Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
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Monday, 22 October 2007
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: Hitler: A Film from Germany
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, with
Heiner
Müller, was one of Brecht's most talented pupils, and nowhere is this
more evident in his 1977 film Hitler: A Film from Germany, which
will receive its first U.S. DVD release tomorrow. The seven-hour film (in
four parts, originally made for television) is a unique document, an essay
about the simultaneous rise of the modern totalitarian state and the
emergence of technological mass-media; in some ways it out-Adornos Adorno.
Susan Sontag called it "The most extraordinary film I have ever seen," and
most viewers will share that conclusion.
It is not an easy film to watch; broadly presentational rather than representational, it's neither documentary nor fiction, but a long meditation on the means by which mass media has served the evolution of the democratic nation-state into a totalitarian playground, manipulated by the compelling, moving film-and-video image and those who control it. Syberberg examines the ambivalent nature of German Romanticism, especially as it emerged in the operas of Wagner (Syberberg's film of Parsifal muses further on this nature), to simultaneously affect both the fascist and the democratic mind. The film is in 22 scenes or "tableaux" set on a soundstage, rear-projections serving as landscapes before which the detritus of twentieth-century history is lovingly handled and considered by the fine performers, especially Peter Kern. Hitler emerges as a man, but also as a face stuck on a girl's doll and a ventriloquist's dummy (who speaks through Hitler?).
At its price (the film is available now through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore), it may be a while until I can get to it again, but many of its images haunt me nearly 30 years after I'd first seen it. I'll look forward to seeing it again. I wrote about it in 2003 for the original Superfluities blog; my short notes on the film are below.
Ladies and gentlemen, now that we're rid of the Kaiser and God -- off we go.
The Song of Songs, the greatest story ever told. Let's give him his chance, let's give ourselves our chance. Taboos, this show's about taboos. The greatest show of the century, big business, the show of shows ... No human story, but a history of humankind, no disaster film, but disaster as a film. The end of the world. Deluge, the cosmos biting the dust.
So announces a circus barker at the very beginning of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany. After five years of preparation, shot on a single soundstage in four weeks on a $500,000 budget, the seven-hour-plus film infuriated audiences around the world and finally infuriated American audiences when Francis Ford Coppola financed a roadshow tour in 1978/1979, needlessly nailing home the point in retitling the film Our Hitler, which was its title when I saw it at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre for the first time.
Filmmakers had dealt with Hitler and the Holocaust before, of course. The television series Holocaust dates from the same period; a few years before, Alec Guinness(!) had starred as Hitler in a docudrama about the dictator's last few days in a Berlin bunker. But except for Susan Sontag's essay on the film, reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn, the work slipped out of sight following its late-1970s run.
That may have been its destiny. Hitler: A Film from Germany is an attempt to divorce Hitler and the Third Reich from a simple narrative and historical summation through a marriage of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and the Brechtian alienation effect, an unlikely alliance but a profitable one: Film as the art form of the 20th century, the epic theater providing its principal dramaturgical devices. "I made the aesthetically scandalous attempt," Syberberg explained, "of combining Brecht's doctrine of the epic theater with Richard Wagner's musical aesthetics, of linking the epic system as anti-Aristotelian cinema with the laws of the new myth."
Hence a circus metaphor; hence depth through duration; hence the episodic quality of the film. Hitler: A Film from Germany is a long series of monologues, film clips, puppet shows and tableaux, motifs emerging and re-emerging from episode to episode. Syberberg's most fascinating technique is to strip even these devices of their ability to enchant by laying them bare as cheap circus tricks. The "puppets" (no more than dolls, really, of Hitler, Goebbels and other historical and symbolic figures) are clumsily manipulated and their lines spoken on-screen by live actors. Even the device of quotation is exposed. In "Part I: The Grail," Austrian actor Peter Kern, costumed and made-up as Hitler (though Kern's considerable girth undermines the illusion of impersonation), delivers the final monologue of the child sex murderer in Fritz Lang's 1933 film M. Kern's delivery is overdramatic, like Peter Lorre's; Syberberg's parallel explicit; but in this shameless theatricality he makes the ease of narrative suspension-of-disbelief ambivalent. We must ask ourselves: What are we watching here? Any film student sees the cultural significance of M to inter-war Germany; what does it mean to make this significance over-explicit in post-war Germany? Does it make our interpretation of M (and, for that matter, Hitler the film and Hitler the figure) easier, or are we made to face our mythologizing tendency to distance our most unpleasant natures from ourselves as observers?
The film is now available on the Internet at Syberberg's Web site. It is a chamber opera, in many ways, demanding intimacy, and so works better on the small screen of television (and the computer monitor), perhaps, than it does on the large screen of the Walnut Street Theater. Until an enterprising American distributor sees his way clear to releasing the film on DVD, it's the best we can get now, but it's far more than we've had since the film dropped from sight in the early 1980s.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Film
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Tuesday, 09 October 2007
G.W. Pabst: The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera. Directed by G.W. Pabst. Screenplay by Bela Balazs, Leo Lania and Ladislaus Vajda, from the play by Bertolt Brecht. Songs composed by Kurt Weill. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. Edited by Hans Oser. Art direction by Andrej Andrejew. With Rudolf Forster (Mackie Messer), Carola Neher (Polly Peachum), Reinhold Schunzel (Tiger Brown), Fritz Rasp (Peachum), Lotte Lenya (Jenny) and Ernst Busch (The Street Singer). Germany, 1931. Running time: 105 minutes. DVD released through The Criterion Collection and available now through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore, as is the Manheim/Willett translation. The Kurt Weill Foundation maintains this Web site with an extensive background and history of the play.
What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank? – Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
The streets and buildings are carved
from stone and eerily lit in G.W. Pabst's 1931 film of The Threepenny
Opera, available now from The Criterion Collection in a new
restoration. Designed with more than a glance to Expressionism, the film
retains the identification of Victorian London with Weimar Berlin; the
camera sinuously snakes, like Mackie Messer himself, through the
alleyways, basements and offices of the urban landscape. This is, easily,
a true black-and-white underworld. Mackie himself, while dapper and
well-dressed, is a rapist, arsonist and murderer; the whores are given the
most lush accommodations among the characters of this world. As Brecht
wished (despite a lawsuit he instigated to stop the film), it's no longer
the fun romp through a Guys and Dolls ambiance that it had become,
but an incisive critique of the bourgeois world, and it also retains the
sweet aura of desiccated sexuality that permeated the German theatre and
culture of the time. (Neher's Polly, through the first half of the film
wearing a tight, bright white wedding dress that seems to glow, is a
fetishistic object of false innocence and becomes, at times, even a more
central character than Macheath; this provides an echo of the tormented
sexuality present in Brecht's early plays like Baal, Drums
in the Night and Edward II.)
There are other ways, too, in which it's not the Threepenny Opera with which we're most familiar. Only half of the music is retained (most sadly, the "Tango-Ballad" in which Macheath and Jenny describe, in song, the circumstances surrounding the abortion of their child was dropped, for fear of censorship problems, early in the production process); the plot elements are rearranged and shifted, and, rather than a near-hanging, the film now ends with the four principal characters founding a bank. Mackie himself is a middle-aged, graying Rudolf Forster, not Sting nor Raul Julia nor Alan Cumming, three recent Macheaths. The film however does the singular service of preserving three of the most mesmerising performances from the original Berlin production – Neher, Lenya and Busch – and the musical direction is by Theo Mackeben, who also presided over the music at the 1928 Schiffbauerdamm premiere.
Pabst's Threepenny Opera is mostly his own; those who seek a truer rendition of the Brecht/Weill original will have to look elsewhere. (Unfortunately, the sparkling Columbia recording of the Richard Foreman/Stanley Silverman Threepenny Opera from the mid-1970s, which restored Weill's original score and orchestrations, remains out-of-print, as does the 1956 recording of the full score in the original German language, supervised by Lenya and something of a benchmark, for all its faults.) But Pabst does cut to the criminal core of the original, which continues to remain relevant. The DVD also contains an informative 49-minute documentary, featuring Eric Bentley, Weill expert Kim Kowalke, Pabst scholar Jan-Christopher Horak and Pabst's son Michael, about the origin and history of both the play and the film.
Posted at 9.11 am in /Film
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