Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media

Roswitha Mueller

Univ. Nebraska Press, 1989

Preface and Chapter 1

Preface

This book has a history all its own that I shall address by way of introduction. My first impulse to write about Brecht came as the need to clarify for myself and my students how far Brecht's literary genius could be separated from his political beliefs. I needed to know whether I could subscribe to the critical reception of Brecht prevalent in the United States, which hails his poetic talent while deploring his convictions and proceeds by carefully separating the two or, worse, indicts his writing altogether on the basis of his "wrong" ideas. The presumption of such critics has always reminded me of Brecht's aviator who pointed at a pigeon and exclaimed: "This bird flies incorrectly."

The conjunction of Brecht's literary production and his intellectual passion became clear to me early in this project. Epic theater without emancipatory intent makes as little sense as distancing without criticism or criticism without productivity. Brecht's politics were not party politics but the result of the close attention he paid to the movements around him and throughout the world. The ethical choices involved testify less to his "moral hber" than to a hunch about the shape of things to come. Brecht was above all an optimist and a generous utopian thinker.

The next level of engagement in this project had to do with my interest in film and film theory and in particular the avant­garde in cinema and in theater. Brecht holds a crucial place with respect to both. What astonished me was Brecht's enormous importance for

xi

film theory in the sixties and seventies, when his actual writings on film were negligible compared with the volumes of his theoretical discussions on all aspects of the theater. His polemics against illuslonism in the theater and against spectator identification were often simply appropriated for the cinema without recognition of the difference between the two art forms. This presented a problem that I tried to grapple with by working with the few scattered remarks Brecht wrote on the specificity of cinema, to elaborate its relation to epic theory through the notion of the gestus.

Brecht's importance for the film theory that began in France in the sixties was mediated by a reinterpretation of his politics from the point of view of Althusserian structuralist Marxism. Although this was a great advance over the puzzled stalemate in the cold war reception of Brecht in Western countries and over the East's attempt to align Brecht with the offcial cultural policies of the Communist party, still the rigidity of structuralist Marxism, its devaluation of the subject in the historical process in particular, seemed unsuited to Brecht's relation to Marxist theory. At the other extreme were those Marxists close to the Frankfurt school, who continued a tradition of animosity against Brecht initiated by Theodor Adorno and who labeled him a mechanical Marxist and a Stalinist. It is in view of all these claims that I am stressing Brecht's relation to Karl Korsch, not in order to claim the "real" Brecht but to restore his heterodoxy with respect to Marxist theory.

This brings me to my most recent concern with Brechtian theory. I see the decline of Brecht's importance in the eighties as directly related to the postmodern reaction against a bipolar model of dialectics in favor of plurality and the proliferation of sign)fication. As one of the main protagonists in structuralist film theory, Brecht was swept aside in this reaction. The irony is that Brecht is much less suited to fit the structuralist bill, when the entirety of his work is taken into consideration, than to any postmodern context. The Brecht who has always interested me and whom I believe to be most important is the Brecht who stands not just for the proliferation of sign)fication but also for the expansion of discourses and experience-aesthetic and political, artistic and practical. I hope I have succeeded in some ways in freeing Brecht from the prisonhouse of categories.

Finally, I would like to express my regrets about limiting the discussion of Brecht's reception to France, England, and Germany. The obvious omissions-Ozu in Japan and Makavajev in Yugoslavia-can be explained only as a consequence of my lack of familiarity with the language and culture of those two excellent filmmakers.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the librarians and friends at the Bertolt Brecht Archive in East Berlin for their untiring support of my research. My thanks go also to the mentors, colleagues, and friends who have helped and encouraged me by their willingness to read this text and discuss it with me: Bertrand Augst, Herbert Blau, Jost Hermand, Martin Jay, Anton Kaes, Tania Modleski, Robert Nelson, Patrice Petro, Gerhard Rauscher, Stephen Thaman, Jochen SchulteSasse, Kaja Silverman, Marc Silberman, and Jack Zipes. I want to give special credit to Robert Nelson for the term "theoretical films." Many thanks to him also and to Valie Export for their help with the film stills from Ku/)le Wampe. The grainy texture of these stills IS m keeping with Brecht's intentions, high­lighting gesture rather than mimicry. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Jamie Owen Daniel for her patient and most intelligent assistance in preparing this manuscript.

Preface xiii

Chapter 1: The Twenties: Author vs. Producer

What might have entered history as the first decade in German democratic statehood became known instead as the decade between two world wars. Weimar and the twenties, notorious for economic and political crises as well as for short periods of stable prosperity, for political extremism and for apathy, nevertheless-or perhaps because of massive contradictions-gave rise to an astounding array of cultural impulses. In the forefront of these impulses stood the new technological media, film and radio, already facing in two directions: as means of mass communication and as means of artistic creation. As Rudolf Arnheim wrote, "Like the first German Republic, film was an experiment, whose success was to be ensured by setting the highest of goals."' In the case of film, success was defined by many theoreticians and artists not only in terms of the acceptability of film as art, that is, its status within the fine arts, but also in terms of its effectiveness in giving expression to social and cultural thought. Bela Balazs, Hans Richter, Bertolt Brecht, Rudolf Arnheim, and Walter Benjamin are among those critics who saw the existence of film as a new art form tied to art's role in shaping social processes and processes of communication, which meant by implication avoiding the commercialization of film.

Brecht's caustic stance vis­a­vis the art status of film shows just how controversial that aspect of FIm had become in confronting the commercial exploitation of its technical possibilities. Brecht thought that the film had lost its vital potential once it was employed in the

1

fabrication of "art." By that he meant that cinematic technology had been placed in the service of a concept of art that dated back to the previous century. The aesthetic categories pertaining to this concept, such as narrative closure and the centrality of "the individual," were in Brecht's view tantamount to the foreclosure of film's potential to forge new avenues of communication and a wholly new concept of art.

In his book Der Kampf um den Film (The Struggle over Film), Hans Richter concretely outlined the sociological conditions that prepared the ground for this foreclosure. He described how, in the years immediately preceding and following the First World War, a shift along class lines occurred in the form, conditions, and subject matter of early films. The effort to woo the so­called better audiences into the movies transformed the nickelodeons into plush movie palaces. Broad slapstick and vaudeville entertainment gave way to sophisticated stage actors, and the depiction of the "little man's" struggle for existence was marginalized by the appearance of specifically bourgeois characters such as "the writer," "the priest," and "the doctor." The psychological treatment of the lives of these characters, seen as absolute individuals, ensured their status as "generally human."2 Richter showed that the lower­class audiences that had made up the bulk of moviegoers remained the main consumers of the new art form even though they no longer determined the spirit of film production. Until the advent of television, film was the uncontested form of entertainment among those audiences.

For social thinkers and critics like Brecht, film was an attractive medium precisely because it was the art of the masses. His enthusiasm for Chaplin in the early films was in line with his antiliterary interest in "plebeian" traditions such as the poetry of Franc,ois Villon, the commedia dell'arte style, and the humor of the Bavarian comic Karl Valentin. Brecht's association with the last resulted in a collaboration on a short film called Mysterien eines Frisearsalons (Mysteries of a Beauty Parlor) in I 92 3. It is quite possible that Brecht and the stage director Erich Engel, who also collaborated on Mystenen, wrote subtitles for other Valentin comic shorts.

Evidence from letters and diaries shows that Brecht was a prolific film­script writer in the first few years of the twenties. Some exam

ples of his scripts have survived. "Drei im Turm" (Three in the Tower), most likely written in I92I, is a morbidly grotesque love triangle story, very much in the expressionist tradition and somewhat reminiscent of Oskar Kokoschka's one­act play Morder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women). Der BrilliantenfresJer (The Diamond Eater) and Das Mysterium der Jamaika­Bar (The Mystery of the Jamaica Bar) are comic detective stories, featuring elopements, abductions, and small­time gangs a la Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera). The tone and temperament of the last two scripts are distinctly related to the understated humor of Karl Valentin. Since the scripts were written for silent films, they read almost like short stories with only an occasional subtitle. The descriptive text reveals Brecht's power of filmic visualization. Following the detailed directions for each shot with respect to acting, costume, and setting, it becomes very easy not only to imagine the action but also to perceive an entire ambience and mood. As far as camera directions are concerned, Brecht contented himself with an occasional specification of high or low angles and fade­outs. Shortly before his first resounding theatrical success in the fall of 1922, Brecht, together with his friend the writer Arnold Bronnen, participated in a competition that film producer Richard Oswald and the magazine Tagebucl' had launched. The film script the two writers submitted was entitled Rohinsonade auf Assuncion (Robinson in Assuncion) and it won first prize.

It is a moot question whether it was the success Brecht had scored as a playwright with the Munich premiere of Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) in September of 1922 that kept him from writing more film scripts or whether the theater had always been his first love; the fact is that after that year Brecht's development as an artist took a sharp turn toward the stage rather than the screen. Nevertheless, his encounter with the newer medium had been deep enough to impress upon him the aesthetic exigencies specific to film. As a consequence, Brecht the dramatist never competed against the technological media (film and radio) in an effort to formulate what is purely dramatic; instead he sought a discourse with them. "In the interest of this discourse," wrote Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Author as Producer," "Brecht returned to the most basic elements of the theater. He was content, so to speak, with a podium. He dis

The Tweneies: Aurhor versus Producer 3

pensed with complicated plots. In this way he succeeded in changing the functional connection between the stage and the audience, the text and the performance, the director and the author."3

This process of stripping theater to its basic elements enabled Brecht to formulate a dramatic theory that, in spite of its concern with specific dramatic problems, contributes incisively to general media theory. Brecht himself suggested the applicability of his theories to forms of expression other than drama. In his "Speech on the Function of Radio" of 1923, he claimed that "the epic dramatic theory with its number­character, its separation of elements, of the image from the word and the words from the music, particularly, however, its pedagogical attitude, would provide a host of practical hints for radio."4 Conversely, one could claim that if Brecht's dramatic theory is applicable to media theory in general, it is because film had first taught Brecht the dramatist a lesson. In any case, Brecht's insight into the interrelatedness and interdependence of all forms of artistic production, which was a consequence of his political and economic analysis of the structures of communication, would have prevented him from treating different genres and media in total isolation.

This insight went hand in hand with Brecht's "plebeian" and iconoclastic attitude toward traditional forms of art and literature (and that included not only the classics but impressionism and expressionism as well), which found fertile ground in the Berlin of the twenties. In 1925, one year after he had moved there from Munich, he joined a writers' league called Gr~ppe 1925, whose goal it was to safeguard the interests of young writers not represented in the literary committees and academies, which were largely run by established members of the previous generation. Some of the other members of Gruppe 1925, such as Johannes Becher, Alfred Doblin, Egon Kisch, Rudolf Leonhard, and Kurt Tucholsky, were already prominent writers and considered themselves part of the left­wing intelligentsia. Yet by far the most valuable contact for Brecht in those early years was Erwin Piscator. This contact was established at a time when Brecht's sympathies for the "little man" developed into a full­blown political analysis that was to include the theater as well as other media.

Piscator's theater collective synthesized and gave expression to a number of characteristics typical of the Berlin avant­garde of the twenties: the attack on established art, a gradual politicization of art, and the belief in the beneficial influence that technology and the technological media-film and radio-would exert on the transformation of social values. Piscator's views on the heritage and future of literature and art were formed by his close connection to a group of people in Berlin, most of whom belonged to the dada movement: the brothers HerzEelde (Heartfield), George Grosz, Walter Mehring, Richard Hulsenbeck, Franz Jung, and Raoul Hausmann, some of whom became part of the theater collective. In contrast to the expressionists' individualist­humanist sentiments, the Berlin dadaists emphasized a "cooling out" (auski~len) or "freezing" (einfrosten) of feelings in art and a radical anarchical destruction of bourgeois art under the slogan "Kunst ist Scheisse,"5 which was quite shocking at that time. After the I9I9 Spartacus uprising in Berlin, dada took a turn toward greater political articulation. For example, the contributions to the magazine Die Pleite, published by George Grosz and John Heartfield, no longer placed themselves exclusively in relation to aesthetic questions; instead, direct political effectiveness moved more and more into the forefront of their consideration. It is in this context that Piscator conceived of theater and art as a political tool, a means of pedagogy and propaganda. A long tradition of political theater was at Piscator's disposal once he had embarked upon this course.

Political theater in Germany began in the wake of Bismarck's antiSocialist laws (Sozialistengesetz) of 1878. A great number of illegal political discussion and reading clubs, camouflaged as bowling clubs and similar innocuous interest groups, sprang into existence. One of these clubs organized performances of plays that the censors suppressed for public theaters because of their criticism of social conditions. These performances were staged by an ensemble called Freie Bi~ne (Free Stage), which was the forerunner of the Volkshuhne (People's Stage). By the time Piscator was called upon to direct at the Volkshuhne in 1924, this theater had gone through many changes. It had survived splits, prohibitions, and reorganizations.

In I9I5 the Volkshahne was placed under the direction of Max Reinhardt, to become the site of his spectacular productions. Rein

The Twenties: Author versus Producer 5

hardt, whom the critic Herbert Ihering considered "the most colorful theater talent of all times,"6 nevertheless represented the opposite of the Volks~z~hne's original goals. Under his direction the theater became a temple for the arts, a sacred place where all thoughts of struggle come to rest. This development was a consequence not only of the direction of Max Reinhardt-who, after all, never laid claim to anything but the most genial completion and apotheosis of the bourgeois concept of art-but also of the notions held by members and by the organizers of what art for the masses should be.

The political situation of the twenties in Germany was reflected on a micro­level in the internal conflicts of the Volksb~hne. Most of the members had sunk into political apathy, hankering after representations of the "eternal" human condition, while the greater audience, mainly the younger generation of socialists, demanded more radical plays with a clear political point of view, the so­called Tendenzsta'ck. When Piscator joined the Volksb~'hne, he opposed the unquestioning implantation of bourgeois drama into political theater. His production of Ehm Welk's play Gewitter i~er Gottland (Thunderstorm over Gottland) in 1927 brought the internal strife at the Volksbahne to a head. While the audience protested and demonstrated against the cuts the management imposed on Piscator's production, the managing committee of the Volksba'hne in its turn voted to maintain a nonpartisan, impartial production policy. After that, Piscator's fate at the Volksb~'hne was sealed. Temporarily he moved to the Theater am Nollendoriplatz while, thanks to generous financial sponsors, plans for his own theater took shape. Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus in Dessau, designed a new theater for Piscator and in collaboration with him. The execution of the design was to be in the hands of the Bauhaus.

Piscator's choice of architects was no coincidence. Like the Bauhaus theoreticians, he was deeply convinced that the purpose and function of a building should dictate its form: "The stage of our time bears the outdated form of absolutism, of the court theater. Its division into stalls, boxes, balconies and galleries reflects the social stratification of feudal society."7 Piscator saw his own contribution to modern political theater not so much in the innovation of the dramatic aspects as in the technical updating of the theatrical apparatus.

Yet, insofar as he saw the technical innovations to be absolutely requisite for a new audience, a new purpose, and a new function of theater, a new dramatic theory-rudimentarily at least-also underlies his technical considerations. Both Piscator and Gropius had very clear ideas about the function of the new theater. All technical means, argued Piscator, are employed to abolish the bourgeois stage arrangement and replace it with a form that "no longer considers the audience a fictive concept, but includes it into the theater as a live force.''S Similarly, Gropius and his friends at the Bauhaus had long been interested in developing a technically advanced theater that would enable the audience to participate in the dramatic events.

Walter Gropius described his design for a "total theater" not in terms of technological devices but as a way to place the audience in the middle of scenic events, as part of the same space in which the performance is taking place. For this purpose stages were arranged not only to jut out from the proscenium into the center of the audience, as is common in most modern theaters, but to surround the spectators on all sides as well. In addition to the horizontal distribution of stage levels, a vertical spread of stage areas was made possible by movable staircases and scaffolds. Gropius further admitted that his special interest was directed at the various methods of light projection demanded by Piscator's genial mise­en­scene. These light projections meant both the creation of scenic­dramatic space-the building of a scene with light as replacement for props and sets-and also the projection of film and slides on as many surfaces as possible- walls, ceilings, and so on-in order to submerge the audience in the heightened illusion of being present at the actual site of scenic events. Gropius's dream of the grosse Raummaschine (great space machine),9 so congenial to Piscator's idea of theatrical production, remained unfortunately just that-a dream or, rather, a number of architectural plans and models.

These theoretical explorations into the realm of architecture and technology did not detract Piscator from his desire to connect with the traditional political theater and also with the agit­prop stages, which were the workers' theater of his time. Both these forms of political theater remained closest to Piscator's interest. He was considered by many critics to be the link between the workers' theater

The Twenties: Author versus Producer 7

`and the professional theater of the Left, represented by Brecht, Friedrich Wolf, and others. In his essay "Schopferische Probleme des Agitproptheaters" (Creative Problems of the Agit­Prop Theater) Friedrich Wolf wrote in 1933: "The professional theater of the Left . . . is unthinkable without the pioneering work of the agitprop stages and of Piscator.''l

The agit­prop movement represented the apex of a process of merging and transformation begun in I9I8 between the traditional form of amateur stages (Laien/~ahnen) and the new subject matter of the workers' theater. A short selective enumeration of the formal elements of the amateur stages will show how close, indeed, not only Piscator's but Brecht's theater is to these stages: simple and distinct fables, rich and eventful scenes, typing of characters, simple but beautiful and often costly decor, use of masks, use of placards and banners, division of the stage by colorful curtains, simultaneous scenes, the short scene and montage of scenes, predilection for songs, dance, and pantomime, and emphasis on rhythm, movement, and body language. Spoken language was not required to comply with the acceptable standard of stage language; instead, actors were encouraged to retain their dialects and individual characteristics as long as this did not obstruct comprehension. And finally, the cabaret style of the political amateur groups is the epic style par excellence, in that episodes, events, and "numbers" are only loosely strung together, an ideal structure to accommodate epic breadth and volume.

In the fall of 1927 Brecht worked with Piscator and other members of the collective on the adaptation of Tolstoi's play Rasp~tin, and in December of the same year he began work on an adaptation for the stage of Jaroslav Hasek's novel The Good Soldier Schweik (Die Ahenteuer des Braven Soldaten Schwejk). Besides Piscator and Brecht, George Grosz, Felix Gasbarra, and Leo Lania also worked on this production. In both of these plays film inserts played a crucial role, but they did not represent the only inclusion of technology and media. Even though the grosse Raummaschine was never realized, Piscator's mise­enscene was acknowledged even by his political opponents for its ambitiously innovative qualities. For the Schweik project in particular, Piscator had in mind an entirely mechanized environment. Not many critics could withhold their admiration, for example, for Pisca

tor's ingenious solution to the problem of movement in Hasek's novel. The character of Schweik is seen in constant senseless motion of which he is not the originator but only the ob ject. Moreover, for all his moving around he remains essentially passive and unchanging. Piscator had the brilliant idea of placing the Schweik actor Max Pallenberg on a conveyor belt built level with the stage floor to illustrate the character's stasis within motion.

Projections of film footage taken as tracking shots in the actual streets of Prague (Piscator called it nataralistischer Film) alternated with animation film of a political­satirical nature by George Grosz. Grosz also did backdrop drawings and designs (about three hundred pages) for masks and costumes (all of which resulted in a blasphemy trial against him and his publisher, Malik­Verlag). Inspired by the political, grotesque marionettes that Heartfield and Grosz had done earlier for dada, Piscator decided on a whole range of marionettes to surround Schweik, from totally art)ficial puppets to actors with masks or simply mechanical, robotlike acting. Grosz also credits Piscator with introducing photomontage into the framework of the stagell and claims that Piscator's theater-which nowadays would be called a multimedia spectacle, since Piscator also worked with slide shows, music, dance, and pantomime in addition to film and puppets-was an expression of his "Wagner yearnings," 12 his neverending search for the great Gesamtkunstwerk that would comprise all the individual arts. Grosz's remark is interesting especially in light of Brecht's later partial rejection of Piscator's efforts.

The examples of film for the Schweik production already mentioned, animation film and shots of the streets of Prague, functioned as political commentary in the first case and as sets in the latter. Piscator wrote that a final differentiation of film materials used in his productions occurred about 1927­28, and he completed the score by listing two additional types of film that found their way into his stage production. Narrative fiction film inserts were drawn on to comment on the action, predicting the future or reflecting on the past much like the chorus in Greek drama or any dramatic personae in the capacity of a narrator. And last, documentary film was used for informational purposes but also acted as commentary.

Brecht wrote along similar lines about the use of film in epic

The Twenties: Author versus Producer 9

theater. In Brecht's view film in theater could be looked at as a kind of "optical chorus"~3 that should engage in a clear dialectic with the scenes and events onstage. "Since film represents reality so abstractly, it is well suited to confront reality.... It can confirm or contradict, remind or prophesy. It is capable of taking on the role of the ghost without which no great drama could have existed in the centuries most propitious to drama." 14 Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, film onstage functions, as Brecht saw it, to bring out what is hidden to the eyes of mortals, the "naked reality." In terms of Piscator's theater, however, it is not the crime and sin of the mother that is revealed but "the good god of the revolution.''l5

In the case of the decorative use of film, depicting a specific social environment or milieu, Brecht insisted on artistic-that is, stylized-treatment. The film insert should concentrate on depicting the typical, drawing on animation if necessary. Everything depends on maintaining the pleasure in the dialectic between plasticity and two­dimensionality, Brecht argued, and he cautioned that a film insert depicting an actual location could upset this balance.

The impulses Brecht received during his association and collaboration with Piscator can hardly be overestimated. They not only were important for Brecht's formulation of epic theater but also bear relevance for the Lehrsti~ck (learning play) theory and practice that Brecht worked on during the late twenties. Two features in particular, which can also be traced back to the agit­prop and political amateur stages, are crucial for the development of the Lehrstack theory. One is the insistence that every actor play as many roles as possible, in order to prevent hierarchies and the development of a star system. The other feature, the "speaking choruses," proved to be an excellent way of letting large masses of people participate directly in the learning plays.

Brecht has acknowledged Piscator's influence on his own experiments with drama in many of his writings. He was particularly enthusiastic about the possibilities of film in the theater. In his view film was, at least in this conjunction, at the service of drama: "Der Film macht dem Drama das Bett." 16 Since information, exposition

and circumstantial description can be handled by the film inserts, the actions of the characters and the spoken word attain greater signifi

cance. Brecht also gave Piscator credit for having brought theater into the modern age and up to a technological standard that most other institutions had implemented long ago. At the same time, he saw the limitations of Piscator's approach. His criticism centered on Piscator s "Wagner yearnings," not so much on the notion of a Gesamtkanstwerk (which Brecht certainly was fond of himself) as on the specific Wagnerian brand of it, the fact of its subsuming quality. Brecht argued that Piscator ultimately employed technology to create an illusion of reality onstage in order to absorb the audience, and that the engagement of the spectator in Piscator's theater was based on the complete involvement of the audience in the performance, brought about mainly through an ingenious total saturation of the spectators by means of technology. This final, sign)ficant difference between Brecht and Piscator was arrived at after many years of fruitful collaboration. It does not annul, however, the fundamental, lasting impact of Piscator's theater on Brecht.

A very similar constellation of influence and difference existed between Brecht and the Soviet artists Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, and Tretyakov. Brecht had always acknowledged their decisive influence on his work. 17 His interest in the cultural development of the Soviet Union was inspired by his curiosity about the new ways Soviet artists could take active part in shaping new forms of artistic expression. Their manifestos reinforced Brecht's lack of interest in the bourgeois tradition of literature and theater, and he eagerly followed their aesthetic discussions as well as their concern with new thematics (as long as that was still possible in the twenties in the USSR). For his insights into the development of cultural politics in the Soviet Union, Brecht relied largely on information given to him by his personal friend Sergei Tretyakov. Tretyakov had published one of the first comprehensive articles on Brecht in the Soviet Union and later translated some of Brecht's plays and poems into Russian. He belonged to a group of young artists that called itself the "Left Front of Art" (LEF). Many of Russia's most accomplished artists belonged to this group and contributed to a style of the Revolution. Their aesthetic background was diverse and often remote from Marxist ideas. Constructivists, futurists, and proletkultists exerted the strongest influence within the LEF. Dziga Vertov, for example, was a

The Twenties: Author versus Producer ~ r

futurist poet before he was caught up by the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm. Ultimately it was their dedication to the revolutionary struggle that held these artists together. It was a time when every theater considered it its sacred duty to call itself an "experimental stage" or even a "laboratory." The filmmaker Leo Kuleshov characterized the atmosphere of artistic life in those days in the following way: "At certain periods in the development of civilization or art, certain moments arise when it is no longer possible to work in the old way; you have to work in a new way, you must say a new word. And this new word begins to float round in the air for everyone." 18

The eagerness for the "new" manifested itself in two pronounced tendencies among LEF artists: the interest in technology, scientific exactitude, and factual material-things­as­they­are in themselves-on the one hand, and on the other, interest in the destruction of the cohesiveness of the traditional artistic statement, its fragmentation and juxtaposition in new and startling ways-in short, the principle of montage. In response to the needs of the Russian Revolution, young cameramen went on agit­trains through the continent to collect and record data, facts, and reproductions of the historic events on the front and distribute them to communities in distant parts of the country for educational purposes. Vertov was the editor for the footage of hundreds of young cameramen. The breadth and depth of expression in film, achieved through the montage of images, not necessarily consecutive in time and space, was unparalleled and lent itself to the overwhelming tasks set by the Revolution: "The unusual flexibility of the montage­construction permits any political, economic or other motifs to be brought into the cinema study.''l9 Vertov and the Kinoka movement conceived of film as a tool of communication between peoples: "The basis of our program is not the production of entertainment and lucrative films but the cine­alliance between the people of the uss R and the entire world on the platform of communist decipherment of existing reality."20 They shunned no hardships to bring the news of the revolutionary struggle from the front to the remotest parts of the country. Moreover, Vertov not only informed the spectators but tried to involve them in the filmmaking process itself: "Using a specially designed film car aboard the agit­train . . .. Vertov composed a continually changing travelogue, showing au

diences newly edited films while shooting their reactions and their surroundings for insertion into the films they were watching.''21

The Soviet artists' use of the new technological media served as a model in discursive practices for Brecht. Yet unlike Piscator, who was also influenced by the Soviet artists, Brecht understood that the difference in historical situation demanded a completely opposite approach with respect to the presentation of fictional or informational material. The Russian artists appealed to the emotions and enthusiasm of the people to draw them into the events of the Revolution, whereas Brecht, conscious of the rising phantom of fascist propaganda, emphasized a "cooled out" critical distance.

What Brecht was most fascinated with in the twenties was the possibility of a fundamental breakdown and change in the structure of communication and discourse.22 No doubt to Brecht the experiments of the revolutionary Russian artists represented the promise of such a fundamental change, yet for all their forward­looking, positive utopian qualities, his writings in the mid­ and late twenties, on the structure of communication in drama as well as in the media, ultimately were firmly anchored in an analysis of their present use in the Weimar Republic. At first Brecht believed that the technological media, radio and film specifically, lent themselves "naturally" to a more democratic use of the means of communication. Much of his theory at that time engaged in battle with the cultural institutions of the Weimar Republic to bring about truly democratic changes. In his theoretical struggles Brecht was supported by his friend, the critic Walter Benjamin, who shared with him an initial euphoria about the emancipatory power of technology.

In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin maintained that the mechanical reproduction of artworks has the effect of a "tremendous shattering of tradition."23 By substituting a plurality of copies for a unique existence, the particular historical and spatial presence of the work of art is obliterated. This, Benjamin felt, represented the loss of the concept of authenticity and ultimately authority. Benjamin saw a sign)ficant connection between mechanical reproduction and contemporary mass movements He wrote: "EThe mass movement's} most powerful agent is the film. Its social sign)ficance, particularly in its most positive form,

The Twenties: Author versus Producer 3

is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage." As human sense perception changes through history, this new mode of perceiving things disconnected from the authority that comes with a unique, authentic place in history corresponds to an increased "sense of the universal equality of things. " Just as the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, "the location of its original use value," the reproducible work of art finds its proper function in politics. 24

The necessary identification of the spectator with the point of view of the camera, in the case of photography and film, would automatically ensure, according to Benjamin, an approach to art that is more akin to the sociologists' testing and comparing than to the absorbed or merely bored reception of the average theatergoer. Brecht was quite in agreement with this analysis. He considered the technological aspects of film, for example, to be a great help in overcoming the "old, untechnical, antitechnical, 'radiant' 'art,' which is tied to religion."25 He often contrasted the traditional, reverent mode of reception with the more casual demeanor of sports fans. Among sports fans, the prevalent attitude of the spectators is that of an expert judge. Brecht would have welcomed expert judges in his theater, precisely because of their alert, "scientific" comparing stance.

Although these attributes were part and parcel of the European avant­garde movements of the twenties, in the early thirties they became embedded in the tissue of historical demands in the form of the struggle against fascism. As such they matched Brecht's "cooled out" attitude, fostering keen observation, fine­tuned differentiation

and sober evaluation in the face of an all­subsuming tide of mass enthusiasm. Later on, when fascism was no longer the direct point of reference-when, instead, his aversion to the commercial exploitation of the arts again became central in his dealings with Hollywood, as it had been with the Nero Film Company-these same attitudes could be mobilized in combating the steady narrowing down of aesthetic production and reception to cliches and stereotypes of the lowest common denominator.

Benjamin's expectation that the "distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character," and that the average citizen could be heard, published in print, or seen in films (as was already

practiced in Russia), dissolved in the face of the deepening commercialization of the technological media in Western countries 26 While in the West modern man's legitimate claim to be reproduced was foreclosed, as Hans Richter has described it, as early as the time of the First World War, the efforts of the Soviet artists were finally thwarted by the institutionalization of socialist realist aesthetics under Stalin in the thirties. In the face of these developments, an analysis of the relations of artistic production was urgently needed, particularly since Brecht saw the relations of cultural and artistic production directly joined to the question "who speaks for whom?"-that is, the question of discursive power in the structure of communication. Brecht rose to the occasion in his numerous writings on a theory of radio, on the Threepenny Opera trial, on his Lehrstack theory, and finally in the learning plays themselves.

The concept of the apparatus is central in Brecht's political and economic critique of the distribution of power in discursive processes. Brecht used the term apparatus as a broad category to include every aspect of the means of cultural production, from the actual technological equipment to promotion agencies, as well as the class that is in possession of the means of production. Thus the terminology itself points up the connection between culture and politics. In this complex of usages, references to the political sense of the term usually denote the state apparatus in the context either of the capitalist states or of the Soviet Union. The apparatus in the context of the Soviet Union seems to refer to a body of high functionaries in opposition to the Party. Brecht spoke in this context, for example, of the "negation of the Party by the apparatus." This corresponds to his discussion of "the collective apparatus, which is not a democracy." Groups, he thought, have the function of mediating between individuals and the masses. Therefore the true collectivist "does not place the group apparatus in opposition to the masses but into the masses."27 Whenever a group assumes power and control at the expense of the masses, it becomes a political "apparatus" in this negative sense.

Apparatus as the means of cultural production refers either to the entire cultural complex or to smaller organizational units within it, for example, the theater, the opera, radio, the press, and the film

The Twenties: Author versus Producer

l5

companies. Finally, it also includes the technical units, the tools of production. The confluence of economics, politics, and culture in the hands of the same group, the economically powerful class, as Brecht has pointed out, has severe consequences for culture. The cultural apparatus in these circumstances functions, among other things, to stabilize the existing social relations both politically and economically. Brecht saw this in terms of a selection process: "By means of the (cultural) apparatus, society absorbs what it needs in order to reproduce itself."28

The overlap of authority and culture expresses itself in a structure of production and communication, in which the owners of the means of production and not the producers control the product. In the case of theater, the contradiction of apparatus versus playwright results in the inadequate production of new dramatic materials, that is, of the new drama, as Brecht called it. Brecht saw the greatest obstacle to the production of epic drama in the slow development of the enormous "material complexes"29 of the theater. The reason for this is that the individual playwright can enter new territory with less of a risk than can the entire apparatus. The only intellectual struggle in the arts left in our epoch, Brecht said, exhibits an interesting overestimation of all means of production. "The businessman, in this case as everywhere, prevails over the worker, the owner of the means of production is eo ipso considered productive."30 Critics and the press reinforce this situation. Quite unconsciously, the critics measure the new drama against the antiquated style of contemporary theater. Anything that does not fit into this style of performance falls by the wayside. If it does not furfill the expectation of the audience and of the management, whose interest it is to sell theater as entertainment

the drama is rejected. In this way the apparatus maintains absolute

primacy.

For Brecht this is also the condition under which the work of art or the cultural product is turned into a commodity and the cultural worker is proletarianized. Brecht wrote about the artists and intellectuals who believe in their independence: "Thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus, which in reality owns them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control." Brecht continued to describe the exact workings of this loss of control: "The

producers are completely dependent on the apparatus, economically and socially; it monopolizes their effect, and progressively the products of writers, composers, and critics take on the character of raw materials: the finished product is turned out by the apparatus.''31

Brecht had firsthand experience of this predicament in his dealings with the film industry. When his Threepenny Opera turned out to be a box office success, Nero Film Company approached Brecht with plans for filming the play. In May 1930 Brecht agreed to a contract that reserved him the right to collaborate on the script. After the conclusion of the contract, Brecht wrote the film text Die Beale, which, as Brecht put it, differed from the play not so much with respect to the meaning but rather in a complete restructuring of the fable. "Filming elements of a play with only minor changes would be sheer nonsense,"32 wrote Brecht in a footnote to this text. However, the changes do not seem to confine themselves to the adjustment of one medium to another-they do not "remain without influence on the meaning."33 The film company's complaint that Brecht's film text intensified the political partisanship of the play was essentially correct. Die Beale, for example, explicitly identifies Macheath's bandits as members of the bourgeoisie. Whereas this connection is merely suggested in the play, particularly in the acting directions, which provide that Macheath should be played as a bourgeois, the film text turns this suggestion into the central motif for the entire film. No doubt the intensification of the world economic crisis in 1930 and Brecht's own political development were important factors in the changes he made in the film text. In the actual trial, however, the political reasons did not play a major role. The court carefully avoided making the greater emphasis on the political aspects of the play the object of the hearings, fearing that this would lead to an even more direct politicization of the trial.

When the film company realized that Brecht's film text was substantially different from his play, they refused to grant him the right to collaborate and proceeded to shoot the film without his consent. Brecht decided to sue and have the film confiscated. The legal situation was quite complicated, for although Brecht had secured for himself the right to collaborate on the script, he did not have the right to interfere with the film itself. While he was able to

The Twenties: Author versus Producer r7

demand changes in the script, he had at the same time agreed to preserve the style and content of the Threepenny Opera play. The film company's abrupt rejection of Brecht's collaboration on the script prompted the court's disapproval, yet ultimately the problem was not laid to the company's charge. On the contrary, the court upheld the film company's complaint that Brecht had delivered the outline for the script orally, thus ensuring his continued collaboration on the actual writing of the script. That his collaboration was guaranteed to the author in the contract itself did not influence the court's decision.

Brecht was fully prepared for this outcome. Apparently he did not take his case to court solely in the hope of winning, but did it for the eventual purpose of a sociological experiment. This experiment was planned to be a theoretical exposition of the relation between bourgeois ideology and bourgeois practice, tested on the concrete example of Brecht's involvement with the film industry, the press, and the judicial system as a consequence of the attempted transposition of his play into a film.

The purpose of the trial was to demonstrate publicly the impossibility of working with commercial film companies. Much like epic theater itself, the trial was to reconstruct social processes and make a statement about them. It was to provide instructive material for an interested audience. The rules of this game were to let things fall where they may without interfering in or manipulating the judicial process. The main point for Brecht was to conduct the trial as publicly and as intelligibly as possible. A clear exposition of the fact that the plaintiff was going against one million marks in his attempt to obtain his rights as author had to be given to the public. In this way the act of merely reacting against a particular injustice was turned into a planned project, whose object was a more general injustice. Similarly, to the degree that the specific legal case became less and less important to Brecht, the case concerning the judicial system itself became central in the experiment. Brecht apparently had been successful in his attempt to bring his case to the public's attention. The opening of the trial in October 1930 drew such a crowd that a passageway for the lawyers had to be cordoned off.

The major point to be demonstrated in this experiment was what Brecht called the "ideological schizophrenia" of the petite bourgeoisie. Brecht argued that each social phenomenon is invested with

at least two for the most part incompatible viewpoints. One is taken from the repertoire of great bourgeois ideologies, and the other has its origins in reality. The notion, for example, that the rights of the individual have to be protected, and more specifically that the immaterial rights of artists have to be protected, is constantly contradicted by social practices. Brecht questioned the status of individual rights if a judge can decide-as happened in his case-that a film is an adequate translation of a play without actually having seen the film. He concluded that "there is no right outside of production."34 It follows that a mode of production that obliterates the contribution of individuals is incapable of guaranteeing their immaterial rights. In this case, Brecht saw the problem of authoritarian control over the cultural product directly in terms of the profit motive.

To illustrate his point beyond his own case, Brecht cited an example within an example. A court decision from 1923 clearly spells out how the immaterial rights of the individual cultural producer have to yield before the overruling economic interest of the apparatus. The case involved a writer's claim that the film company that had bought one of his scripts with the intent of making a film had, in fact, never used it for that purpose. The court's decision focused on a comparison of contracts involving the publication of books, the production of dramas, and the production of films. In the case of books the reproduction of the original presented no artistic problem, since the publisher's collaboration is purely mechanical. Neither drama nor film can be seen in terms of exact mechanical reproduction of a text. The difference between a dramatic production and the production of a film was seen in terms of the distance between text and final realization. For drama this gap is less crucial than for film. The transposition of a written script into the sequences of images of the silent movies constituted a much greater break than that between text and theater, where the reproduction of dialogue is possible.

The main distinction, however, was made with respect to the mechanical reproducibility of film as opposed to the reproductions of a play onstage, which are always contractually limited and defined in time and space. Film was described as a "mass commodity" and as such much more dependent on the taste of the audience, the competition on the world market, and the timeliness of its subject matter. As

The Twenties: Author versus Producer ~9

a consequence, the courts decided against the scriptwriter's claims, explicitly stating that his understandable wish to present his intellectual product to an audience is outweighed by the interest of the producer, who, through the director, is co­creator of the work and carries the economic risk for the production and for its marketing.

With this example in hand Brecht was able to demonstrate that the pressure to create salable goods forces the film company to contradict "the great bourgeois ideology," which holds inviolate authors' immaterial rights to their intellectual products. Reality looks somewhat different: "The author is being engulfed in the technological process and the latter is seen as commodity production. The protection of the author's immaterial rights is denied because the producer 'is burdened with an exorbitant financial risk.' Intellectual interests may be protected as long as this protection does not cost too much."35

Subsequently Brecht asked what happened to ideologies once they have thus proved incorrect. They are by no means discarded, he argued; in the interest of this social system they must be maintained. Old ideas are tied together for better or worse; only if one idea is "totally compromised is it dropped after long hesitations and after having changed its name several times.... But at the cradle and at the coffin of every ideology sits practice."36

Although Brecht was interested in showing the discrepancy between bourgeois ideology and practice, he himself was not interested in protecting the bourgeois idea of intellectual property (his replies to the accusations of plagiarism launched against him are well known). Nor did he deplore the demise of the artist's status as individual creator. In his view, the method of cultural production by a group of people, rather than by the traditional "inspired genius," carried within itself the potential of a more progressive form of cultural production. Like Lenin, Brecht believed that the mode of production in late capitalist society-precisely in those aspects that contradict bourgeois ideology-foreshadows forms of socialist production. Brecht's reservations vis­a­vis these forms of production are slight: "If this artfully unified and efficient apparatus had intellectual immaterial interests as well, in short, if all this did not just amount to the protection of profit, we would have very few objections."37 This statement stands in curious contrast to Brecht's earlier complaint

about the film company's mode of production, which he described as anything but efficient. It seems that here Brecht is giving in to the same theoretical fallacy that allowed the introduction of Taylorism in the Soviet Union under Lenin. Brecht's at least partial belief that advanced modes of capitalist production foreshadow socialist practice was supported by the avant­garde's love affair with technology and the latter's ability to intervene rationally in the mystification of social processes.

In other contexts, Brecht refused to discuss formal criteria separately from context. In the form/content debates that flourished in the twenties and continued into the thirties as the expressionism/ realism debate, Brecht always took a firm stand in favor of new forms for new contents or, better, the inseparability of the two in the concept of function. In "The Author as Producer," Walter Benjamin elaborated on this crucial point in Brecht's aesthetics and proposed a dialectical solution to the fruitless splitting of correct political content, on the one hand, and formal quality, on the other, that determined much of the realism/formalism debates in the Soviet Union. The apparent dichotomy is mediated in the concept of technique, which provides the material basis for analysis of the work in question. Technique in this sense ensures a materialistic approach precisely because it is a dimension of function. And in turn, the function of a cultural product depends on its position in the conditions of artistic production in its time. It is ultimately tied to the question of control over the means of artistic production. The result of Brecht's political and economic analysis of the Threepenny Opera trial becomes encapsulated in his concept of "refunctionalization," which understands function as the pivot between artistic and social production. Yet there is an anticipatory if not utopian move involved in Brecht's concept of refunctionalization on which both his radio theory and his Lehrstuck theory are based. Benjamin explained Brecht's concept of refunctionalization as the structural reorganization of the relationship bet~veen the stage, the author, and the audience-or in the case of radio, between the producer and the listener-in order to bring about a more democratic structure of communication. It is evident that these structural and functional changes entail political as well as forma1 differences. The political content, however, was anticipated.

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