Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die
Welt? (Brecht/Dudow/Eisler/Ottwald,
1931)
Kuhle Wampe
• opened in Berlin 30 May 1932
• Reported audience of 14,000 in first week
• banned by Nazis on 26 March 1933.
Brecht’s influence on Film
- Jean-Luc Godard and French New Wave
- Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
- Fassbinder and New German Cinema (e.g.
Sanders-Brahms, H.J.Syberberg, Alexander Kluge)
See Martin Brady, ‘Brecht and Film’, Cambridge Companion to
Brecht.
Kuhle Wampe
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1. Opening to suicide
2. Bönike eviction to engagement party
3. Sports festival
4. Tram scene
Film and Photography between
documentary realism and ideology
• ‘The situation has become so complicated
because the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says
less than ever about that reality. A photograph of
the Krupp works or the AEG reveals almost
nothing about these institutions. Reality as such
has slipped into the domain of the functional. The
reification of human relations, the factory, for
example, no longer discloses these relations. So
there is indeed ‘something to construct’,
something ‘artificial’, ‘invented’.
•
Grosse Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Berlin, Weimar, Frankfurt am Main,
1988–2000, vol. 21, p. 469
• in detail film has terrible flaws which seem in principle
to be incurable. there is the dislocation of the sound . .
. then there is the fixed perspective: we only see what
one eye (the camera) sees . . . mechanical reproduction
makes everything appear final, unfree, inalterable. this
brings us back to the basic objection: the public no
longer has a chance to adjust the actor’s performance,
it is not faced with a production but an end product
that has been produced in its absence.
• Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, 27.3.1942
Montage as distancing device
• ‘For Brecht the possibilities of epic
fragmentation are undermined by the
inflexible Cyclopean gaze of the camera. In
Kuhle Wampe he and his collaborators
attempt to use the former to disrupt the
latter.’
• Martin Brady, ‘Brecht and Film’, p. 304
The city
• In modernism: often site of anonymity, jungle,
force in its own right (Ruttmann, Berlin – Die
Sinfonie der Groβstadt, Alfred Döblin, Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1928), John Dos Passos
Manhattan Transfer (1925)
• In Kuhle Wampe: Site of political struggle:
‘Wessen Straße ist die Straße?’
• City as metaphor for political scene
Sozialfaschismus-Theorie
• Communist idea that Social Democracy is ‘left wing of Fascism’
• Originates in Grigori Sinowjew (1924) and adopted by Stalin, reactivated
1928.
• For KPD, idea that SPD, because of its support of republican democracy is
working into the hands of fascism.
• Based on concept that fascism is outcome and goal of crisis of Capitalism
(and democracy is a Capitalist form of government)
• Splits working class in Germany in time of its opposition to Nazism
• Represented in Kuhle Wampe in Bönike family as petty bourgeois (see
engagement party)
Montage
• ‘Montage is here a cognitive process and its
effects take place on the micro-level in the
spectator, who becomes aware that the ‘content’
itself is also split. Montage breaks with the
‘normal’ (linear, natural) film narration at the
formal level; whilst at the same time, at the level
of content, the spectator sees the juxtaposition
of different ideologies and realities.’
•
Gal Kirn, ‘Kuhle Wampe – Politics of Montage, De-Montage of Politics?’, FilmPhilosophy 11/1, 2007, 33-48)
Dialectical montage
Moralising parents espousing liberal maxim of
success through strife – images of Franz’s cycling
wheels.
Does Franz die as an individual or as a
representative of his class?
Neighbours comments on Franz’ suicide?
Dehumanisation and
Verfremdungseffekt
• Effect of reification, i.e. the principle that
under Capitalism the relationship between
people turns into the relationship between
things.
• Brecht: ‘Don’t start from the good old things
but the bad new ones.’ (Walter benjamin,
‘Conversations with Brecht’, in: Benjamin,
Understanding Brecht, London, 1998, p. 121.
Gender
• Patriarchal structure of family
• Anni as ‘neue Frau’: modern, self-confident, working
woman as result of social changes in Weimar Republic
• No of female employees trebled 1907-25 to 1.5 mio
• ‚Bubikopf, Zigaretten aufgesteckt im Spitz und knielange
Röcke wurden vor allem in den "Goldenen Zwanzigern"
zu den Modeerscheinungen einer neuartigen
Massenkultur‘ (lemo.de)
• Open consideration of abortion (illegal unter §218 of
Weimar constitution – resulted in censorship)
Class
• Split working class
• Petty bourgeois ideals
• Working class culture and education: creation
of class consciousness and trans-family ties
• Solidarity: ‘Vorwärts und nicht vergessen,
worin unsere Stärke besteht’
• Anni as alternative to Franz (self-sacrifice for
family values)?
• ‘Der Faschismus versucht, die neu entstandenen
proletarisierten massen zu organisieren, ohne die
Eigentumsverhältnisse , auf deren Beseitigung sie
hindrängen, anzutasten. […] Der Faschismus läuft
folgerecht auf eine Ästhetisierung des politischen
Lebens hinaus. […] So steht es um die Ästhetisierung
der Politik, welche der Faschismus betreibt. Der
Kommunismus antwortet ihm mit der Politisierung der
Ästhetik.’
• Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, Gesammelte
Schriften I.1, , Frankfurt/M., 1991 (1936), 506-508.
Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens
(1934)
Nazi ‘Lichtdom’ (Cathedral of Light)
Nazi decoration of Unter den Linden in
Berlin for Mussolini visit, 1937
Fascist vs. Communist bodies – Leni Riefenstahls
Olympia (1936) & Kuhle Wampe