Mackie Messer - Brechts Dreigroschenfilm (2018)

The film opens with a quotation—the first sentence from a work by Bertolt Brecht—and many more quotations follow: Because of the great success of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which premiered in Berlin in August 1928 with music by Kurt Weill, the work is to be made into a film. Against all expectations, Brecht’s work has become the most successful play of the 1920s. The astonished audience goes wild, delighted by the play’s wealth of allusions, its exuberant musicality, and, above all, the irreverence with which the director flouts the conventions of the day. Brecht celebrates the success with his closest circle. Alongside his wife, Helene Weigel, this includes Kurt Weill and Elisabeth Hauptmann, Weill’s wife Lotte, and the celebrated actress Carola Neher. The press is interested in how the opera came about and asks about Hauptmann’s contribution, since it was in part her knowledgeable translation from English of John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch’s The Beggar’s Opera that made Brecht’s Threepenny Opera possible in the first place. Before the play becomes a worldwide success, the press also challenges Brecht, asking why he does not bring it to the screen. Although he loves cinema in principle, he replies sharply: An offer from producer Seymour Nebenzahl to film the opera comes as no surprise. But Brecht has no intention of having his play adapted for the screen exactly as it is. His ideas about what the work might look like as a film differ greatly from Nebenzahl’s. The film producer aims to make the greatest possible profit from the production without taking risks. He wants to give moviegoers only what they are already used to. Brecht, by contrast, explicitly intends to break with audience habits. He does not want a depiction of reality, but a view of what lies behind it, and puts it this way: Before the producer’s mind’s eye, Brecht conjures up a surprising film idea, vividly unfolding the struggle between London gangster boss Macheath and Peachum, head of the beggars’ mafia, so that this fictional film appears to both of them in moving images: The gangster, feared also by the name “Mack the Knife,” falls head over heels in love with Peachum’s underage daughter, Polly. Peachum is horrified when he learns that his daughter returns this love. Making matters worse, he has invested a great deal of money in outfitting his daughter and expects her to make a good match one day, thereby securing his livelihood in old age. When Brecht wants to bring all the devices of his Epic Theatre to bear in the film adaptation, the producer is alarmed: he fears both film censorship and the enormous production costs of furnishing the sprawling story. His plan for making the film supposedly calls for “the most distinguished actors” and one of “the greatest directors in the profession”—a director who, however, sees The Threepenny Opera “purely visually” and “like a fairy tale.” Brecht, though, considers this backward and “trash,” serving only the “stupefied tastes of audiences” to which people have become accustomed. He wants to show “the events behind the events” and thus offer social criticism. He also wants to expose the brutality of the SA and of the “house painter,” Adolf Hitler. He intends to tell the story of the six million unemployed for whom ruthless capitalism is responsible. The global economic crisis has caused this mass unemployment, and more and more people are threatened with impoverishment. Brecht wants to make not trash but art that helps these people. For him, therefore, the screen must deliver an “assault on bourgeois ideology.” The burgeoning film industry, in his view, still has no artistic aspirations and stands for narrow-mindedness. The gang leaders in his Threepenny film are to be as bourgeois as the citizens they rob: they have full savings accounts, imitate upper-class style, and share its stuffiness. Citizens and criminals become indistinguishable. The general principle is: Brecht leads Nebenzahl through the dazzling scenarios of his cinematic fantasies. He imagines his Macheath as an ambitious businessman seeking to create the appearance of respectability and dreaming of upper-class prosperity and prestige. But Macheath spots Polly in the street, strolling through the city with her mother. His eyes immediately light on Polly’s shapely backside. Before he has even spoken a word to her, he decides to marry her. He flirts with her in front of her mother, invites them both to dance, and persuades Polly to leave with him. They have known each other for only four hours when they are already married. A gangsters’ wedding is celebrated, with the criminals trying to imitate upper-class marriage customs. Present are the groom’s brutal and immoral gang, as well as his “friends” from respectable society. The producer finds Brecht’s remarks cynical and the story vulgar. He simply wants to turn the famous name of The Threepenny Opera into commercial success. Brecht does try to placate him, but ideas the producer finds offensive continue to pour out of him. His dilemma is that he knows, deep down, that he does not want to abandon his vision of a politically and aesthetically radical film version. Thus his “negotiations” with the film company reach an impasse, because Nebenzahl is absolutely unwilling to realize Brecht’s ideas in the film for which he has paid for the rights. The producer finally threatens to make The Threepenny Opera without Brecht’s involvement. Although Brecht knows the production company will not go through with it, he remains determined to make an entirely new kind of cinema. His vision of a Threepenny film is provocative, radical, uncompromising, political, and pointed. This leads not only to a showdown in Brecht’s fictional film narrative—as in the opera—but also in the real-life film story that frames it. Brecht subsequently sues the production company in the Threepenny Trial and fights for his artistic freedom in a case whose outcome he has already predicted but knowingly accepts. He actively seeks a public confrontation. He goes to court only to prove that the producers’ greed ultimately wins. His comment on this is: Here, too, he sets in motion a very special kind of staging: the judges, lawyers, journalists, and everyone involved are to become participants in a learning play. He calls the case he has brought a “sociological experiment.” With National Socialism looming, its contempt for humanity already taking effect in the threatened republic, not only the film company with which he is already at odds but also the film industry and cinema owners turn against him. They claim that the subject matter is inherently immoral and therefore “un-German.” “Brecht and Weill deserve a heavy-handed response,” the political right chants. But he refuses to be intimidated. In a statement, he leaves no room for restrictions: The film’s main story increasingly becomes a game with reality and Brecht’s fictions. In the end, an attempt is made to transpose the conflict of The Threepenny Opera into the present day.