Dave Kehr takes a look at the Criterion Collection's re-release of G. W. Pabst's 1931 film adaptation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The 3 Penny Opera. As Kehr notes, Pabst was a logical choice for the adaptation--he was trained in the theater--but Brechtian experimental theater was evidently not to his tastes. Pabst let some songs go only as long as he could stand them, while others he couldn't bring himself to film at all. Although the original 1928 play was a popular success, Pabst's film version wasn't.
Pabst is invariably classified as a realist, and Brecht is often classified as one as well, albeit with less certainty. Pabst and Brecht each represented very different examples of what happens when realism is imbued with an explicit or implicit political purpose. Pabst was the most prominent film director of the neue Sachlichkeit ("the new objectivity") which entered German society and art during the 1920's. Reacting to the overwhelming phenomenon of defeat and economic collapse after World War I, Germans were determined to see things objectively, but in a way they never had before: infected by cynicism, disillusionment, and an almost masochistic sense of resignation to things are they are. In his best-known film, The Joyless Street (1925), Pabst's static, unblinking camera eye watches as two young women, one of them played by Greta Garbo in her German film debut (by the way, if you want to know why people made such a fuss over her, watch the scene in which she first appears), sell themselves into prostitution to save their financially ruined families. With no sentimentality or symbolism whatsoever, Pabst follows the women as they amuse wealthy clients at opulent blackmarket nightclubs while the women's families scramble for food.
Brecht's 3 Penny Opera might seem farcical and frivolous by comparison, but Brecht's play represents a very different approach to the same social problem. Instead of Pabst's shrugging depiction of exploitation, Brecht wanted to use the theater to involve his working class audiences in a broad political and philosophical vision of the material struggles that divided society. He set out to restore realistic art the principles of play, artistic experimentation, and genuine aesthetic gratification that the neue Sachlichkeit mopes had replaced with the downcast reflection of the world. Brecht overcame the age-old dilemmas of a didactic theory of art (to teach or to please?) in a vision that was scientific in the best sense: imbued with curiosity along with a willingness to experiment and to fail, popularly and aesthetically. Brecht was proud of the popular success of The 3 Penny Opera with the same working classes Pabst sequestered in the dreary back streets of Vienna, and for a brief time he and Walter Benjamin thought they'd found the recipe for a genuinely Marxist aesthetic practice. Alas, Brecht's plays were met with indifference when performed for workers in an actual Marxist state (East Germany), and his exuberant estrangement effects fell out of favor with post-war Western intellectuals under the spell of Samuel Beckett.
Pabst's 3 Penny Opera, restored from the original camera negative in 2005, recalls a time when depressed Germans were looking for a way out of their miseries, and Brecht offered a vision of a very different future than the one that eventually unfolded.
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