Mr. Courage

Bertolt Brecht at the Harvard Film Archive

by Steve Vineberg

"BRECHT/THEATRE/FILM," At the Harvard Film Archive, through February 22.

The remarkably scholarly "Brecht/Theatre/Film" series beginning this week at the Harvard Film Archive (where it is co-sponsored by the Goethe Institut Boston) raises an intriguing question. Given that Bertolt Brecht was not only one of the most prolific playwrights of our century but possibly the single most influential on post-realist theatrical thought, why have so few of his plays been transferred to the screen?

It's true that movies, even more than theater, have the propensity for creating the illusionary realism Brecht so despised -- he equated its effect on audiences to narcolepsy and damned it as counterproductive to the political action he hoped his own plays would provoke viewers to take. Nonetheless, there's a long Brechtian legacy in movies. The deliberate distancing of the audience known to students of Brecht's methodology as the "Verfremdungseffekt" -- a term that's been translated inadequately as "alienation effect" -- is familiar to us through the work of directors as disparate as Godard and the Taviani brothers. Woody Allen employs it in the romantic comedy Annie Hall; the Freudian dramatist Dennis Potter gets considerable psychological mileage out of it -- a purpose Brecht would surely have deplored -- in Pennies from Heaven and his BBC miniseries The Singing Detective. There's even a brief, mysterious Brechtian passage in Martin Scorsese's 1977 musical New York, New York where Robert De Niro watches a sailor and his girl dance without music on a subway platform.

My guess is that, aside from the later versions of The Threepenny Opera (one came out in the late '50s and another, known as Mack the Knife, a few years ago), the HFA series gathers virtually every Brecht movie. The Pabst Threepenny from 1931 is here, of course (February 7), a stunningly designed and photographed production that suffers, however, from the gifted director's apparent bafflement about what to do with the musical numbers. (Their simple, cardboard-cutout style is probably consistent with the Kabarett theatrical context out of which Brecht and the composer Kurt Weill's work emerged, but on a flat screen they're inarticulate.) Here are films of The Mother (February 15) and Mother Courage and Her Children (February 8) performed by Brecht's East Berlin-based Berliner Ensemble, with his widow, Helen Weigel, the most celebrated of all Brecht interpreters, in the title roles -- films that Americans could never have seen before the wall fell.

Shorts preserve portions of A Man's a Man (February 6), which Brecht directed and Weigel and Peter Lorre appear in, and the landmark US production of Galileo (February 14) that starred Charles Laughton. There's a documentary by Hans Jürgen Syberberg (Syberberg Films Brecht, February 14) and one about a Sri Lankan mounting of Puntila and Matti (Herr Puntila in Sri Lanka, February 8). Brecht wrote Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World in 1932 and directed The Mysteries of a Hairdresser's Shop in 1923 (both can be seen February 6). Among the other arcane offerings are a 1953 film of Señora Carrar's Rifles (February 21), again with Weigel, and a half-hour film by Nick Havinga called "Bertolt Brecht: Practice Pieces" (February 8), which illustrates Brecht's elusive theory of acting training.

Of these films only Threepenny was available for preview. But I did get to see the one picture Brecht worked on during his disastrous sojourn in Hollywood, the 1943 Hangmen Also Die (February 13), which was directed by Brecht's fellow refugee from Hitler, Fritz Lang. Lang had already made his own Brechtian experiment in 1938, in collaboration with Weill, an oddity called You and Me that surfaced in the Brattle's "Universal Noirs" series last year. Hangmen Also Die is based on a story by Brecht and Lang, but the only Brechtian element in it is its pedantry -- an imperfect rendering of the distinctive Brecht tone, of course, which always includes a strong measure of irony.

Still, the movie is fascinating. A wartime propaganda thriller set in Czechoslovakia, it makes only the most superficial adjustments for the Eastern European setting. Brian Donlevy plays the Resistance hero as if the character had stepped out of one of the Dashiell Hammett stories he was more comfortable appearing in. And, in a casting stroke for the ages, Walter Brennan shows up in a goatee and specs as a professor named Stefan Novotny with contacts in the Czech underground. The results, which are beyond description, certainly produce a peculiarly Hollywood form of alienation effect. Only Brecht completists and the resolutely curious need check out Hangmen Also Die. Anyone who cares about what Brecht was up to will want to sample the rest.