The films of the Berlinale are an annual treat, and not least because they enrich the lectures I prepare every semester, in unexpected ways. Two films in particular have made the 1920s and 30s come into sharp focus: the two-part miniseries Brecht, a biopic of sorts, written and directed by Heinrich Breloer, about Bertolt Brecht; and Mr. Jones, the latest foray of Agnieszka Holland into the bloodbath of European 20thcentury history, focused on the British journalist who first reported on the Soviet-made famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s (staggering death toll: between six and seven million). They also propose parallels with current events, as they examine the role of the artist and the journalist, in their pursuit of beauty and truth, confronting state power. As I like to remind the students, if they don’t make connections between the classroom and the outside world - if they don’t “think” - a college education is sterile.
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| Brecht (Tom Schilling) and collaborator Elizabeth Hauptmann (Leonie Benesch) work on The Three Penny Opera |
Brecht was made by Bavaria Film, the production company turning 100 this year, looking to tap on the hot market for limited and long form series, German and international, blazing the trail of Babylon Berlin (2017). It is an intelligent take on the complicated private and public sides of the German playwright. The reviews I read, and the comments exchanged with some colleagues, were not enthusiastic, remarking that the picture was superficial and plodding - “the kind of ‘prestige’ biopic one expects from public television”, as Variety noted.
However, it is the striking use of old and new interviews with Brecht’s collaborators, blending quite seamlessly with the dramatization, that makes the film stimulating for use in class. This archival footage sets up the historical context of Brecht’s life (1898 – 1956). The first episode is centered in 1920s Berlin, the decade of giddy artistic experimentation, and the second unfolds in the 1950s, when Brecht is charting the experimental/ideological course of the Berliner Ensemble. But the city is now in the hands of cultural commissars, and the debate about the role of art in society (excitingly explored in the first episode) has been stifled, while the practice of socialist realism is enforced. This underlying tension between the artist and the state makes Brecht a relevant work for our students. Interestingly, the writer’s exile in the U.S., between 1941 and 1947, and his work alongside his German compatriots, in theater and in Hollywood, is glossed over. Except for the widely circulated footage of his testimony at the House of Un-American Activities Committee, an interview with his lawyer from a documentary, and a fictionalized short scene of Brecht rehearsing his speech in faltering English, we jump over from the Weimar Republic to the GDR. (An extended treatment of his Hollywood career would have brought another dimension to the film; but one understands that production costs, and, ultimately, the need to keep the German perspective must have prevailed. However, even a brief a scene with Fritz Lang and other German writers and directors would have been to die for).
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| Brecht in the recreated Romanisches Café on Kurfürstendamm Strasse in Berlin |
Brecht is played by two superb actors, Tom Schilling (Never Look Away), as a young poet and playwright, and Burghart Klaussner (The White Ribbon, The State vs. Fritz Bauer) as Brecht in his fifties, who do look like the writer, in costume, makeup and mannerisms. Because the film constantly jumps from archival footage (even Berlin, Symphony of a Big City makes nicely edited appearances) to the dramatizations, the effect is quite stunning. The most compelling sections are interviews with collaborators, including his long-suffering actress wife Helene Weigel, and an intriguing one with Berliner Ensemble actress Regine Lutz, still under the spell of Brecht many years later. These interviews function like the flashbacks of Citizen Kane, to give rich insights into Brecht’s artistic idiosyncrasies, his left-wing ideas, sexual profligacies and his treatment of associates. It’s a tightly woven tapestry that kept this viewer glued to the seat for three hours. (How Brecht would have fared in the #MeToo era is a tantalizing question).
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| Gareth Jones (James Norton) arrives in the Ukraine in 1933 |
If Brecht discusses the role of the artist in society, as a prophet and agent of change, Mr. Jones asks pointedly about the responsibilities of a journalist as an investigator of truth in the era of “fake news’, to quote director Agnieszka Holland during the post-screening press conference. For Holland and first-time screenwriter Andrea Chalupa, Mr. Jones, played by James Norton, was an urgent and necessary film, since there is no democracy without free media. What can be seen as a platitude in the current state of affairs, becomes a fascinating story, that of the Cambridge-educated journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935), whose first-hand account of the horrific extent of the Holodomor, the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, pierced through the veil of misinformation and lies woven by the Stalin regime. (He was killed by a communist agent in Mongolia at age 30.) The machinations of Soviet propaganda had succeeded because Western believers in the construction of the new Russia were willing to justify the horrendous cost in human lives, accepting Stalinist propaganda wholesale as a means to an end. The film’s historical fellow-traveler was the Moscow-based New YorkTimes correspondent Walter Duranty (a finely unctuous performance by Peter Sarsgaard), the gatekeeper for Western journalists seeking access to reporting from the Soviet Union.
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| Plaque unveiled in 2006 commemorating Jones in Aberystwyth University, U.K. |
For my money, these are the most fascinating aspects of Mr. Jones: not only the recreation of a political dynamic pitting a courageous and somewhat naïve individual against a totalitarian system, but also the way a messianic ideology replaces facts with their interpretation. George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) makes a key appearance in the movie (at first, somewhat confusing) to make the point that his disillusion with the Soviet system was triggered in part by the harrowing facts uncovered by Jones, and culminated in Animal Farm, published a decade later. In the opening minutes, we see Orwell writing his novel, seemingly unrelated to the story. The connection will come two thirds into the film, when Orwell and Jones meet in London, after the trip. There is no historical record of such an encounter, the screenwriter answered to a question; it was an artistic license at the service of a larger truth.
In these days of multiple platforms, I hope Brechtand Mr. Jonesreach a large audience; the use of these films in media-related classes would be a fruitful and – I know – an entertaining addition.
On a brief aside, why is it that German filmmakers need to prove themselves against their greatest directors? Fatih Akin, whose place in present-day German cinema seems assured, degrades Lang’s 1931 classic M (always a revelation to the students) with his Competition film, The Golden Gloveby denying the protagonist any trace of humanity. All that is shown on screen are brutally explicit acts of violence by a retard masquerading as Peter Lorre.
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