[In the following essay, Elsaesser argues in favor of The Threepenny Opera's merits as a great achievement in Weimar cinema despite a lawsuit filed against Pabst by Bertolt Brecht—the author of the opera upon which Pabst's film is based.]

PRELIMINARIES

To write about Pabst's The Threepenny Opera (Die 3-Groschen-Oper, 1931) is to venture into a minefield of received opinions. Even if one sidesteps the boobytraps of literary adaptations and refrains from debating the faithfulness of filmed classics, one ends up frying on the barbed wire of Bertolt Brecht's powerfully polemical defense of his intellectual property in The Threepenny Trial (Der Dreigroschenprozess). Finally, Pabst's ambivalent role within the Nazi film industry seems to weigh the arguments in favor of assuming that the filmmaker had necessarily “betrayed” Brecht.¹ Any assessment of the film in its own right is therefore likely to be seen as a case of special pleading. But since the film is most often discussed in the context of Brecht,² I propose to dispose as quickly as possible of the question of the lawsuit and the circumstances of the production. Instead, I want to concentrate on whether, in light of the film itself, Pabst's approach to the material has a coherence of its own. This should allow some conclusions about Pabst, and also put the case of The Threepenny Opera for being considered a major work of Weimar Cinema.

THE LAWSUIT AND ITS LEGACY

On the merits of the lawsuit and trial, commentators usually attend to Brecht's version. This seems reasonable, especially since his purpose in writing up his experiences with the film industry are interesting for two reasons. First, it will be remembered that Brecht, from about 1928 onwards, was practicing what one might call a strategy of cultural intervention, wanting to make his presence felt in virtually every debate and through every existing medium of artistic production. Brecht, in Walter Benjamin's words, sought “never to supply the apparatus without trying to change it.”³ Not only did he work in the theater, he wrote radio plays, participated in musical life through his collaborations with Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and Hanns Eisler. He was active in proletarian associations such as the Rote Wedding and wrote learning plays for factories and workers' clubs. He involved himself in filmmaking via Prometheus Film, and with Slatan Dudow and Eisler made Kuhle Wampe.⁴ For the theater he wrote such different plays for such different publics (or non-publics) as The Mother (Die Mutter) and St. Joan of the Stockyards (Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe). All this made the years between 1928 and 1933 among the most productive of his life.⁵The Threepenny Trial must be seen in this context.

Second, Brecht (who lost his case—whereas Weill accepted an out-of-court settlement and did rather well financially) was able to take the legal debate onto the high ground of political theory and ideological critique. By focusing on the contradictions between bourgeois notions of artistic autonomy, on the one hand, and capitalist notions of property, on the other, Brecht demonstrated that bourgeois law, though called upon to defend intellectual rights of ownership, cannot in practice legislate against a material concept of ownership, even if this leaves bourgeois ideology in tatters as a result.⁶ Since Brecht believed neither in artistic autonomy nor in the capitalist mode of production, he could claim to have instigated the lawsuit in order for the system to reveal its own contradictions: hence the subtitle “Sociological Experiment,” a prime example of Brecht's “interventionist thinking (eingreifendes Denken).”⁷The Threepenny Trial was a sociological experiment not only about individual authorship under capitalism, but a materialist account of how the structure of the film industry itself determines the nature of the products.

Pabst, in an interview with A. Kraszna-Krausz (not quoted as often as Brecht) given on becoming the Head of Dacho (the independent union of German film-workers), implicitly comments on the controversy and points to one of the historical reasons for the ambivalent position of the creative personnel in filmmaking: “A process [of production developed during stormy commercial prosperity means that] the originators of mental-creative work were (and are) not able to decide sufficiently for themselves. They are used as material nearly always.” Pabst is here astutely political, especially when he goes on to make the case not only on behalf of (relatively privileged) writers, but of others active in the industry, including technicians. Pabst stressed, for instance, the importance of unionization. He concluded: “The social question of the film-worker remains unsolved as long as the film is the exclusive property, that is to say: ‘good’ in the hands of the manufacturer and his renters.”⁸

Brecht and Weill, when taking out proceedings against Nero, knew that they could count on maximum publicity. The whole affair attracted much press coverage, well beyond the film industry trade journals and the culture section of daily papers, because The Threepenny Opera was “hot property” at the time, the hottest there was, in fact.⁹ As a consequence, the lawsuit was personalized and publicized to an extraordinary degree, with every critic feeling he had to take a stand. Thus, when writing up The Threepenny Trial, Brecht had a fat clipping file to draw on.¹⁰ There is some doubt whether he ever saw the film, either then, or subsequently.¹¹

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF PRODUCTION

What did the situation look like from the point of view of Nero Film, and by extension, the German film industry? Kurt Weill had sold the film rights of The Threepenny Opera to the Berlin representative of Warner Brothers, who went into coproduction with Tobis Klangfilm¹² and Seymour Nebenzahl as owner of Nero Film. On May 21, 1930, Brecht signed a contract with Nero Film-AG, giving him “consultation rights” (Mitbestimmung) on the script, but no powers of a veto.¹³ The film was to be shot in three versions: German, French and English, as was common practice for major productions in the brief period between the coming of sound and the invention of dubbing.¹⁴ This already indicates that the companies involved were not only hoping for worldwide distribution, but from the start conceived of it as a major production,¹⁵ indeed, it was said to have had the “biggest set that had ever been made for a German movie up to that time.”¹⁶

Nero, with its aggressive production policy (other major Nero films during these years included Pabst's Kameradschaft and Fritz Lang's M), wanted to break into the international market, and also to strengthen its hand against Ufa, the distribution giant in the German and European market. For Warner Brothers, teaming up with a German independent producer was a way of keeping a foot in the door. Much, therefore, was riding on the success of the project and its smooth realization. In the Kraszna-Krausz interview Pabst is aware of the wider economic implications and also of his own dilemma as creative artist and representative of a professional body within the film industry:

G.W.P.:
Once already, eight years ago, Germany was able to determine the development of the silent film. Then Germany like the whole rest of the world succumbed to the American film. Now for the second time the fate of the European film is lying in the hands of Germany. France, England have already succumbed afresh to American money. Russia has not yet succeeded in finding a productive attitude to the sound-film. America's production however has driven into a blind alley, out of which the way will scarcely be found alone [sic]. Germany is uncommonly enabled by its literary and musical past to determine the shape of the sound-film of tomorrow, if …
A.K.K.:
… if the German industry will not be Americanized in spite of all that. If the Russia of the silent film won't remain eternally the ‘Mekka’ of the German critics.
G.W.P.:
… and if the German film-workers will at last determine their fate—and with it the fate of the German film—all by themselves.(17)

The Threepenny Trial was, in this respect, a minor episode in the international struggle of the major companies to sew up the European market, with mixed results. It may have been good box-office publicity for the international release of the film, but there is evidence to suggest that the delays and the terms of the eventual settlement foiled the plans for an English-language version.¹⁸

Weill sued Warner/Nero because of the music, rather than any alterations in the text, nor for fearing that the social message of the play had been blunted.¹⁹ In the contract he was guaranteed exclusive control over the music to be used. The grounds on which he was able to litigate successfully were apparently that in the scene of the beggars' final march on Trafalgar Square, one trumpet call was inserted that Weill had not composed.²⁰ Weill's settlement is, so to speak, a counter-example of a Brechtian brass trade (Messingkauf): Nero bought from Weill the trumpet call he had not composed.

BRECHT AND PABST: TWO DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE CINEMA?

When considering how “faithful” the film is to Brecht, one is looking at two sources, rather than simply at the original Brecht-Weill opera: Brecht wrote a fairly detailed treatment for the film, as stipulated by his contract. Since the publication of this treatment,²¹ several critics have tried to extrapolate from it Brecht's implicit conception of the film, comparing it to Pabst's realization.²² Most of them take the view that the film is somehow “fatal to Brecht.”²³ The exception is Jan-Christopher Horak, who in a careful assessment of Brecht's treatment of the film script by Leo Lania, Béla Balázs and Ladislaus Vajda,²⁴ and of Pabst's actual realization of both, comes to the conclusion that “Pabst's film is ideologically more correct from a Marxist point of view” than the opera, Brecht's treatment, and the script.²⁵ The argument generally revolves around two basic issues: first, whether Pabst's concern for a more classical continuity style—integrating the songs into the narrative and leaving out as many as he did (from the “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” and the “Tango Ballad,” to the “Executioner's Ballad” and Mack's prison song)—constituted a betrayal of Brecht's epic form and undermined the role of the street singer and various other protagonists, who in the original step in and out of their fictional roles. Second, whether the changes made to Brecht's treatment by the scriptwriters somehow inverted, attenuated, or otherwise falsified the political message Brecht wanted to convey. On the first issue, Horak maintains that Pabst's direction of the actors (many, such as Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Carola Neher, drawn from the first or second stage production) “comes closest to the Brechtian conception of ‘epic’ theater,”²⁶ insofar as dialogue is pared down and sparingly used. (This, of course, is also due to the technical difficulties of combining music, camera movement and spoken word in one take.²⁷) The characters, in the love scenes for instance, look straight into the camera, breaking the illusionistic space of the diegesis.

Discussions of the second point—alterations to the story line—have focused mainly on the ending, and the motivation for the rivalry between Peachum and Macheath. In the opera, Peachum puts pressure on Tiger Brown, the police chief, to avenge Macheath's seduction of and elopement with Peachum's daughter Polly. In Brecht's treatment, the sexual shenanigans are secondary and the rivalry is between the bosses of two competing businesses, both leeching on the middle class: Macheath's gang of professional thieves and fences (the “Platte,” numbering around 120 men), and Peachum's beggar syndicate. Lania, Vajda and Balázs's script once again personalizes the antagonism between Peachum and Macheath and sends Peachum to a dismal fate after his beggars have turned upon him. The finished film represents a compromise, or rather, a skillful synchro-meshing of the two narrative motors driving the conflicting interests, notably by making Polly a much stronger character. At first a typically “romantic” figure, lovestruck, vain, and innocent, Polly turns herself into a hardheaded businesswoman: she is the one who, during Macheath's stint in jail, leads the gang into going legitimate, and sets the terms on which both Tiger Brown and old Peachum join the Bank—the ironic twist being that she does it “out of love,” as if running a bank were no different from keeping the house tidy for her husband's return. Brecht, in his film treatment, is mainly interested in working out the logic of capitalist dog-eat-dog-or-join-the-pack, making the play more like Arturo Ui by introducing a gradient of move and counter-move into the linear flow. The transition from opera to film gave Brecht a chance to maximize the cinema's ability to suggest through editing new connections and new chains of cause, effect, and consequence.

Reading The Bruise (Die Beule), one cannot help feeling that Brecht was having fun being hard-boiled and cynical. He must have known the problems his ideas would encounter in production. Some scenes are more dada than epic theater, with sketches of the dramatic situation and characterization that are broad caricature.²⁸ Montage sequences underline the didactic gestus of the whole. Brecht tried to use film as a medium that “reduces” lines of dramatic development, intent to get from A to B in the shortest possible time. At worst, Brecht is trying to sabotage the project from the start; at best, The Bruise is a critique of the dominant modes of the silent “author's film” prevalent during the 1920s.

Brecht creates causal relationships; Weimar cinema dissolves causal relationships. Brecht is elliptical in order to force issues into contradictions, whereas expressionist cinema uses ellipsis to suspend causality, to introduce ambiguity, and to open up parentheses. Where Brecht is interested in metonymy, the German cinema employs metaphor; Brecht goes for satire, pastiches, irony, the German cinema for pathos, self-tormented psychology, primary process imagery. Brecht's is a text of verbal aggression, the Weimar cinema revels in texts of mute repression. Brecht's affectivity is all invested in punning and “Witz” (the saving of psychic energy) whereas the Weimar cinema's psychic economy is more like dreamwork: it, too, shifts the burden of representation onto figures of condensation and displacement, but without the semiotic or comic payoffs.

What is generally missing in German films is not an attention to detail or objects, but their concretization within the image, and also within the intellectual movement of a scene. Expressionist abstraction is, as Brecht recognized, the very opposite of the kind of reduction or foreshortening (“Verkürzung”) he was after. It is a form of symbolic generalization which opens the event to its contamination by the categories of the imaginary: reversible, inward, existential, psychoanalytical. The historical specificity and social gestus are almost always absent.

Yet Pabst's work, too, provides a critique of Weimar cinema while at the same time exploiting to the full what had made the German cinema internationally famous in the 1920s. He parodies, for instance, the expressionist mania for charging objects with a life of their own. In one of the night scenes, as the gang steals the furnishings for Mackie's wedding, we see an armchair scurrying through the streets, shot at and followed by a policeman. Here Surrealism is invoked to deflate Expressionism.²⁹ More importantly, though, Pabst has rethought in terms of his medium the issues that Brecht raises in the original and in his film treatment.³⁰The Threepenny Opera, as we have it, is not so much a film about the contradictions between moral codes and business practices (the theme of capitalism's own betrayal of the ideology that supports it, also taken up in The Threepenny Trial). Instead, Pabst concentrates on the duplicity of representation itself, and of filmic representation in particular.

To phrase the contrast between Brecht and Pabst in these terms may seem paradoxical, given that Brecht, too, criticized bourgeois modes of representation, and above all, the canons of realism and verisimilitude. But Brecht's notion of representation was language-based, and in his film work he seems to show little interest in the crises of representation brought about by the new culture of the image (however perceptive he was about photography).³¹ For Brecht, the primacy of language always remained the writer's hope, coupled with an enlightenment belief in the demystifying powers of the word.³²

Before exploring this point further, it is worth mentioning that The Threepenny Opera is also “Brechtian” in ways perhaps different from those mentioned above. To the extent that it engages with a recognizable fictional scenario, the narrative is a standard Weimar Oedipal situation: a man steals a daughter from a father, who becomes violent and homicidal but is essentially powerless to intervene, since in the process, the daughter emancipates herself from both father and lover. This scenario, which is similar to, say, a Heimatfilm like Vulture Wally (Die Geier-Wally, E. A. Dupont, 1921), is deconstructed by Pabst, who lets the material interests (“business”) triumph over blood ties and family interests—except that in the end, family interests and business interests are made to coincide perfectly. What in other Weimar films gives rise to melodrama (or comedy) becomes here a parody for the purpose of a materialist critique of the bourgeois family. Rather than depicting a story of betrayal and jealousy (Macheath, unfaithful to Jenny, is betrayed by her to Peachum, who betrays him to the police) which would amount to psychologizing the Brechtian plot, the film is true to Brecht's consistent de-Oedipalizing of family relationships: as in Mother Courage (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder), Galileo, and even The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis).

PABST'S POWERPLAY OF APPEARANCES

Pabst's cinema, and especially where it deals with political or social issues, has always supported its dramatic conflicts by underpinning them with another structure altogether: that of visual fascination, the treachery and irony of appearances.³³ Revolution, as in The Love of Jeanne Ney, or the turmoil of postwar inflation, as in The Joyless Street, are grist to the same mill, where power is defined across its hold on the machineries of make-believe. In this, of course, he is not alone among the major Weimar directors: Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch, too, work with the very structures of the cinema as the powerplay of appearances.

Pabst's obsession with the shifting configurations produced by the false ontology of the filmic image can, I think, be usefully compared to that of Lang: the logic of The Threepenny Opera as a film rests on its place within this wider, also typically Weimar preoccupation. Pabst's Mackie Messer (and especially as incarnated by Rudolf Forster) is above all, the hero of many disguises: the opening song, already in Brecht, emphasizes his ubiquity and invisibility. But the way the film introduces him, leaving the brothel in Drury Lane, emphasizes another point. One of the girls passes him his cane through the window, he tugs at it, she playfully refuses to let go and the cane unsheathes to reveal a lethal dagger, the “teeth” from the song. No object that Mackie is associated with is what it appears to be and yet each becomes a metaphor of his personality. In this respect, he is a second cousin to Dr. Mabuse, equally dandified, though Mabuse is more darkly intelligent and tormented than Macheath. But whereas Mabuse connotes the mesmerizing power of capitalism itself with its breathtaking manipulation of the mass media and public institutions, Mackie Messer's power is founded on erotic power, the register of seduction, which in Mabuse is a mere by-product, a consequence of deploying the kind of intellect needed to wield social power. The Mackie of the film seems incapable of the deeds attributed to him in the Mack the Knife song, however much we see him actively encouraging the legend, and, indeed, being a slave to its claims.

Thus, apart from keeping certain epic elements already mentioned (the songs, the street singer-presenter), Pabst retains a typical ambivalence. In the guise of a critique of “moonshine and romanticism,” the opera had romanticized the proletarian demimonde of the brothel, the pimp, sexual libertinage, and antibourgeois moral sentiment. Brecht's film treatment goes some way towards excising this lumpen sentimentality. Pabst returns to the element that undoubtedly had made the opera such a hit, but adds a telling nuance, in that he uses the performative cabaret mode to redefine the main protagonist's social status as a celebrity. For instance, the first time we see Mackie Messer head-on is when he joins the crowd listening to Ernst Busch singing the Mack the Knife song. His look into the camera introduces a point of view of the crowd and initiates his search for Polly and her mother. Pabst cuts to the crowds moving closer to Ernst Busch singing, then to Mackie entering the frame, followed by a policeman. Mackie twirls his cane in response to the line about the teeth no one can see. A tracking shot from a high angle (the level of Ernst Busch standing on a platform) follows the crowd milling about before it identifies with the diagonal movement of Polly and Mrs. Peachum.

Here the camera, at first moved by Macheath in pursuit of Polly, turns out to be the delegate of the singer's narrative, weaving the character of Mackie and the setting into the song, and constructing a narrational en-abyme effect rather than a distancing device, by its complex shift in focalization.³⁴ Macheath, distracted from his quest for Polly, gets caught up in listening to the song that celebrates his exploits, which introduces both the motif of vanity and self-display, and the extent that he, too, is implicated in the universe of the “show” which so completely dominates the world of the brothel, but also that of Peachum's beggars. The young man through whom the audience is introduced to Peachum's business and whose real poverty lacks credibility until he is kitted out in rags, looks at himself in the mirror, gazing at his image in wonderment and awe. The scene is similar to an earlier one at the wedding, where the pastor, anxious to get away, catches sight of himself in a mirror and is rooted to the spot by his reflection. Later, at a moment of great danger, with the police in hot pursuit, Macheath looks at himself on a “Wanted” poster, and encouraged by this boost to his ego, sets about seducing another female passerby. In these instances of recognition/miscognition, the characters lose themselves to the phenomenon of fascination itself: but only Macheath, captivated by his own image, makes narcissism the chief resource of his power over others.

Eroticism as seduction has in Pabst's cinema much to do with the characters' ability to control the image, which in turn is a control of one's own appearance and disappearance: witness Mackie's compulsive Thursday visits to the “whores at Tunbridge,” elaborate charades of regularity and surprise, geared not toward the sensuous extension of moments of pleasure, but the mise en scène of an ever more skillful vanishing artist. From this it would seem that the power of fascination is ambivalent in respect of gender. In The Threepenny Opera, Mackie, phallic hero par excellence, is “feminized” by his flaunted narcissism, assuming the function of a fetish, and becoming the love object of both males and females: of the masculinized Jenny, the ultra-feminine Polly, and of Tiger Brown, his buddy from the wars. In his dependence on this circulation of desire and its frustration (and the social machinations which result from it), Mackie's position is similar to the role occupied by Lulu in Pandora's Box.³⁵ No doubt his eroticism brings into Pabst's text a subversion quite different from that intended by Brecht and makes Mackie an ambivalent narrative agent, halfway between possessor of the look that furthers the plot and the look that acknowledges being-looked-at-ness: longingly, suspiciously, angrily, admiringly.

Yet Pabst's reworking of the central figure is, as it were, only the localized instance, the evidence of a structure of perversity and narrational reversibility which allows the director to bracket it with another structure of fascination, also perhaps erotic, but in the first instance directed towards the social world: the fascination emanating from the different sham worlds which vie for the spectator's attention. There is the world of Peachum's beggars, that of Tiger Brown's forces of law and order, of capitalist business practices, of respectability, and of Jenny's sexuality, all of them dominated by display and masquerade, which find their corollaries in the wedding feast and the brothel visit and culminate in the crowd scenes and the sham revolution of the beggars' procession.

UNIFORMS AND DUMMIES, WINDOWS AND DOORS

One of the criticisms leveled against The Threepenny Opera is that Pabst allowed it to become the set designer's and art director's film.³⁶ But the evident emphasis on textures and materials, decor, and props rather underlines the inner logic of Pabst's conception, and the continuity that exists between “classical” Weimar cinema of the 1920s and the sound films of the early 1930s. For a distinctive feature of German silent cinema, and part of its pioneering role in film history, is the “designed” look of so many of the films, based as they were on the close collaboration between director, scriptwriter, cameraman, art director, and editor. This labor-intensive and costly production method allowed directors to pre-design each shot or set-up, and to integrate characters, setting, figure movement, and editing in a way Hollywood had to acquire by importing the star talents from Germany in the 1920s—Lubitsch, Murnau, Pommer, among others.³⁷

Thus, here is a further reason why the collaboration with Brecht was bound to be difficult, given Brecht's unwillingness to subject himself to this apparatus and Pabst's habit of planning set-ups very carefully but improvising story details and dialogue material to fit in with the visual conception:

In framing a scene from the pictorial point of view and in understanding how to use the camera for pictorial effect, he is probably one of the greatest. … What makes it rather difficult for a writer to work with Pabst [is that] he has to supply the whole structure and at the same time he has to creep, as it were, into Pabst's personality in order to present a story to him, a story which Pabst always sees in pictures, not in scenes. … Pabst is certainly not a disciplined person, in the sense of being able to organize a story, to construct. And so if the other man, like Brecht, is just the opposite, but also unable to tell a story, darting from point to point, then you have no counter balance and no force that supplies the structure, the skeleton for the story.³⁸

To the extent, therefore, that Pabst's Threepenny Opera coheres around a unity of style,³⁹ it is still very much an example of a “cinema of metaphor” in the tradition of the 1920s.⁴⁰ Two metaphoric chains run through the film. One is centered on puppets and dummies, statues and objets d'art; the second on windows, partitions, doors, and Mackie's prison cell. Scenes are not only frequently marked off by a fade-out or black leader (thereby minimizing narrational contiguity), but stand under a different master image: for instance, the window of the brothel and the milliner's shop window are “condensed” in the scene where Jenny opens the window to signal to Mrs. Peachum and the police; the mirrors in the dance hall anticipate those at the wedding and in Peachum's house; the stairs at the warehouse serve as altar for the wedding ceremony, allow Macheath to do his dictation and office work, and “rhyme” Tiger Brown's entrance with the gang's exit; at Peachum's the stairs dramatize the family quarrel, and in the brothel, they show Mackie making his escape.

Both metaphoric series function either in tandem or as counterpoints and both are integral to locating the film in a play of the human and the mechanical, of inside and outside, open and closed, of mirrors and walls, light and darkness—in short, a play of doubles and oppositional pairs entirely focused on sight, illusionism, and imaginary space: a combination which fairly defines that intensification of visual pleasure in Weimar cinema which one might call the fascination of the false.

The subject of puppets is introduced very early on. Before the film properly begins, and over the chorus from the Threepenny song, doll-like stand-ins of the leading characters parade in the round like Seven Deadly Sins or Foolish Virgins on a medieval cathedral clock. Besides preparing for the narrational effects described above, which place Mackie both inside and outside the double fiction of the song and the narrative, the playful sarcasm of the figurines raises the question of who controls the mechanism activating the power politics, of who, finally, pulls the strings on whom and is thus in charge of the show.⁴¹ The motif is taken up when we see the dummy bride in the shop window, stripped bare by Mackie's “bachelors” a few scenes further on, with one of the thieves tipping his hat to her—very nearly the same hat that was tipped to Mackie in the dance hall, and then to Tiger Brown. His is the character most closely associated with the metaphoric chain that goes from dress-dummies to dress uniforms, from bowler hats and etiquette to the imposture of office and authority most graphically shown in the scene where one of Macheath's men lets himself be caught “redhanded” by the police in order to deliver the wedding invitation—hidden in his deferentially lowered hat—directly to Tiger Brown. Visually, the bowler hats and their self-importance are echoed in the grotesquely inflated barrels dominating Macheath's warehouse.⁴² Morally, the motif leads to Peachum, his dummies as beggars, and his beggars as the rent-a-mob dummies of the powers-that-be. Yet so aware is the film of its play on reversal and ironic inversions that Pabst not only introduces a slave motif in the brothel, shown full of statues of negresses, but they form a rhyming contrast to the white plaster goddesses with Greek pretensions in the warehouse, shown most prominently after Polly sings her ballad of the man with the dirty collar who doesn't know how to treat a lady, and Mackie admonishes his men who find the song “very nice”: “You call this nice, you fools—it's art.”

The metaphoric chain that links the many windows, trapdoors, partitions, and skylights first of all draws attention to the sets themselves. In the warehouse, a slow pan reveals the whole brilliant display, but the scene is actually constructed as a series of rapidly changing passages to different fantasy worlds. The backdrop to the wedding, for instance, is the harbor and the moon, in keeping with Mackie and Polly's “Moon over Soho” duet. But its character as a stage (or movie) set, now in keeping with the intensely felt phoniness of the sentiments expressed, is underscored by the fact that we first see it as a steel door, before it is hung with Chinese embroidery. After another song, announced by Polly and applauded by the guests as a performance, a curtain is pulled, the marital bed revealed and a drawbridge raised. The atmosphere of a country fair combines with the sophisticated illusionism of a backstage musical, and as in Pandora's Box, the stage and the mechanics of putting on a show serve as a metaphor for the deceptiveness of representation, but also the pleasure of that very deceptiveness. The warehouse, Aladdin's cave of capitalist production, here a surrealist accumulation of stolen goods and a hideous clash of styles, gives not only the wedding an air of unreality: by celebrating the false bottom of the world it depicts, it turns the human players, but especially the figures of morality and law (the pastor and Tiger Brown) into mere props and objects, obsolete mementos of a bygone age.

This scene stands in a structural contrast to the one in the brothel, which is built very similarly around the foregrounded architectural elements of the decor. Jenny's entrance is lit explicitly to recall that of Tiger Brown when he stepped through the skylight of the warehouse. But what is highlighted here are the different acts of transfer and exchange: framed in the window, Jenny stuffs Mrs. Peachum's bribe in her stocking, the same window that Mackie steps through immediately after. Jenny then opens the window making the fatal sign to Mrs. Peachum and the policemen, before closing it again, while other girls draw the curtains. The window makes this drama of entrapment and betrayal into a scene where money, glances, and bodies become interchangeable signs of transaction and transgression.

Thus, even motifs that relate more directly to the political issues, such as the constant references to ledgers and accounts, bills, papers, lists, bail money, and bank business are, as it were, introduced via references to visual exchanges. Conspicuous at the bank, for instance, is a sliding door with frosted glass, giving rise to a kind of shadow play, where each “board member” takes a bow without the spectator seeing the object of their deference. It is through this very door that Tiger Brown comes, as he slips from one high office to another, strutting into the room with his guard-officer's uniform.

THE CHARM AND CHARISMA OF MACKIE MESSER

One reason why the film contains so many sets with partitions, panes of clear or frosted glass, blinds and curtains, windows half-lifted and suddenly dropped, is that they play a key role in defining Mackie Messer's mode of authority, based as his attraction is on his image as a show-value. Noticeable from the opening scene—sash windows are raised, objects like a glove, a cane are passed through, linking the inside with the outside—is that entrances, exits, and internal frames establish the paradigm of communicating vessels so important for the movement of the film as a whole. In this respect, transparency and transport are the secrets of Mackie's success, and his power (of fascination, of attraction) resides in an ability to penetrate walls and summon people through windows. The scene where Mackie takes Polly to the dance hall, persuades her to marry him, and organizes the wedding all at the same time is Pabst's way of showing a form of power in action, based, it seems, entirely on the glance and the gesture, on shadows spied through partitions and messages passed as if by magic. Mackie looks at the camera (an incompletely sutured point-of-view shot towards the two crooks), Polly looks at Mackie, while between them is a spherical wall-mounted light, announcing the full moon later on. This set-up is repeated many times: the spectator is drawn into the imaginary space to the front of the screen, and witnessing the consequences of Mackie's look, experiences the power of that look. Thus Mackie does not have to do anything to win Polly: he is the man who makes things happen by simply being seen. In the dance hall full of mirrors reflecting other couples dancing, everything organizes itself around Mackie—source of a power that is economic, logistic, and erotic—but in this scene framed, himself, as a spectator.

This play on vision establishes a double mode of control on the level of the narrative, Macheath's power is defined as active but the mode in which this power is exercised and visualized is passive. A male character defined as phallic but also narcissistic, and the many scenes staged around windows, apertures, and partitions, dramatize a mode in which seeing and being seen are the two aggregate states of the same resource of power and control.

If Mackie is an ambiguous character in relation to gender, since he is not only erotic object, but also both producer and product of the narrative, a similar ambiguity surrounds the female characters—with one important proviso. While the film's image of masculinity is embodied in Mackie, that of femininity is split between Polly and Jenny. Pabst has always been recognized as an exceptional director of actresses and the creator of memorable women characters:

Pabst has [in each of his films] displayed an interest in the mental and physical make-up of his feminine players, with the result that he has often brought to the screen women who have been unusually attractive in a bizarre, neurotic manner, very different from the brilliantly turned out, sophisticated but stereotyped women of American pictures, or the dreary young ladies favoured by British directors.⁴³

Paul Rotha goes on to single out the chance meeting of Mackie and the girl in the street immediately after his escape from the brothel, which, indeed has the sort of eroticism Baudelaire first captured in his eros-and-the-city poem “To a Passerby.” But more crucial to the narrative as a whole is the transformation of Polly, and how she translates the aggressive eroticism of Jenny into a specifically masculine power potential. Polly's mode of subjectivity is emblematically introduced in the scene in front of the milliner's shop. Mackie's desire in the opening scene is born out of a division: the frame is split, as it were, between him catching a disappearing glimpse of Polly and him separating from Jenny. Polly's desire is depicted more classically—for a female character—through the narcissistic doubling of an image. As the song ends on “Mackie, what was your price,” we see Polly in front of the shop window with the wedding dress. The camera is inside the window for this shot, then reverses the angle, and Mackie enters into the frame, but appears on the same side as the dummy in the window display.⁴⁴ Polly sees the reflection and smiles. Only then does she turn around and, with an expression of shock, sees the “real” Mackie Messer standing next to her. From being the imaginary dummy groom next to the dummy bride he becomes the spy who has seen her see her fantasy. These are the terms around which the seduction in the dance hall and the consent to marriage play themselves out across the screen of Polly's romantic double vision: glance/glance into camera by Polly/Mackie Messer, implicating the spectator into their erotic space. But Polly's narrative trajectory is, of course, the total transformation of this feminine imaginary: it ends with her assuming phallic power over both father and husband, staged in that extraordinary scene already mentioned, where all the thieves turned bank managers bow before an invisible presence, which we infer before we know it, is Polly. Her desire, overinscribed in the register of vision during the first scene, has become that ultimate of male power in the German cinema (of both Lang and Pabst)—invisibility.

DUPLICITY: THE POWER OF THE FALSE

Recent criticism of The Threepenny Opera has drawn attention to the fact that duplicity is one of the film's central preoccupations. Tony Rayns even speaks of “frank duplicity.”⁴⁵ In one sense, of course, this is in keeping with Brecht's original, and indeed his film treatment. Whereas the opera had insisted on the moral duplicity, the film treatment wanted to focus on the economic and political implications of such duplicity. What makes the film appear at one level a retrograde step is that Pabst seems to celebrate the same duplicity which in Brecht is the moral of the fable, and which the verbal wit, and the logic of the dramatic conflicts are called upon to expose. However, Pabst has recognized that the kind of duplicity which the opera had seized upon is the more difficult to focus critically, since its effects are multiple. First, duplicity energizes. Contradictions create differentials, and differentials are the very lifeblood of capitalism, its source of profit and power. Second, duplicity eroticizes. In the play Mackie is attractive to women because he plays hot and cold, because of his double standards, making explicit the duplicity of bourgeois morals by holding a mirror up to it. Finally, duplicity is the source of humor and wit. Pabst has, consistent with his project of translating all these issues into the terms appropriate to the cinema, made a film in which the false is not criticized by the true, but by the false, raised to its nth power.

This he does, essentially, by contrasting distinct forms of cinematic space, all of them imaginary. There is the use of offscreen space to the side of the frame, mostly used for comic effects, and to underscore the social hypocrisy, cynicism, and double morality enacted by the dialogue. Then there is the space to the front of the action, into the camera, and thus toward the spectator, in a manner apparently “estranging” (breaking the illusion) while also implicating us through its performative dimension. But the most typical space of the film, a kind of meta- or hyper-space of representation, is that constructed in the form of an infinite regress, en-abyme, in which a show appears within a show, a frame framing a frame. It is these cinematic markings of spatial relationships which create that constant awareness of the differentiations and degrees operating on the reality status of the image. They structure the intrigue and its logic more decisively than other, more directly social issues, and they would allow one to investigate further the fascination emanating from duplicity.

If one were to read The Threepenny Opera—analogous to so many German films of the early 1930s, and especially those of Lang—as a statement about the nature of power in the age of the mediated images and the manipulation of appearances, then the elaborate mise en scène of Mackie Messer's charisma could be seen, by itself, as a mystification of the source of power. But one might argue that what was at issue for Pabst was first and foremost to preserve the popularity—the original opera's social truth value—and that which had made it commercial, in short, a “hot property.”⁴⁶ For by emphasizing Mackie's and Polly's narcissism, Pabst enacts and also deconstructs them as role models. It is not so much, as Jean Oser jokingly put it, that “every girl wanted to be Polly … every fellow wanted to be Mackie,”⁴⁷ but that every spectator, male and female, wants to be in love with their self-image, across the desire of the other. Mackie and Polly have what to this day characterizes the successful consumer of mass-entertainment: “style.”

The German cinema thus contributed to world cinema not so much a new psychological language, a new inwardness, nor even the cinema's own self-reflexivity, but perhaps a different mode of displacing the technology of filmic production into an intensification of the erotic aspect of the filmic reality, which became the heightening of the commodity—the glamour, seizing not only the men or the women characters, but all objects, including the decor. Here lies the peculiar achievement of Pabst's mise en scène in The Threepenny Opera: he was able to imbue every aspect of the filmic process with value in itself, as an added attraction to the commodity status of the artifact which was the opera and became the film.

Notes

1. Even John Willett, who admits to liking the film, thinks that Pabst and Brecht were antagonistic in their outlook. “Gersch, like other students of Brecht, on the whole takes Brecht's view and argues that Nero … had political objections to the new material. … Personally, I doubt whether this was due to anyone but Pabst, whose divergences from Brecht's views … were surely predictable from the start.” See John Willett, Brecht in Context (London: Methuen, 1984), 115.

2. See, for instance, Europe (January-February 1957), special Brecht issue, 14-21; Ecran, No. 73 (March 1973): 2-29; Screen 16.4 (Winter 1975-1976): 16-33; Cinématographe (Paris), No. 125 (December 1986): 38-39, 42-44.

3. Walter Benjamin, “The Artist as Producer,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 220-238.

4. See “Interview with George Höllering,” Screen 15.2 (Summer 1974): 41-73 and Screen 15.4 (Winter 1974-1975): 71-79.

5. See Willett, Brecht in Context, 180-184.

6. “Capitalism in its practice is cogent (konsequent), because it has to be. But if it is cogent in practice, it has to be ideologically contradictory (inkonsequent). … Reality has developed to a point where the only obstacle to the progress of capitalism is capitalism itself.” Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), 18:204.

7. Willett calls it “a classic early media study to set alongside some of Benjamin's and subsequently Enzensberger's writings” (Brecht in Context, 116).

8. A. Kraszna-Krausz, “G. W. Pabst Before the Microphone of German Broadcasting,” Close Up 8.2 (June 1931): 122.

9. According to Jean Oser, who worked on the film as editor: “When Dreigroschenoper came out, it formed the entire pre-Hitler generation until 1933; for about five years … every girl wanted to be [like Polly, talk like Polly, and every fellow] like Mackie Messer. Apparently the ideal man was a pimp.” See Interview with Oser by Gideon Bachmann, reprinted in Masterworks of the German Cinema, introduced by Dr. Roger Manvell (London: Lorrimer, 1973), 299. (Line in [] missing from original; see microfiche file Die Dreigroschenoper in British Film Institute Library, London.)

10. See Bertolt Brechts Dreigroschenbuch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 271-336, for a selection of contemporary reviews.

11. John Willett seems to think he did (Brecht in Context, 117).

12. “Tobis had a monopoly on all sound film production in Germany because they had bought up all the Swiss, Danish and German patents. They were the only ones who could actually make sound films. You had to rent the sound crew and equipment from them. I was working for Tobis, and so when Pabst wanted to make a sound film … I became editor for him” (Oser interview, 298).

13. See Wolfgang Gersch, Film bei Brecht (Berlin/GDR: Henschel, 1975), 48, and Willett, Brecht in Context, 114.

14. See Ginette Vincendeau, “Hollywood Babel,” Screen 29.2 (Spring 1988): 24-39.

15. “I agree with Brecht, because you don't make a million-dollar movie out of a story which should practically be shot in a backyard” (Oser interview, 299).

16. Ibid., 300. This may be something of an exaggeration, considering the sets for “Grossfilme” of the 1920s such as Metropolis or Faust.

17. A. Kraszna-Krausz, “Pabst Before the Microphone,” 125-126.

18. “An English version, The Threepennies Opera [sic], was also supposed to have been shot. But it appears that essentially this became a straightforward dubbing of the German version.” Claude Beylie, “Quelques notes sur l'opéra de quat'sous,” L'Avant-Scène du Cinéma, No. 177 (1 December 1976): 4. “The film was released in France … and was a tremendous success. In Germany it was not such a success and it was attacked quite often by the critics” (Oser interview, 299). The Threepenny Opera premiered in Berlin on February 19, 1931 and was banned by the Filmprüfstelle on August 10, 1933. After a press show in Paris in March 1931, the French version was banned by the censors and only opened in November 1931, with some minor cuts, at the famous Studio des Ursulines. The cinema also showed the uncut German version.

19. See Lee Atwell, G. W. Pabst (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 83: “Although the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm production was carried out strictly according to Brecht's directions, it would be a mistake to assume that critics or audiences were captivated by Brecht's bitter cynicism about the human condition. Rather, they were taken with Kurt Weill's jazz-influenced, easily singable score and songs.”

20. This information according to the interview with Jean Oser. Willett maintains that it was the music in the wedding scene Weill objected to (115).

21. “Die Beule.” See bibliography for publication data.

22. See Arlene Croce, “The Threepenny Opera,” Film Quarterly 6.1 (Fall 1960): 43-45; Alan Stanbrook, “Great Films of the Century No. 10: Die Dreigroschenoper,” Films and Filming 7.7 (April 1961): 15-17, 38; Wolfgang Gersch, Film bei Brecht, 48-71; Willett, 113-116. These may usefully be compared to some of the original reviews of the film, such as those by Lotte Eisner, Siegfried Kracauer, and Paul Rotha.

23. Arlene Croce, 45.

24. Reprinted in full (with indications of cuts and alterations made during the shooting) in Masterworks of the German Cinema, 179-276.

25. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Threepenny Opera: Brecht vs. Pabst,” Jump Cut, No. 15 (July 1977): 20.

26. Ibid. Willett takes a similar view: “At all events, the finished film is as distinctively a Brecht work as are his other collective works of the time, starting perhaps with the Threepenny Opera and not excluding Happy End of which he chose to wash his hands; and so far as is now known he was satisfied with it” (117).

27. Paul Rotha, in his very favorable review of the film, draws special attention “to the prevalence of moving camera work in Die Dreigroschenoper. Since the introduction of the spoken word into film-making, there has been a growing tendency to decrease the number of direct cuts in a picture, partly because of the desire to minimize the amount of different camera set-ups and partly on account of the difficulties attendant on cutting and joining the sound strip” (repr. in Masterworks of the German Cinema, 296).

28. The central idea, namely that Peachum keeps in peak condition the bruise on one of his beggar's heads, received from Macheath's men when they punish him for grassing on a robbery, may be good enough for a cabaret sketch, but is plainly silly as the dramatic premise for the “multi-million movie.” Erwin Leiser, who knew Brecht personally in the 1950s and occasionally went to the cinema with him, speaks of Brecht's “hair-raising ideas of what was feasible in a feature film” (“‘Schlecht genug?’—Brecht und der Film,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 June 1983, 45).

29. “If the director has subverted the play's subversiveness, it is to the end of a poetic anarchy, irrational, beautiful and precise, where surrealism, expressionism and Marxism find a remarkable if fleeting common ground” (Tony Rayns, Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1974, 162).

30. In this he is within Brechtian thinking, according to which an adaptation ought to constitute the “deconstruction of the work, according to the vantage point of keeping its social function within a new apparatus.” Bertolt Brecht, “Der Dreigroschenprozess,” in Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 1:30; also quoted in Gersch, Film bei Brecht, 51.

31. See the famous remark in The Threepenny Trial, about a photo of the Krupp works or A.E.G. not telling anything about the reality of such institutions (Bertolt Brechts Dreigroschenbuch, 135).

32. See Josette Féral, “Distanciation et multi-media, ou Brecht inversé,” in Brecht Thirty Years After, ed. P. Kleber and C. Visser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

33. Barthélemy Amengual goes so far as to claim that the favorite Pabst shot is the low-angle, and it functions as a kind of matrix or mastershot, because it concretizes the attitude of fascination. See Georg Wilhelm Pabst (Paris: Seghers, 1966), 57, n. 33.

34. The narrational complexity of the scene is even more of a technical tour de force when one considers the difficulties of setting up such a scene with the sound equipment then available.

35. See my “Lulu and the Meter Man,” Screen 24.4-5 (July-October 1983): 4-36.

36. Andrey Andreyev is often mentioned as being responsible for its look, along with Fritz Arno Wagner, the chief cameraman. A sumptuous volume dedicated to Hans Casparius, edited by Hans-Michael Bock and Jürgen Berger, Photo: Casparius (West Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1978), gives the fullest visual record of the making of The Threepenny Opera and also contains a wealth of contemporary material, documenting the lawsuit, trade journal reports, press comments, production notes, and Pabst's shooting script (165-431).

37. See Barry Salt, “From Caligari to Who?,” Sight and Sound 48.2 (Spring 1979): 119-123, for a useful discussion of set design in Weimar cinema; also my “Secret Affinities: F. W. Murnau,” Sight and Sound 58.1 (Winter 1988-1989): 33-39. One of the most astute commentators on this feature of Pabst's style is still Paul Rotha, who talks of the film's “dovetailed workmanship”: “Not solely on account of their individual merit as design do I draw attention to these sets, but because they are the envelope, as it were, of the film. Without the self-contained world that they create, a world of dark alleys, hanging rigging and twisting stairways, without their decorative yet realistic values, without the air of finality and completeness which they give, this film-operetta would not have been credible. … This is due not only to the settings in themselves, but the very close relationship maintained between the players and their surroundings, which has come about because the director and the architect have to all intents and purposes worked with one mind. Each corner and each doorway is conceived in direct relationship to the action played within its limits. This factor, together with the cooperation of the camerawork, builds the film into a solid, well-informed unity” (Masterworks of the German Cinema, 295).

38. Leo Lania, interviewed by Gideon Bachmann, “Six Talks on G. W. Pabst,” Cinemages (New York) 1.3 (1955).

39. Pabst shows his sense of humor also in this respect: when Mackie is in prison, even his socks match the bars of his cell.

40. See Michael Henry, Le cinéma expressioniste allemand (Fribourg: Edition du Signe, 1971), 41-58, for the notion of metaphoric space in relation to German films. I am using the term here as shorthand for a rather complex narratological issue which I discuss further in “National Cinema and Subject-Construction” (unpub. paper, Society for Cinema Studies Conference, New York, June 1985).

41. “It looks forward (in the integration of characters and setting) to Le Crime de M. Lange rather than backwards to The Joyless Street” (Rayns, 162). Rotha also commented on how Pabst emphasized “the relationship between the players and their surroundings” (Masterworks of the German Screen, 295).

42. They were noted with amazement by Paul Rotha, ibid.: “On all sides of the set rise up great barrels, ridiculous barrels of absurd height and girth, yet how admirably original. Mackie's dressing-room consists of smaller barrels placed slightly apart, behind each of which he vanishes in turn to complete his toilet.”

43. Ibid., 297.

44. Very similar shots can be found in Lang's M, at the beginning and end of Fury, and in R. W. Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

45. Rayns, 162.

46. See note 30.

47. See note 9.