History Lessons - Brecht on Film: Kuhle Wampe
13 April 2010
The Brecht Forum
451 West Street
New York, NY 10014
2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the Brecht Forum (originally known as the New York Marxist School). Throughout the month of April they will hold an exhibition, "On Brecht," featuring art and performance inspired by its namesake, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). We will present two screenings to accompany this exhibit and anniversary.
Since we started the Red Channels project last June we have worked with Kazembe Balagun and the Brecht Forum more often than any other organizer and space, having presented at least half of our programs together. This collaboration has meant quite a bit to us, and we are happy to help celebrate this important anniversary of theirs in solidarity.
The first of these two screenings will feature one of Bertolt Brecht's early, and few, film efforts; a docudrama from Weimar Germany written by Brecht, and featuring music by Hanns Eisler. The subject of this film, most broadly, is unemployment during the worldwide Depression of the early 1930's. We will pair this film with two short newsreels produced during this same time, and on this same subject, by the Workers Film & Photo League here in the United States.
This newsreel program comes from a recent series we co-presented at the Anthology Film Archives, "Film Workers," around the work and collaborations of Leo Hurwitz (1909-1991). It is part of an ongoing interest of ours to look at and re-consider historical examples of politically engaged cinema. As our historical present continues to resemble our historical past, it feels necessary and worthwhile to look back to these past attempts at committed cultural production.
Tuesday April 13th 2010 - 7:30PM
KUHLE WAMPE
--Workers Newsreel Unemployment Special - Workers Film & Photo League, 1931, 8 minutes
--Detroit Workers News Special: Ford Massacre - Workers Film & Photo League, 1932, 6 minutes
--Kuhle Wampe - Slatan Dudow, 1932, 68 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 82 minutes | Digital Projection
Discussion with:
--Noah Isenberg - professor; editor of Weimar Cinema (2009)
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The latter screening will be a very rare presentation of East Germany's film production (DEFA) of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (written in 1939), featuring Helene Weigel and the Berliner Ensemble, and music by Paul Dessau.
PLEASE NOTE: The video source we had booked for the below screening of Mother Courage does not, after all, have English subtitles. The Brecht Forum will be screening the film anyway; and now at 4:30 instead of 7. We are working with the Goethe Institut and the DEFA Film Library to find a copy of the film with English subtitles to present later this year. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Sunday April 18th 2010 - 4:30PM
MOTHER COURAGE
--Mother Courage and Her Children - Peter Palitzsch & Manfred Wekwerth, 1961, 151 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 151 minutes | Digital Projection [NO SUBTITLES]
Co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut New York
The Brecht Forum
(We have previously screened Ken Russell's Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill (1961) and Alan Clarke's teleplay of Brecht's Baal (1982), starring David Bowie; Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955), which also featured music by Hanns Eisler; and For the Living (1949), by Lewis Jacobs & Leo Seltzer. It was Seltzer who restored the Workers Film & Photo League newsreels in 1982.)