Film review

  • The Threepenny Opera

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Die 3-groschen-oper

    G W Pabst (1931)

    The film programmer Margaret Deriaz gave an excellent introduction to this BFI screening of The Threepenny Opera.  She was informative about the making of G W Pabst’s film and the legal disputes with the original authors that it generated.  She very clearly placed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s theatre musical – a succès fou when first staged in Berlin in 1928 – in its cultural and political context.  The version that BFI showed included a prologue, inserted in an East German reissue of the late 1940s, in which two of the film’s main actors, Ernst Buch and Fritz Rasp, reflect on its harmony with Communist thinking.  At the time of its original release, however, plenty of Marxists deplored what they considered a blatantly capitalist undertaking and were hardly better disposed to the film than the Nazis, who banned it in 1933.

    The Threepenny Opera is an essential artefact of the Weimar Republic and the visual style of Pabst’s film confirms the place and time in which it was made.  (The cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner’s other credits in the 1920s and early 1930s include Nosferatu, M and The Testament of Dr Mabuse.)  The surprising, sometimes discomfiting camera movement, long dark shadows and twisty stairways are so characteristic of contemporary German expressionist cinema that the nineteenth-century London setting of the story – the days leading up to Victoria’s coronation – always seems weirdly artificial.   (Brecht and Weill’s inspiration was The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s 1728 stage entertainment, with its cast of London lowlifes and their social ‘betters’.  Gay’s aristocratic targets became bourgeois ones in The Threepenny Opera.)  The inter-war Germanic substrate of the film is sealed by one of its retrospective qualities.  In the closing stages, as crowds of have-nots trudge through the streets, they irresistibly bring to mind other, real ghetto faces of the period.

    The musical highlights come courtesy of Ernst Buch and Lotte Lenya.   The strong-faced Buch, in the role of the street singer, gets things off to a splendid start with his rendition of The Threepenny Opera‘s most famous number, ‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’ (one of those songs whose melody means it could go on for ever, whose ending seems almost comically arbitrary).   As the prostitute Jenny, Lenya, with her natural eccentricity and flair, gives the film a shot in the arm with her delivery of ‘Seeräuberjenny’.   It’s a positive turning point:  from here on, the plot gathers pace.   The wedding of Mackie Messer and Polly Peachum, along with the events surrounding it, has been slower, harder going.   As the dandified crime boss Mackie (Mack the Knife), Rudolf Forster is good whenever he gives the camera a menacing level stare but neither he nor Fritz Rasp (Peachum) is exciting to watch.  Carola Neher as Polly has the presence of a fine actress.  Margaret Deriaz gave forewarning that Reinhold Schünzel, as the police chief Tiger-Brown, plays in an exuberant musical-comedy style.   In contrast, the white horse on which Tiger-Brown appears at one point and that wanders off after he’s dismounted, is a nicely deadpan performer.  Vladimir Sokoloff, excellent as Mackie’s duped jailer, is one of several cast members who also appeared in the French-language version of the film that Pabst made at the same time as this German one.

    23 May 2018

  • 13th

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ava DuVernay (2016)

    Ava DuVernay’s documentary takes its name from Amendment XIII to the US Constitution.  The amendment outlawed slavery and ‘involuntary servitude’, ‘except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted …’   DuVernay’s thesis is that, since the end of the American Civil War, slavery has in effect been perpetuated through a succession of government practices and legislation.  Her film, which runs 100 minutes, focuses at most length on the period since 1968, when Richard Nixon won the presidential election on a law and order platform.  Through declaring a ‘war on drugs’ that disproportionately affected black and other minority communities, Nixon and his successors in the White House over the next thirty years oversaw huge and sustained increases in the incarceration of people of colour.  This central chunk of 13th is sandwiched between, at the start, a summary description of post-Civil War racism (including images from D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation) and, in the closing stages, videos of police shootings of African Americans in the present decade.

    13th  is a bitterly outraged, emotionally powerful piece of work.  How much of the power results from DuVernay’s technique and images, how much from the statistics she presents, is harder to say.   The statistics would be appalling as a simple list of facts on a piece of paper and include the following.  The USA is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners.  The country’s total number of prisoners, around 327,000 in 1970, is now more than two million.   Black men account for approximately 6.5% of the US population and 40.2% of the US prison population.  One in every 17 American white males can expect to spend part of his life behind bars; the equivalent figure for American black males is one in three.  Most of the many talking heads in 13th  seem to talk at great speed, an effect reinforced by DuVernay’s rapid cutting between interviews.   The soundtrack also includes plenty of urgent, furious rap.  DuVernay likes to underline key phrases – whether spoken by interviewees or in song lyrics – by flashing them on the screen in bold, kinetic letters.  Information and assertions come thick and fast:  13th is challenging to experience thanks partly to sheer sensory overload.

    For this viewer, the most compelling witness was Angela Davis, past and present.  DuVernay includes news film of the fiercely articulate political activist of the early 1970s.  The seventy-four-year old Davis – now Professor Emerita of the University of California, Santa Cruz – also features, speaking with a calmer, deeper anger.  Not every contributor is liberal or left of centre:  the conservatives in evidence include Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich (who at least admits the disparity in sentencing for offences relating to use of cocaine vs crack was unfair and ‘an enormous burden’ on the black community).   But most of the views expressed are sympathetic to DuVernay’s arguments.  I lack knowledge of the subject enough to have a clear sense of how much that’s said is disputable but I’d guess there are plenty of oversimplifications.  (Someone says, for example, that Nixon, thanks to his law and order pitch, won the 1968 election ‘easily’.  His margin of victory in the electoral college was certainly comfortable but the difference in the popular vote shares of Nixon and Hubert Humphrey was small – 43.4% to 42.7%.)  Donald Trump is peerless at condemning himself out of his own mouth so it worries me when DuVernay accompanies some particularly vile words of his with images of white racist violence to which Trump’s rant doesn’t explicitly refer.  But these are quibbles.  The thrust of 13th  is unarguable and its effect enraging.

    22 May 2018

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