Brecht and Dudow

Kuhle Wampe (Brecht and Dudow, 1931) is often noted as the first communist film produced in Weimar Germany and was produced by a collective of men, heavily involved in the formation and success of Weimar cinema. The collaborative team consisted of Hanns Eisler, who composed the musical score for Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), Ernst Ottwald, a distinguished novelist and screen writer, primary director Slatan Dudow who participated heavily in the production of Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and finally Bertolt Brecht. The aforementioned trio heavily influenced the industrialised surrounding that encompass’ the location and narrative of Kuhle Wampe, however, fellow script writer and co-director Bertolt Brecht had very little experience in film production –aside from aiding the preparation for Karl Valentin’s The Mysteries of a Hairdresser’s Shop (1923). Brecht’s influence upon Kuhle Wampe came much more in the form of philosophical grounding, with himself, at the time developing his ‘materialist aesthetics’ in trying to conceptualise the answer to the question: ‘what is political art?’ Bringing together politics and art formulae, in this case montage, we can assess the messages that were conveyed through the use of montage and how it was used as a tool of political suggestion.

From the opening sequence, Kuhle Wampe’s stylisation appropriates itself with that of Soviet Montage, of which is Sergei Eisenstein’s theories are based on the idea that montage originates in the "collision" between different shots in an illustration of the idea of thesis and antithesis. This basis allowed him to argue that montage is inherently dialectical, thus it should be considered a demonstration of Marxism and Hegelian philos...

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...h the montage sequences in Kuhle Wampe.

Works Cited

Brooker, Peter (2004) “Key words in Brecht’s theory and practice of theatre” in Brecht. Eds. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks. Cambridge University Press, Pp. 185-200.

Eisenstein, Sergei; Jay Leyda (translator) (1947). The Film Sense. Hardcourt Brace and Company

Eisenstein, Sergei; Jay Leyda (translator) (1977) The Film Form: essays in film theory. Hardcourt Brace and Company

Kracauer, Siegfried (2004) “Montage” [from From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947)] in German Essays on Film. Eds. Richard W. McCormack and Alison Guenther-Pal. New York & London: Continuum, Pp. 181-189.

Silbermann, Marc (1995) “The Rhetoric of Image: Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World” in German Cinema: Texts in Context. Detroit: Wayne State University Pp. 34-48.