G. W. Pabst

Films of G. W. Pabst:

• The Love of Jeanne Ney - G. W. Pabst (1927)
• The Threepenny Opera - G. W. Pabst (1931)

"The Threepenny Opera" - G. W. Pabst (1931)

During the filming of the The Threepenny Opera (Die Dresigroschenoper or Die 3 Groschen-Oper, 1931), a celebrated lawsuit was initiated by the author, Bertolt Brecht, and the music composer, Kurt Weill, against the production. Brecht had very successfully produced his own play previously in Berlin and was not about to allow G. W. Pabst to make his substantially altered screen version. Brecht lost the case, but unlike most such instances, the film’s alterations did not destroy the power of the artists’ original work. Pabst and his excellent cameraman used sophisticated shooting angles and swirls of dust and smoke to create a very moody, well-felt atmosphere for the players, most of whom were the original stage actors. For once Pabst, the “realist” of The Joyless Street and The Love of Jeanne Ney fame, chose Expressionistic filming devices to elicit the contrasts between the Edwardian bourgeois and the Soho slums.

The plot, set in an imaginary, fantastic London at the turn of the century, features three rogues – Mackie Messer, a leader of a gang of criminals, Peachum, the beggar king, and Tiger Brown, the police commissioner. Peachum, furious over Mackie’s impetuous engagement with his daughter, threatens to disrupt the imminent coronation of the Queen with a beggar’s demonstration, unless the police commissioner sends Mackie to the gallows. This sets the stage for Brecht’s vigorous plot machinations as well as his pungent comments on the inherent corruption of a capitalistic society.

Kurt Weill’s songs, which were reputedly based on a few notes whistled by Brecht, were the very pivots of the play and gave it much of its impact. The film is more cinematically motivated, i.e. its movement through time id dependent more on purely cinematic values. Thus the music appears less fundamental in the film than in the play. It might be added that Kurt Weill, after the court case was over, cooperated with Pabst and adapted his songs to the exigencies of the screen.

This film, Pabst’s first completely successful integration of image and sound, is also noted for the create use of the illusionary possibilities of photographing through glass to enhance the bizarre character of interiors. The numerous screens of glass in the café scene (Mackie’s courtship) are designed to transform the crowded and smoking room into a confusing maze. Another time, Mackie is shot entering a brothel behind a glass partition, which gives him a rather provocative halo.

The film version . . . differed much from the play, but on the whole preserved its social satire, genuine lyricism and revolutionary colouring.

– Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler

★★★½ 

"The Love of Jeanne Ney" - G. W. Pabst (1927)

G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, 1927) is not an Expressionist film, but like the Expressionists, Pabst never managed to reject a shot which was both forceful and picturesque. The theme was similar to The Joyless Street (Die Freudlose Gasse, 1925), except instead of depicting Vienna in turmoil, Pabst took on the whole of European postwar society.

Pabst was forced to work under some distressing pressures. First, the American films were already having a deleterious box-office effect on the German film industry, and Pabst was instructed to stage his picture “in the American style.” Second, he was also under pressure to match the recent successes of the Russians Eisenstein and Pudovkin. And finally, Ufa studios insisted on an outrageously bowdlerized version of Ilya Ehrenberg’s original story, altering the social, sexual, and political implications. The result was a masterpiece. Rotha, regarding the film even better than The Joyless Street, observed that

Jeanne Ney developed from sequence to sequence with breathtaking power. Mood succeeded mood, each perfect in its tension and its understanding.

Fritz Arno Wagner, now at the height of his cinematographic powers, achieved in his smooth travelling and panning shots and in his natural lighting a technical tour de force.

The cutting of the film has become a textbook example of unobtrusive effectiveness. Every cut was made on actual movement, so that at the end of a shot somebody was moving and at the beginning of the next shot the action was continued. The eye, following the movement, scarcely notices the actual transposition. This style was in sharp contrast to Eisenstein’s montage, which was deliberately used to shock the spectator. There is one scene in The Love of Jeanne Ney that, though lasting only three minutes, has over forty cuts – though the eye scarcely notices them. This short sequence has been used for pedagogical purposed in filmmaking courses.

Iris Varry, writing for the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, says,

Pabst’s work here is in no sense picturesque, it is photographic. His settings and his individual scenes are quite as carefully composed as those of the more obviously artistic German films, but the craftsmanship is less apparent, the spectator is led to feel “how true”, rather than “how beautiful”.

★★★½