Taking a Walk in The Elephant's Graveyard

by a Feral Subject

The first tracking shot in The Elephant's Graveyard establishes a town of tight streets, semi-detached houses that constitute a warren of domesticity built against both the sky above and the surrounding green hills. A man walks hastily away from the town into the hills- effectively commuting the wrong way- as he purposefully escapes. The camera cuts to the reasons for his flight. As well as stifling semi-detached domesticity the town is bisected by streams of traffic taking hard working citizens to either the IBM factory or the shipyards and docks down by the sea front. The town is a network of wage labour, measuring time out abstract minute by abstract minute until wages are earned at the expense of bodily, intellectual and psychological exhaustion. Then there is time for leisure, looking after the kids, maybe even a few beers with workmates. Then the next day starts in order that all of this labour can be accumulated into capital that might produce more factories, offices, semi-detached houses and workers in order to produce capital that might produce more... Bunny, the man walking with some haste into the hills is having none of this- at least for today. He turns with a grimace towards the repetitive activity of the town and strides out into the hills to hide. Once in the hills, Bunny encounters Jody, who is another refugee from the regimes of wage labour and domesticity. Both men are classic work-shy proletarians; both admit to fooling their wives; Bunny pretends he's a postman and Jody a factory worker. The latter is also older, more experienced in the art of slipping away and refusing to work. In conversation he keenly undercuts the younger mans doubts about his chosen non- vocation. There's no point in feeling guilty and no point in worrying about being caught. This is because- as Jody points out with proletarian fatalism- they will be caught for not being on the job and so might as well share the bottles of wine he has.

The Elephant's Graveyard - written by Peter McDougall-was first broadcast in 1976 as part of the BBC's long running 'Play for Today' series of specially commissioned dramas whose remit was to examine topical subjects. Dennis Potter, Lindsay Anderson, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke all contributed to it and the series often attracted controversy due in part to its unflinching approach to sex, violence, class conflict, poverty, etc.1 While this would place 'Play for Today' in a British 'social realist' tradition- something that continually blights UK cinema and television- the series also experimented with both form and subject. For instance, Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle is like a low budget, less emancipatory and more mean spirited version of Pasolini's Theorem; both share the disruptive figure of an angel/ demon that upsets and negates, calling into question the social relations he is cast into. The Elephant's Graveyard is just as disruptive in its negative critical impetus towards the world of work though through the simple joy of not working this is a gentler negation. And it shares a sense of everyday uncanniness with Brimstone and Treacle. However embodied the two men are in their slacking from the quantitative time of wage labour The Elephant's Graveyard- running, climbing trees, drinking, laughing, philosophising, joking- there's a spectral melancholy to it all. They are not where they are supposed to be. Rather than fulfilling the roles of subject- worker such as clocking in, posting mail, working the machinery of production, clocking out, watching telly, etc., they've stepped away from all that tightly measured wasted time. It's worth remembering- though we're rarely allowed to forget- how important quantified time is to capital. IBM- an American company that provides one of the workplaces in Bunny’s town- stands for 'International Business Machines'. An early 1889 'innovation' of IBM was the invention of a time clock to record a worker's arrival and departure time on a paper tape. Clock in, clock out, punch in and punch out as the clock punches back. Refusal of this quantitative time is central to The Elephant's Graveyard: stepping out of the time of capitalism into a potentially more qualitative, fulfilled time of doing absolutely nothing.

The Elephant's Graveyard has little to do with British social(ist) prolekult realism. Not working here is an opening out to momentary possibility rather than a litany of destitution, monetary need, depression and begging for work from welfare bureaucrats and bosses. Peter McDougall identifies and articulates a different form of proletarian 'need' in this tale of slacking and skiving. This is a 'need' not to be caught in the work/welfare/home/leisure apparatuses and to no longer be defined as working class, worker, prole. The Elephant's Graveyard is one of the few instances- at least in British culture- where this particular 'need' is not only acknowledged but valorised and articulated in language and gestures a million miles away from that of an Oscar Wilde style aesthete or the refusal of work as a preamble to a career in art. The refusal of Bunny and Jody- like most genuine instances of refusal- isn't particularly aspirational within the terms set by capitalism. They just want to think about things a bit, maybe get drunk and recognise themselves outside of the predicates of being working class sons of toil. It's not too speculative to see much of Peter Mcdougall's own experience reflected in this refusal as he spent his youth enduring the hard graft of Glasgow shipyards.2 He probably worked alongside a fair number of aspiring Bunny's and Jody's and their 'craic'- or banter- and habitual hatred of work infuses The Elephant's Graveyard with a class hatred different than that articulated by even the most radical elements of the 'old' Left. As Jody might have said though doesn’t: 'Who the fuck wants to take power as a worker when that's exactly what we wanna escape from?' Needless to say, the only presence of the official representatives of the 'workers'- the trade unions- in The Elephant's Graveyard is in a piss taking diatribe by Jody who describes the process whereby even sincere leftists become absorbed by the 'sponge' of the media and career ambition. A 'sponge'- also composed of wage labour and the religious work ethic of Scottish Protestantism- that Jody thinks is to be avoided whenever possible.

It's hard to imagine The Elephant's Graveyard being commissioned or made in a 2011 Britain. In 2011 even an involuntary period of unemployment leads to enforced exclusion from our increasingly shrinking 'Big Society' and subjection to discipline, disdain and derision by state, media, economic and welfare apparatuses. Even in 1976 it's difficult to think of many cinematic or television antecedents that express the refusal of work as a joyful and oppositional proletarian gesture. If there are cultural antecedents for The Elephant's Graveyard then they tend to be literary and rarely British. We can find them diffused throughout 19th and 20th century culture. For instance, there's Herman Melville's intransigent scrivener Bartleby, whose 'I would prefer not to' is uttered in the heart of 19th century Wall Street. Or the character of Voshchev in 20th century Soviet dissident Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit, dismissed from his job for thinking too much in the midst of production. When Jody and Bunny wander the hills drinking it seems like a distant echo of the poet Arthur Rimbaud's preference for 'infinite walks, rests, trips, adventures, wanderings.' (Letter, August 25th, 1870) over wage labour. Or as he put it during the Paris Commune: 'Work, now? Never, never. I'm on strike' (Letter, May 13th, 1871).3 This foot dragging proletarian recalcitrance towards the supposed joys of labouring was never really acknowledged in orthodox socialism, Marxism and anarchism. An exception to the tendency of 19th and 20th century anti-capitalism to venerate labour was the wildly popular ‘Right to be Lazy’ by Marx’s brother- in-law Paul Lafargue. He wrote in 1883 that ‘the proletariat […] has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.’4

Of course, that The Elephant's Graveyard is produced in 1976 places it at a particular historical juncture of a more recent politics predicated upon the refusal of wage labour. In 1976 there were still the determined lines of flight of Autonomia in Italy and the post-Situationist libertarian left throughout Europe and North America. This libertarian left partly arose out of practices such as wild cat strikes, sabotage, factory occupations, 'proletarian shopping' and non-payment of rent and bills and a dis-affiliation from 'being' a worker. The Elephant's Graveyard captures something of the emotional tonality of this period in a much quieter register. Rather than the great meta- narratives of resistance and defeat, crisis and revolt, it traces the history of this affective 'need' to resist by any means necessary even if that just entails going for a walk. Still, when Jody and Bunny imagine the massacre of good hard working families by Apaches in the hills where they drift its hard- for me anyway- not to think of the 1977 era 'Metropolitan Indians' in Italy. Dressed in feathers and war paint a contemporary wrote that they would:

"Habitually break into shops and appropriate useless goods.... they also frequently appear at the most elegant movie theatres in groups of about thirty people, naturally after visiting the most expensive restaurants where they obviously didn't pay".5

Even the relatively gentle refusal of work outlined in The Elephant's Graveyard always carries a little of this threat so terrifying to the capitalist or reformist 'Left' and the 'Right'. That said it'd be easy to read the fear of domesticity and the ‘wife at home’ that recurs in The Elephant's Graveyard as a reassertion of working class masculinity that borders on misogyny. Maybe, though, it’s worth reading the flight of Bunny and Jody from both wage labour and the unwaged social reproduction of domesticity as an acknowledgment that domesticity too- and the normative roles of 'man' and 'woman'- are reproduced in capitalism and central to it.

The Elephant's Graveyard is also situated exactly at the point when UK punk began to articulate its own sense of 'No Future' against and through the 'No Future' of capitalism. Without being reductive, Punk partly reflected a decomposition of the Keynesian welfare state that we're still living through in its 'new' guise of neo-liberal crisis. One of the most pernicious forms this crisis takes in the present is the 'Big Society' dream of social entrepreneurs, engaged volunteer labour and the suggestion that it's o.k not to work 9-5 so long as you're a 'creative'. Even 'slacking' might be alright for capital so long as it occurs at the local self-organised library as a form of volunteering. That this goes hand in hand with a disciplinary impetus towards the imposition of disciplinary welfare upon those counted as surplus to the requirements of capital isn't that much of a contradiction.

Part of the subversive import of The Elephant's Graveyard is the wry acknowledgment that 'need' as a simple desire for there to be more to life is expressed through a refusal to be anything in particular- especially a worker- by people whose class position deems them feral subjects unless they're labouring hard. This runs entirely counter to the normative standards of contemporary neo-liberal UK plc. that only allows self- development, workplace development or maybe cognitive behavioural therapy and pills. If the BBC commissioned such a drama now its inevitable Bunny and Jody would be 'chavs', miscreants, 'scum'- if not it'd be a bit too controversial for Milliband, Cameron and our illusory 'Big Society' to swallow down its collectively self- righteous throat. It’s worth speculating that neo-liberalism also gradually established a cultural hegemony that’s especially evident in television drama; occasional exceptions to this such as The Wire tend not to originate in the UK and such televisual subversion is not at all the rule.

As both Jody and Bunny recognise their brief refusal is destined to fail and a return to toil, the strictures of responsibility and the parameters of capitalist social relations is inevitable. That's not to say that such slacking off the job is completely pointless though. They discover less instrumentalised social relations outside of work- through arguing, reflecting and playing together they become friends. And there's always the possibility of repeating the experiment of momentarily running away even as one is always sucked back into work and welfare discipline. Or as Giorgio Agamben, the finest contemporary philosophical proponent of what we could call 'Bartlebyism' writes:

'I tend to think that every act emanating from the singular need of an individual, the proletarian, who has no identity, no substance, will also be, all the same, a political act.' 6

The Elephant's Graveyard reminds us that in work or not we're always potentially feral (non)subjects who will steal, sabotage, sleep or find that moment of grace to momentarily just walk away.


Notes

i http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_for_Today
ii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_McDougall
tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_McDougall iii See ‘The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune’ by Kirstin Ross (Verso, 2008).
iv http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm
v http://www.uncarved.org/music/apunk/autonomia.html
vi http://www.scribd.com/doc/34537417/Agamben-Rethinking-Marxism-Interview

Peter McDougall and the BBC's Play For Today

The old jobs are vanishing. Nostalgia for these outmoded forms of production – now a marketable commodity in art and theatre – is surely misplaced. It was hard, miserable toil in deplorable conditions - F. Mclay, (ed), The Reckoning. Clydeside Press, 1990, p.10.

Play for Today (1970-84)

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/454719/index.html

One of the most famous and influential of all play strands, Play for Today (BBC, 1970-84) demonstrated single drama's potential to engage mass audiences with social comment and artistic experimentation.

In effect The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70) renamed after being rescheduled from Wednesday nights, Play for Today reflected in its name its defining concern with contemporary British life. The series has been associated with social realism, controversies and attacks on its perceived leftwing bias, but its sheer diversity belies such a reductive analysis. Its different styles and genres included comedy and science-fiction; its protagonists encompassed alienated youths and institutionalised pensioners, and its subject matter ranged from regional identity to multinational corporations, from racial politics to time travel.

Within Play for Today's regular industrial space, committed producers (including Tony Garnett, Graeme MacDonald, Margaret Matheson, David Rose and Irene Shubik) enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy. Writers and directors were drawn from theatre (including Richard Eyre and David Hare), established Wednesday Play contributors (including Ken Loach and Dennis Potter) and new talent.

The first piece transmitted under the Play for Today banner (though early pieces were commissioned for The Wednesday Play) was 'The Long Distance Piano Player' (tx. 15/10/1970) by Alan Sharp, directed by regular strand contributor Philip Saville, with Ray Davies as a pianist seeking a record for continuous playing. Early highlights included John Osborne's 'The Right Prospectus' (tx. 22/10/1970), about a middle-aged couple returning to school; 'Circle Line' (tx. 14/1/1971) by W. Stephen Gilbert, who won a BBC Student Play competition; and two contributions to the European initiative Largest Theatre in the World: 'The Lie' (tx. 29/10/1970) and 'The Rainbirds' (tx. 11/2/1971), written by Ingmar Bergman and Clive Exton respectively.

Early examples of overt social comment included Jeremy Sandford's highly-rated homelessness study 'Edna, the Inebriate Woman' (tx. 21/10/1971) and two intricately-researched Tony Parker pieces, 'When the Bough Breaks' (tx. 11/2/1971), on child welfare (directed by future British Board of Film Censors chief James Ferman), and 'A Life is For Ever' (tx. 16/10/1972), on the effects of long-term imprisonment, which was enhanced by Alan Clarke's adept direction of themes of institutionalisation.

However, for directors like Clarke, Play for Today also meant tackling uncharacteristic pieces with different methods, making the strand a kind of studio system. With British cinema undergoing financial uncertainty, directors (including Michael Apted and Stephen Frears) were able to hone their skills on initially rare, much-coveted slots for plays shot entirely on 16mm film - for example, Clarke's 'Penda's Fen' (tx. 21/3/1974), an extraordinary visionary piece by David Rudkin - in addition to less desirable video and multi-camera work.
'Penda's Fen' also exemplified the regional imperative and experimental vision encouraged by producer David Rose at BBC Birmingham. Other examples included 'Land of Green Ginger' (tx. 15/1/1973), Alan Plater's evocation of Hull, plus 'Gangsters' (tx. 9/1/1975), Philip Martin's tough exploration of racial tensions and organised crime in Birmingham, which spawned the self-aware series of the same title (BBC, 1976-78).

Another Play for Today that became a series, 'Rumpole of the Bailey' (tx. 16/12/1975), demonstrated that tough themes and comedy could mix superbly. Other examples included Jack Rosenthal's exquisite coming-of-age piece 'Bar Mitzvah Boy' (tx. 14/9/1976), the genre pastiche 'A Cotswold Death' (tx. 12/1/1982) and the often-cited Mike Leigh pieces 'Nuts in May' (tx. 13/1/1976) and 'Abigail's Party' (tx. 1/11/1977).

Play for Today benefited from film and theatre practitioners embracing television as a platform for social engagement. Determined to address the popular imagination, Trevor Griffiths contributed such incendiary plays as 'All Good Men' (tx. 31/1/1974) and 'Comedians' (tx. 25/10/1979), the latter epitomising the strand's relationship with radical theatre. Further provocative examples included Lindsay Anderson's production of David Storey's 'Home' (tx. 1972) and landmark pieces such as Howard Brenton and David Hare's 'Brassneck' (tx. 22/5/1975), David Edgar's 'Destiny' (tx. 31/1/1978) and the dialectical event 'The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil' (tx. 6/6/1974) from John McGrath and the 7:84 Theatre Company.

Plays on trade union politics and the betrayal of labour engaged with (and, critics feared, incited) industrial action. Key work included Jim Allen and Ken Loach's 'The Rank and File' (tx. 20/5/1971) and Colin Welland's 'Leeds - United!' (tx. 31/10/1974), ably directed by Roy Battersby. However, a political backlash - which damaged Battersby among others - makes Play for Today a barometer of the changing cultural climate.

Several pieces suffered cuts or controversy, particularly those on Northern Ireland, including 'The Legion Hall Bombing' (tx. 22/8/1978) and David Leland and Alan Clarke's 'Psy-Warriors' (tx. 12/5/1981), which presented themes that resonate strikingly with today's 'war on terror'. Two plays were banned outright: Dennis Potter's 'Brimstone and Treacle' (eventually transmitted 25/8/1987) for its conflation of disability, sex and the demonic, and Roy Minton's 'Scum' (tx. 27/7/1991) for its compressed catalogue of Borstal abuse. The BBC's capitulation to Home Office anxieties over 'Scum' exacerbated a purge of leftwing programme makers. The bans were particularly painful given that Potter and Alan Clarke (director of 'Scum') were regular, committed strand contributors - Potter interwove themes across such major pieces as 'Angels Are So Few' (tx. 5/11/1970), 'Double Dare' (tx. 6/4/1976) and 'Blue Remembered Hills' (tx. 30/1/1979).

The furore underlined the increasing vulnerability of single drama strands to political suppression and economics. The strand produced some groundbreaking film work - note the shared aesthetic, akin to Italian neo-realism or art cinema, in early plays, including Leigh's 'Hard Labour' (tx. 12/3/1973) - but the increasing dominance of film raised costs. Despite the interesting related strand Play for Tomorrow (BBC, 1982), the term 'play' seemed anachronistic: a few Play for Today commissions were broadcast without that label, and the mid-1980s saw film-based strands such as Screen One, Screen Two and Film on Four (which, while aiming for cinema release, saw David Rose pursuing themes and approaches comparable with his Play for Today work). Quality drama persists in series and serials, but the absence of a regular slot for contemporary comment and talent development is regrettable: notably, Play for Today was namechecked when the BBC recently mooted a new evening play slot.

Dave Rolinson
Further reading
Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (BFI, 2003)
Irene Shubik, Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama (Manchester University Press, 2000).
www.playfortoday.co.uk

McDougall, Peter (1947-)
By Simon Farquhar

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/1394293/index.html

There can be no better justification for the modus operandi of the BBC drama department of the 1960s and 70s than the discovery of Peter McDougall. The most original Scottish voice of the era, McDougall might never have been given a break at any other time in broadcasting history.

Having gone straight from school to the Glasgow shipyards, McDougall fled to London in the mid-60s. It was while painting the house of Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78) star and future writer Colin Welland that he began relating his youthful exploits as a drum major in Glasgow's Orange Parades. The fascinated Welland suggested McDougall turn his experiences into a television play.

Director John Mackenzie was flabbergasted at McDougall's raw talent, and claims the finished film barely contained a single change from the original draft of the script. However the Glasgow police blocked filming on a drama they feared would cause "bloodshed on the streets in the making and in the showing."

Not disheartened, McDougall offered the BBC another play. 'Just Your Luck' (Play for Today, tx. 4/12/1972) told the story of a Protestant teenager who falls pregnant by a Catholic sailor. Its exposure of the religious bigotry of Scotland's West coast caused an enormous reaction, from outrage in the locality to reviews hailing it as "the most exciting debut since Look Back in Anger",

This success prompted the BBC to weather the inevitable controversy and finally make 'Just Another Saturday'. The resultant film (Play for Today, tx 10/3/1975) tells of one day in the life of 16 year-old John (Jon Morrison), whose excitement at leading the Orange Parade is shattered by his discovery of the violence behind the pageantry. Beyond the political issues, it is McDougall's mastery not only of the gallows humour of Glasgow's working class but of the hidden motives of parental kindness that make the drama, in Jeremy Isaacs's words, "a masterpiece" and won the play the Prix Italia.

'The Elephants Graveyard' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 12/10/1976) was an intimate, pastoral follow-up, teaming Morrison with Billy Connolly for the charming story of two unemployed men dodging the wives who they have deceived about their job situation. The play follows them over one gloriously irresponsible day as they revert to childhood through games, stories and examination of their fears and hopes.

The astounding 'Just a Boys Game' (Play for Today, tx. 8/11/1979), was another 'play in a day', pursuing hard man Jake McQuillan, whose life of alcohol, violence and emotional impotence is threatened by the arrival of a younger, razor-wielding thug. Jake's casual 'boys' games' ultimately result in the death of his only friend. Featuring some of the strongest violence the BBC had ever dared broadcast, it was stunningly photographed by Elmer Cossey and featured McDougall's most crackling dialogue and richest characterisations, all brilliantly evoked by a cast headed by blues singer Frankie Miller in a performance that melts the camera in its intensity.

The partnership of McDougall and Mackenzie was one of the finest of the era. Their final collaboration was on HandMade Films' A Sense of Freedom (1981), dramatising the life of notorious Glasgow criminal Jimmy Boyle. Despite a devastating portrayal of Boyle by David Hayman and some nightmarish sequences of depravity and brutality, it suggested that McDougall was less confident in fact-based or big screen works, an unfortunate weakness as TV drama lost its taste for the single 'play'. Having discovered a genius, television simply didn't quite know how to make the most of him, and sadly, McDougall has never again managed to recapture the extraordinary successes of his early years.

The Old School of Capitalism

Sunday 25th September | Doors 6pm | Admission Free



The Old School of Capitalism, 2009
written and directed by: Želimir Žilnik
(Serbia, 122 min, DV + HDV)

The Old School of Capitalism is rooted in the first wave of workers revolts to hit Serbia since the advent of capitalism. Desperate workers bulldoze through factory gates and are devastated to discover the site looted by the bosses. Eccentrically escalating confrontations, including a melee with workers in football shoulder-pads and helmets and boss and his security force in bulletproof vests, prove fruitless. Committed young anarchists offer solidarity, take the bosses hostage. A Russian tycoon, a Wall Street trader and US VP Biden’s visit to Belgrade unexpectedly complicate events that lead toward a final shock. Along the way, the film produces an increasingly complex and yet unfailingly lively account of present-day, in fact, up-to-the-minute struggles under the misery-inducing effects of both local and global capital.



At
Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

More screenings and info:
http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

Full Unemployment Cinema
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

Autumn Break

Schools out. We have gone to Croatan. We are running with the Wolfen on the Heygate now, squatting in Venice, not logging onto Facebook in Tunisia, commuting between Glasgow and Brazil, training in magical struggle in Omø. Enough of toil! Stuff this brittle and tiresome world we must leave. We're off!

Be seeing you soon...

Brecht's Beggar's Opera vs. Pabst's Threepenny Opera

We're through with romanticism, now the seriousness of life begins.
– Polly Peachum, The Three Penny Opera.

It's appropriate that the The Three Penny Opera, G.W. Pabst's 1931 film adaptation of the wildly successful 1928 stage play The Beggar's Opera should have become immured in a court case before it was even completed. Appropriate because both the film and play are concerned with the interweaving of legality and illegality within capitalism, the way that businesses and the state shade into gangs and rackets and vice versa. The case was brought by Bertolt Brecht- co-writer with Elisabeth Hauptmann of the original stage play script – and Kurt Weil – composer of songs and music for both stage and screen versions – upon the rejection of Brecht's script for the film adaptation. Brecht lost the case, a result that may have partly been down to him substantially revising the original stage version of The Threepenny Opera in order to sharpen its anti-capitalist message. For instance, while the conflict between Peachum, the King of the Beggars, and Mackie in the completed film is as much personal as about business, Brecht's original script emphasized that it was essentially nothing more than a conflict between two businessmen and their respective capitalist enterprises. The point being that the underworld is based upon waged and unwaged labour as much as the world of capitalist legality and the two are often indistinguishable. That another racket, that of the 'law', is deeply embedded within this conflict is all to the point. Despite this watering down of Brecht's script the film surprisingly retains the Marxist theme that both criminal enterprises and the 'law' are nothing but business enterprises. As the communist critic and friend of Brecht, Walter Benjamin wrote at the time: 'Brecht is concerned with politics; he reveals the crime latent in business'.


Characteristically, Brecht used the court case as the springboard for a text - The Threepenny Litigation - in which he argued he had set it up as a 'social experiment' in the proletarianization of cultural producers i.e proving that within capitalism they own nothing. Brecht viewed the trial as a grotesque theatre and wrote that it revealed that 'justice, freedom, character have all become conditional upon the process of production...' Even failure and defeat confirmed the basic tenet of Brecht's epic theatre, that capitalism is best apprehended through physical gestures and manifest statements rather than psychological depth. The trial itself exemplified this. Cannily, Brecht later squeezed some cash out of the studio by threatening to force a re-trial and proved he was much more an irritant nurtured on pragmatism than a romantic weeping over creative control.

That he lost the case is not to suggest that Pabst's film version loses all of Brecht's surgical cutting into the real of capitalism – even if the lush expressionist darkness of the film undoubtedly runs counter to the bare sets of Epic Theatre. The Threepenny Opera is best viewed as being at the intersection of some of the most vital if contradictory cultural and political currents of Weimar Germany. Feeding into The Threepenny Opera are Pabst's own darkly expressionist romanticism; Brecht's determined theatrical practice of estrangement, its emphasis upon making unnatural through gesture, statement and voice a capitalism that theatre and cinema traditionally naturalise; communist crude thinking (the poor are always fucked...); the venality of culture as business exemplified in the studio system; the cynical eroticism of Weimar cabaret; the new collective forms of cultural production enabled by both cinema and prolekult experimentation; and the unexplored potential of new forms of cinematic technology as the 'talkie' replaced its silent predecessor. All of these are present in The Threepenny Opera even if the direct Brechtian gaze and voice of Pirate Jenny is seen through the fog of an imaginary Victorian London re-constructed on a Weimar film set.


The Threepenny Opera is a strange hybrid that can't quite let go of either big studio 'romanticism' and expressionist shadows or the 'seriousness' of Brecht's radical experimentation with form. But, given that the songs were so popular in Weimar Berlin that a Beggar's Opera bar opened dedicated to them, this distinction might be too simplistic; Brecht's experimental theatre practice came out of a collective, and popular, communist political culture. That Pabst retained much of Brecht's script- such as the horde of beggars descending upon the Queen – underlines that The Threepenny Opera can't be reduced to a simple recuperation of radical culture by an unscrupulous studio. Maybe, contra Brecht, the expressionist fog and shadows of Pabst's London express as much about the chaotic obfuscation inherent to Weimar Republic capitalism as the sharply delineated gestures and slogans of the theatre of estrangement illuminate it. The mob of beggar's could be a foretaste of a proletarian uprising or a prescient suggestion of the threat of a disenfranchised crowd roused to action by the proto-fascist rhetoric of the beggar king. Pabst's expressionist sets, with their poor lighting, retain and underline this ambiguity. The tensions between the aesthetic strategies of Pabst and Brecht are refracted through one another much as Weimar culture itself was fraught with political, economic and social crisis; the King of the Beggars is also key to the racket, the only way for gangsters to prosper is to own a bank not to rob one. It's this insight into the way the black (illegal) economy not only shades into the world of legitimate capitalist enterprise (see Mexico, Italy, the UK, pretty much anywhere today) but is essentially interdependent with it that makes The Threepenny Opera more than a bit of Weimar cabaret nostalgia. Benjamin writes of Brecht's even more acerbic Threepenny Novel, featuring a crooked underworld/ military industrial complex deal:

This detective novel depicts the objective truth about the relationship between bourgeois legality and crime, the latter being shown as a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former. Sometimes one slides easily into the other.

There's little light or hope in The Threepenny Opera both literally in its cinematography or as an imaginative space for optimism and hope. Pabst's direction might be said to reflect an authentically Brechtian cynicism albeit in an entirely 'wrong' expressionist register. In the film even the rare dreams of utopia and escape are ultimately predicated upon violence and nihilism, in a stark recognition of how fucked up this world of rackets is. Or as Pirate Jenny sings in her (or rather Kurt Weil's) revenge fantasy of a victorious class struggle that arrives on 'The Black Freighter/ With a skull on its mast head':

Coming out from the ghostly freighter/ They're moving in the shadows where no-one can see/ And they're chaining up people/ And delivering 'em to me/Asking me: 'kill them now or later ? /Asking me: 'kill them now or later ?/ Noon by the clock and so still at the dock/You can hear a fog horn miles away/ And in that quiet of death i'll say: right now !'/ right now !/ And they pile up the bodies/ And i'll say: 'that'll learn you./ That'll learn you./ And the ship/ The black freighter/ Disappears out to sea/ And on it is me!

Links:

Lotte Lenya sings Pirate Jenny
Nina Simone sings Pirate Jenny
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC15folder/3PennyOpera.html#n11
http://kinofist.blogspot.com/2007/03/forwards-not-forgetting.html
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/614-the-threepenny-opera-doubles-and-duplicities
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/threepenny_opera/

Bertolt Brecht Poems

Sonnet No.1

(In memory of Josef Klein. Beheaded for robbery and murder 2 July 1927 in Augsburg gaol.)

I dedicate this poem to Josef Klein
It's all I can do for him, for they cut
His head off just this morning. Pity. But
That made it clear we don't approve of crime
That's how they handle flesh and blood, the swine.
Strapped flat upon a wooden board it rode
(It got a bit of Bible that some Holy Joe'd
Picked out, well knowing that no God loves Klein.)
But I think that its really rather much.
Approve it? No, I'd really rather not
Since their crime never stops once they've begun it.
I don't care to be seen among that lot.
(At least not until I've had time to touch
The money that they owe me for this sonnet.)

The Theatre Communist

A hyacinth in his buttonhole
On the Kurfurstendamm
This youth feels
The emptiness of the world.
In the W.C it becomes clear to him:he
Is shitting into emptiness.
Tired of work
His father's
He soils the cafes
Behind the newspapers
He smiles dangerously.
This is the man who
Is going to break up this world with his foot like
A small dry cowpat.
For 3000 marks a month
He is prepared to put on the misery of the masses
For 100 marks a day
He displays
The injustice of the world.

The Beggar's Opera Double Bill

Sunday 31st July | Doors 7.30pm | Admission Free


The next Full Unemployment Cinema screening is a double bill of German and Brazilian interpretations of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera itself in turn an early 20th century updating of John Gay's 18th century ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera. Prepare for a 200 year continuum of prostitution, work, crime, class struggle and amazing music.

Sunday 31st July | Doors 7.30pm | Admission Free

8pm

Die 3groschenoper / The Threepenny Opera by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931 (Germany, 110mins)

10pm

A Ópera do Malandro / The Opera of the Rascal by Ruy Guerra and Chico Barque, 1986 (Brazil, 107mins)

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

The Immediate Broth Thursday 28th July

---------------------------
Thursday 28th July
The Immediate Broth
---------------------------

Glasgow / Edinburgh Film-making collective, The Immediate Broth, present their recent films

Doors 7.30pm

Film Programme starts 8pm

Palimpsest
Neil Gray,UK (2010, 11 minutes)

Palimpsest is composed of ten one-minute theses forming an interrogative essay on the constructed face of urban erasure in the West Midlands. The film focuses on The Public, a multi-purpose arts, community and business space designed by Will Alsop. While city boosters hail the ‘creative advantage’ offered by The Public, the film investigates another possibility: that West Bromwich is “neither Shoreditch nor Manhattan”, and cultural regeneration policy merely marks the weak emulation of losing formulas; a loss leader in a zero-sum game.



The Process
Sacha Kahir, UK (2010, 21 mins)

The Process is a ghost story, where dead industry and new industries of rehabilitation and the black economy loom large. Made with a group of ex-homeless people in Dunfermline, and set in a non-place somewhere between a ghost town and the clinic. The film explores themes of memory and identity on both a personal and social level. Examining the industrial warehousing of the poor in institutions and sink estates, it uses distanciation to create a constantly shifting narrative, where the various subjective experiences of those involved intertwine.



Vaguing in Oppidanus
Neil Gray / Sacha Kahir, 2010 ( UK, 20 mins)

In 18th century Edinburgh, the presbyterian Taliban would seize idlers for ‘vaguing’ on the sabbath. This film, a low rent version of the works of Patrick Keiller or Chris Petit, takes a vague and runs with it, drifting it’s way across the atomised spaces of Edinburgh. As good ‘proletarian shoppers’, the filmmakers appropriate freely from a range of historical and radical texts to create a collage-work which critically explores modern urban life.



Check the Immediate Broth website: http://theimmediatebroth.wordpress.com/