Brecht on Film: Baal

Federal Republic of Germany, 1970, 87'
Directed by: Volker Schlöndorff

Cankarjev dom Cinema Brecht on Film: Baal

Screenplay: Volker Schlöndorff, based on Bertolt Brecht’s play of the same name
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Music: Klaus Doldinger
Cast: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla, Margarethe von Trotta, Sigi Graue, Günther Neutze
Production: Hessischer Rundfunk, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Hallelujah Film

Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1970. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: “You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.” After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He commits an unspeakable act and dies alone. “You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.”

The film takes youthful impetuousness and hatred of oppression as its subject and also ponders the cult of genius and sexual morals. Rainer Werner Fassbinder simultaneously plays both Baal and himself, surrounded by many actors who were later to perform in his own films.

Brecht had written Baal when he was nineteen, still in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, where he actually met this strange character, a drunkard with a guitar who was hanging out in the beer halls and chasing women and trying to get other people to pay for his drinks. This man was indeed called Baal, his family name. And Brecht was somehow looking to the wilderness of his passions and of his behaviour.
When I first came upon this work, it seemed to express so much of the feeling we had in ’68, ’69, and it had been written fifty years earlier, unbelievably, right after the First World War. Like to throw all civilization overboard, looking for the instincts, for the original passion of our genes, when we were still closer to Mother Nature. And here it was expressed, coming out of the First World War, like the German painters Otto Dix and George Grosz, indeed, in a very, let’s say, antibourgeois way. Not only the morals but the aesthetics were so antibourgeois. And then as I was looking for the character to play this part, I came upon Fassbinder, who was still doing theatre. And it seemed to, again, be such a correspondence. We shot this fifty-year-old piece of literature as if it were social reportage, contemporary to us.
Volker Schlöndorff

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