Week Three

This week, we watched Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World? Now, I’m no drama major, but I do enjoy theater quite a bit. Back at UW, I would definitely choose a play over a football game any day. And, over the years of going to the theater and reading plays on my own time, I have encountered Brecht on many occasions, and from that I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s pretty nuts (but in a good way). His work is pretty interesting with his distancing methods. I’ve had so many fun discussions about him in classes and with my roommate, Laurie, and I was really excited for class discussion this week.
As far as the film goes, I found it a bit hard to digest right off the bat and at a somewhat early hour in the morning. I had never seen Brecht in film form before, so it was different. I felt like the distancing effect was even greater here, perhaps because film itself is has a distancing effect on the audience. In theater, the action is “real” in the sense that you could reach out and touch it; it is right in front of you. The emotions can be raw and powerful, and, if it’s done right, you can literally feel its heaviness in the very air you breathe. Film can also have similar effects on the senses, but it is still just an image projected on a screen. Brecht definitely uses this to his advantage here. I think growing up in a film society that so heavily relies on story and character, and being a writer myself, I found it hard to look at this film analytically in the first viewing. This is definitely the type of film I would need to see more than once in order to get a better handle on the meaning of it.
As far as the film project goes, things have changed a lot. The original idea to do a fiction film has almost completely gone out the window. After talking a lot about the project with each other and with Eric, we came to that sad and often had realization of many student filmmakers—our lack of time and money. We realized how much we had to get done in order to do our idea justice. We had to storyboard, find a German actress, rehearse, screen tests, film on location, compile footage and edit it all into a nice neat package. And, we wanted to include some of our own memory of the city in there, but, we haven’t really had enough experience in the city to have a lot of memories to work with. It was just getting too complicated and stressful. Then, Eric had the brilliant suggestion to create sort of a documentary of the failed making-of a film. It worked perfectly, because then we could still keep the scripted scenes that Josh and I had written. The opening scene in particular I am rather fond of. It was one of those scenes that you seem to already have worked out in your head. It has sort of a Buster Keaton feel to it, which I also have a soft spot for. I was really looking forward to directing it, and I’m really glad we can still use it.