- beginning in the city and beginning with brecht
text notes 1: BRECHT: A CHOICE OF TWO EVILS by martin esslin (3rd edition) (1980)
- bertolt brecht is everywhere and nowhere. “it’s brechtian”. SE says: “that means breaking the fourth wall”. but it’s rare to actually read his plays or see them performed in english (according to esslin his work is extremely difficult to translate). found this biography by chance and began here. trying to work out what brecht is all about (albeit again through the lens of another person, at least to begin with). trying to cut through myths and assumptions. then through moving image works. looking for surprises.
some notes:
- brecht was a poet in the tradition of arthur rimbaud and francois villon. he began as a sort of bard in southern germany accompanying his poems with music. in his collection BERTOLT BRECHT’S DOMESTIC BREVIARY (1927) he suggests some of the poems be accompanied by a guitar. at the base of his plays is his own poetic language (he also published many books of poems).
- martin esslin identifies 4 elements of brecht’s language:
1. everyday language of southern germany (this is particularly difficult to translate)
2. an “anti-metaphorical poetry of colours, textures and other concrete images”
3. bureaucratic jargon which is related to a carnivalesque sensibility, the folk and circus tradition
4. “anglicisms and other exotic expressions” - things taken from other languages
- furthermore esslin details brecht’s idea of how to write poetry without using rhyme and regular rhythm (traditional methods). brecht says “i always thought of the spoken word”. according to esslin, brecht’s technique was to create:
“a language in which the words already contain the gesture that must accompany them”
“the language itself implies and compels the corresponding action”
“this element of implied gesture keeps unrhymed irregular verse as poetry in quality”
“brecht discovered the power of such irregular rhythms in the slogans shouted in unison by the unemployed and the news vendors of the streets of berlin”. streetwork / listening to the city.
- esslin also suggests brecht’s theatre was not entirely a modern project. another aspect of it was returning to the past; his reaction was against the theatre of the 19th century which was where the idea of illusion began, of believing that what was happening on a stage was actually real. before this is the baroque and the carnivalesque which have no such pretensions.
- brecht wanted the actors not to inhabit the characters but narrate what they were doing.
- brecht also anticipated later developments in cinema:
1. leaving details out for the viewer to fill in, as in films by robert bresson, abbas kiarostami or marguerite duras
2. attempting to thwart the viewer’s identification with characters and fictional environments, preceding feminist and structuralist-materialist moving image
3. separating and making visible the different media used in production, for instance visible musicians performing the soundtrack (as in some of jacques rivette’s films, for instance DUELLE (1976)).
- continuing through soho
2. attempting to thwart the viewer’s identification with characters and fictional environments, preceding feminist and structuralist-materialist moving image
3. separating and making visible the different media used in production, for instance visible musicians performing the soundtrack (as in some of jacques rivette’s films, for instance DUELLE (1976)).
- continuing through soho
THE COMIC STRIP (1981)
- following on from WIDOWS (1983), an older soho also phases in and out of this film, which calls itself the “10p opera”. there are shots of the real soho, specifically the seedy neon lit walker’s court where the comic strip group of comedians held their club night on the premises of raymond’s revue bar. again here soho is a kind of giant cheap arcade place you’d go on a saturday night - the soundtrack is full of the noise of beeps and whizzing and coins - not an exclusive place, crowds seen in the film are composed of all sorts of people, presumably all real punters. ML: “when you go to soho today you can’t even imagine that this had existed”.
- the first of the series of many films made by this group which were shown on channel 4 - seemingly somewhat forgotten today (in contrast to THE YOUNG ONES which featured many of the same performers, minus peter richardson who featured in, as well as often directing, much of the comic strip series).
arnold brown performing in THE COMIC STRIP
alexei sayle as mr sweary inside and outside the narrative
- the narrative in THE COMIC STRIP is mostly a frame for documentation of the comic strip group’s different stage acts at the time. the fictional characters in the film are ultimately rooted in these stage acts and their different languages. as in brecht, the basis of the film is an idiosyncratic language composed of street talk and carnival elements (performance), but this time taken from stand-up comedy rather than poetry.
- then there are a number of unstable street locations which don’t look much like anywhere in contemporary soho, but as film sets these seem far too grand for this low budget film, particularly a building used to represent a salvation army headquarters. then a huge structure that looks like an enormous victorian tenement that has been taken over for the filming, which makes use of its stairwells and cavities for different exhibit-like scenes. are these demolished buildings or other parts of london?
- these locations and the way they are filmed evoke a fictional victorian soho, like the phantom soho in brecht’s play THE THREEPENNY OPERA (1928), a place, as with many settings in his plays, that to my knowledge he had never visited.
- alexei sayle of the comic strip group wanders through these sets dressed as brecht himself, a joke suggesting a bertolt brecht guided tour of soho (not that far from the contemporary karl marx tour). this begins a preoccupation with brecht that sayle followed through the 1980s.
COMIC ROOTS: A PUB CRAWL (1982)
- a creative and surreal essay written on and with the outside world. moves through space in an interesting way via editing, and through the constraint of places where you can get a drink over a 24 hour period. again here a base of live (text) work incorporating styles of performance taken from comedy, everyday life and the street, is extended into different media.
- crawling into an old world hotel bar in liverpool before cutting to waste ground where sayle verbally conjures up an imaginary prior version of the city. then cutting to an outdoor drink in stanley park, because the film was made before the licensing laws were changed (no pubs open in the afternoon). freedom of space, democratic use of space; why not. outdoor performance.
- euston station; the way these places are treated like squares on an enormous board game. space of play and writing and performance (atlantic archipelago, ultimately small and traversable). possibility of different way of approaching space (and in the edit, time). emphasised by sayle’s monologue about a liverpudlian euston slum where he lives in a fridge for six pounds a week.
- three johns pub, islington. use of actual locations as a prompt for ideas and performances, a beginning place for writing. the way sayle marches from location to location, more games; orders a pint and his hat at the bar. inside sayle reprises his cockney character from THE COMIC STRIP, in that film called mr sweary, who wears his hat down low over his eyes. here he’s called john and talks to two other johns about a series of other johns (more use of everyday speech, this time cockney dialect). traces of this older islington still slightly visible, holloway road, balls pond road. old bar interior; crazy wallpaper.
- a health club prompts an impromptu musical sequence (brecht). the first of many. a funny song about drinking as a form of exercise. chelsea college of art union bar. passing through a wide variety of places in impossible time. one of those ye olde tourist pubs on fleet street (at this point there are still newspapers and journalists (a trade, not a profession) here). a nightclub covered in mirrors becomes a second stage for crazed singing and dancing.
- a few cracks at the wine bar craze of the 1980s and hampstead. a giant pub in hammersmith and fear of closing time (much earlier then, although most pubs i think still close around this time). london is still not really a 24 hour place (unless you have loads and loads of money). sayle heads for stringfellows cocktail bar populated with an outlandish cast of offscreen characters (yuri andropov, elvis). then to the comedy store which to my knowledge was where the comic strip group began before moving to their own revue, circling back to COMIC STRIP 81. sayle heckles himself from the crowd.
- brecht: the way these monologues spin out into jargon to the point of (funny) surrealism.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE FORD CORTINA (1982)
- sayle then turned up in this interesting film from the arena documentary series. he continued to pursue odd preoccupations and routines through different media, even films made by other people. where do these preoccupations of sayle’s come from?
- this essayistic film joins together a plethora of bits of moving image to explore the cultural origins and significance of the famous cortina car, which seems to have been a touchstone that cut across the whole of society. footage used includes an auction, a convention, interviews with designers, tom robinson driving around singing his cortina song, sir john betjeman reading his cortina poem, an interview with a mechanic in brixton and a young couple’s super 8 cortina home movie complete with cortina fan letter to the essex plant. “it is part of the family”, she says in the interview.
- these include sayle (introduced as an “automobile sociologist”) playing a specialist MASTERMIND round on the cortina in which every answer is “the cortina” pushing this preoccupation to the point of obsession. the cortina preoccupation also merges with the film, in the case of the mastermind scene being used to introduce different facts about the cortina car which highlight its importance. the quiz round is overlaid with different stock footages, commercials and images of the car being sent down an italian ski slope.
- dagenham; factory-image 1 (america on thames):
- more physical essay writing; sayle turns up at a real location, a cafe named for the car. then mr sweary returns for an interview with john mcvicar on the criminal possibilities of the cortina. more london images (where is this? a sense of glasgow).
- then more sudden musical performances, this time a song about fictional sales reps gone rogue in the badlands of essex, decking out their cars with loads of gaudy stuff. this links to the previous sequence in which the cortina goes as far as to become an indicator of a salesman’s social status, with any customisation of the factory model strictly forbidden.
- the cortina content builds and builds to the point of excess. a myth? difficult to think of a contemporary subject a similar film could be made about? (82- turning point to a different mode of production with thatcherism - less shared frame of reference - subsequent cultural stasis and fragmentation, dominance of revivalism - cortina replaced by the much maligned ford sierra at the end (sayle’s character is not pleased)).
ULLO JOHN GOT A NEW MOTOR? (1984)
- the cortina and cockney preoccupations are brought to a head through another medium in this surprising hit single, which combines the hat character and the sudden lunges into song and dance.
- part of why to write about these sayle and comic strip works is the images of london that populate the background; a sense of the real place, difficult to find. the music video manages to make images of london. those long wide roads that never become avenues, lined with brown townhouses and buildings with mysterious commercial functions, always dead and busy at the same time. the bus queue.
- more street performance. presumably the car dealer was in on the joke but much of the video seems to be sayle cavorting around in the presence of a bemused public. possibilities of public space: pretending to drive the bus.
- the song itself combines a manic monologue that strings together repeated street-jargon phrases that stop being meaningless when yelled over a beat. the music sounds like a premade backing track that could have been produced for adverts or lifts. misusing the prefab (brecht? the way brecht would use prefab structures like chicago gangsters or texts by other writers). using music to stretch out a text into a durational performance. the lyrics continue to explore other obsessions like alcoholic drinks (light and bitter) and london place names.
- then there’s the bizarre top of the pops performance of the song which features crowd members and professional dancers aping sayle’s hat style and dance moves. more use of mass media for subversive purposes, in the service of what?
ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS (1986)
- julien temple, who directed THE COMIC STRIP (1981), returned to a soho setting five years later with a different approach. have only seen a few clips from this film - it’s hard to tell but it looks like a soho that has been reconstructed on an enormous soundstage (presumably at massive expense), which the camera sweeps through. it’s both convincing and slightly off at the same time, capturing the small shop fronts and dense grid aspect, and recreating real locations (cinema house wardour street, bar italia, the coach and horses pub), before cramming them all together.
- making a trippy, condensed, cartoony soho is closer to brecht but the intention of this is murky; it’s not political, it seems to be in the service of showing what an exciting place it is, which is an idea produced much more effectively by the location shots in THE COMIC STRIP.
- esslin says brecht laid the groundwork for the hollywood musical; ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS might be an attempt to put brecht back into it. the “that’s motivation” sequence features a classical hollywood approach with more giant soundstages and even synchronised tap dancing, but in the service of a song about corrupt property development.
- contemporary western commercial cinema: the void left behind by the dismissal of basic forms of performance; singing, dancing, music.
DIDN’T YOU KILL MY BROTHER? (1988)
- by 88 sayle (with co-writers david stafford and pauline melville, and director bob spiers) had the chance to make a large scale project, a fully fledged tv film in the style of brecht, which brings together all of the preoccupations and tangents. the title and presumably beginning point came from another single released years earlier. a culmination of a practice that is suspended across different media.
- the tone is set in the introductory montage sequence which incorporates different media. first there is a film fragment of clowns dancing which cuts to a news broadcast (an aspect of this has been dampened? seeing an image that apes the form of a tv news broadcast on an actual television must have meant something different - but the form is somehow still recognisable). then there are location shots of wandsworth prison, and images of diplomas which belong to sayle’s character, one of a pair of (again) east end gangster twins (both played by sayle), clearly modelled on the krays, who are introduced by a black and white photographic still. stock footage of what looks like the blitz is used to illustrate their reign of terror, then more colour and black and white stills are used to introduce other characters and locations. then imitation documentary footage of the release from prison.
DIDN’T YOU KILL MY BROTHER? (1988)
- by 88 sayle (with co-writers david stafford and pauline melville, and director bob spiers) had the chance to make a large scale project, a fully fledged tv film in the style of brecht, which brings together all of the preoccupations and tangents. the title and presumably beginning point came from another single released years earlier. a culmination of a practice that is suspended across different media.
- the tone is set in the introductory montage sequence which incorporates different media. first there is a film fragment of clowns dancing which cuts to a news broadcast (an aspect of this has been dampened? seeing an image that apes the form of a tv news broadcast on an actual television must have meant something different - but the form is somehow still recognisable). then there are location shots of wandsworth prison, and images of diplomas which belong to sayle’s character, one of a pair of (again) east end gangster twins (both played by sayle), clearly modelled on the krays, who are introduced by a black and white photographic still. stock footage of what looks like the blitz is used to illustrate their reign of terror, then more colour and black and white stills are used to introduce other characters and locations. then imitation documentary footage of the release from prison.
- this sequence introduces a range of very exaggerated and heightened fictional characters but also a range of real subjects and locations. the use of different media and this real aspect almost create an impression of an essay film (something informative?) yet it all sits within this comic fictional framework - this juxtaposition is the brechtian style? a bawdy show that aims to inform.
- the opening credits present the title song alongside a stop motion photomontage sequence of more black and white stills.
- traditional tv editing appears to reconstitute itself in the opening long shot which follows each character’s car away from the prison. each car is accompanied by the musical motif and genre associated with each character. (cartoony- the way the police have defaced their own van). the building is full of unused industrial equipment.
- unlike brecht or ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS the set is the real street. the main setting is this old school where the kids are nicking bikes (also alluded to in the introduction montage). more empty london roads in winter. wide grey pavements. always a high street in the distance.
- a hermetic world (a play) emerges, played out on the actual streets of the city, connecting the fiction and the ongoing political context of the late 80s - the result of the transition of brecht (theatre) to television program (moving image - you can film outside). all the characters are ultimately connected. kids cut down telephone poles with chainsaws and nick bikes. a plant pot turns into a robot. little kids talk in psychology jargon.
- there’s a scene where one of the twins punches himself in the head, and the other falls down. a strange structure. links back to the comedy club scene in COMIC ROOTS where sayle heckles himself.
- a party full of london intellectuals and a flashback to a group session for prisoners blend together textually with the prisoners spouting more jargon (this time marxist academic).
- then there’s the constant shots of bicycles and the direct addresses to the audience by the protagonist. “bicycles are important in this film. see how many you can spot”. a game runs through the whole duration.
- mr chipstick is a classic comic magistrate character in the vein of tiger brown from THE THREEPENNY OPERA (1928). his punishment for the street thieves is making them play cricket in the middle of a street in the middle of the night.
- meanwhile benjamin zephaniah, another artist figure who moved through different media appearing all over the shop in one long piece of work, is held in the van. there’s a bizarre scene where he and sayle converse in patois - another piece of brecht-text (borrowing expressions from other languages and dialects). in a later scene sayle’s character converses in fluent mandarin chinese. each character has their own personal form of speech constructed out of various materials.
- london images; bridges, pubs, always night time. back to the obsession with pub interiors and wine bars. a really funny scene where the gangster goes back to his old local, now a traditional east end boozer with smoke and pianos, and wonders what happened to the wine bar he used to know and love, harking back to COMIC ROOTS, revisiting the earlier jokes about folk singers in fictional form. new people have moved into the area; “it’s a postmodernist backlash! they don’t want sophistication”.
- the secret wine bar downstairs is the stage of the second song, this time a bawdy song about crime in the mode of brecht and kurt weill (mack the knife). the songs and style of brecht but in an actual london setting with real references “the traffic on the euston road is dreadful”. direct quote from brecht in this scene before the song begins. there’s more use of what sound like premade backing tracks of the most anonymous kind, subverted. the wine bar folksinger is incorporated into the musical ensemble as in a stage play.
- as in THE THREEPENNY OPERA the kids’ bicycle thefts are revealed to be part of a grand money making scheme run by the villain. eventually sayle’s protagonist unites this child workforce into producing rather than stealing bicycles in a collectively run workshop using the unused machinery at the school. but it’s still entertaining and a surreally funny throughout like the other films - a speech about uniting the workers descends into a bizarre dream story about a swimming pool full of puppies, and the villain’s royal family-obsessed gangster matriarch mother advises that you should always put a badger on a head wound.
- the third song features zephaniah reading poetry over more prefab sounds at the community police ball, “the over 60s reggae nite”, full of skanking coppers and judges singing “free nelson mandela”.
- the spooky ambiguous ending - referencing PERFORMANCE (1970) - sees good twin murder bad, take his identity and begin to preach “idealistic socialism” from his new position of power. final brecht-y monologue straight to camera:
“and now our story’s finished, our tale is almost told, but can we find the moral in the story of the moss brothers so bold? this country’s based on stealing, the poor are on the rack, but men like me will always be plotting to steal this country back.”
“and now our story’s finished, our tale is almost told, but can we find the moral in the story of the moss brothers so bold? this country’s based on stealing, the poor are on the rack, but men like me will always be plotting to steal this country back.”
- but then a final “didn’t you kill my brother?” suggests the two characters now inhabit one body; the struggle continues.
DREAD POETS SOCIETY (1992)
- zephaniah stars in this short tv film which shares a writer with DIDN’T YOU KILL MY BROTHER. most of the film takes place on a train to cambridge; an electrical storm brings the ghosts of byron and the shelleys into the carriage, causing a poetry contest. the romantic poetry styles are pitted against zephaniah’s improvised method.
- birmingham image 1: the old new street station
