Directed by:
Volker SchlöndorffCinematography:
Dietrich LohmannComposer:
Klaus DoldingerCast:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sigi Graue, Margarethe von Trotta, Miriam Spoerri, Hanna Schygulla, Christine Schuberth, Michael Gempart, Carla Egerer (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht's late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. 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 stabs a friend to death 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 and is surrounded by many actors who were later to perform in his own films. After the film was broadcast on West German television, Brecht's widow Helene Weigel prohibited any further screenings, arguing that the social circumstances engendering Baal's rebelliousness had not been adequately explained.
(Berlinale)
Reviews (1)
In this film, Schlöndorff maintains the tendency from the beginning of his career, which focuses on the phenomenon of rebellion against society and its values, carried by strong individuality. Based on Bertolt Brecht's original work, the film updates the revolt of a poet who refuses to submit to either prevailing conditions or basic laws of human coexistence. Gradually, in its precise but alienating lyrical diagnosis, it distances itself from not only ridiculous bourgeois but also its own friends. /// Schlöndorff's placement of the play from 1918 in the contemporary setting evokes in the viewer (also thanks to the use of folk-rock music - hopefully that's what it's called - to underscore Brecht's original choral) thoughts of the Western counterculture or Eastern underground culture of that time. At its core, it is a strangely romantic idea that in a dive pub, a drunkard could step forward and start reciting verses... /// The casting of R.W. Fassbinder in the leading role of Baal was very fortunate - the enfant terrible of German film and culture of his time perfectly fits his role (which is essentially anti-Brechtian...).
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