From Weimar Germany to Hollywood to East Berlin, Brecht on Film & Radio gathers together a selection of Bertolt Brecht’s own writings on the new film and broadcast media that revolutionized arts and communication in the twentieth century. Some excerpts:
I strongly wish that after their invention of the radio, the bourgeoisie would make a further invention that enables us to fix for all time what the radio communicates. Later generations would then have the opportunity to marvel how a caste was able to tell the whole planet what it had to say and, at the same time, how it enabled the planet to see that it had nothing to say.
All changes undertaken in the process of adapting extant stage plays for the sound film are no longer simply transformations from the acoustical to the optical medium necessitated by technological needs, rather, they are, in some cases, a form of meddling with the poetic substance of the work itself.
What then can be learned from the Threepenny lawsuit? When you buy a ticket for a sound film, you have learned and you know that what you will see now was produced exclusively as a commodity in a world consisting exclusively of commodities. If you intended to buy art with your ticket, then you have not learned that the art sold to you in the sound film must be marketable in order to be sold.