More exile business

[selenak]

Part of yesterday's panels at the conference were dedicated to the stage experienc, and again the people talked about ranged from the world famous (Brecht and Charles Laughton, William Dieterle) to the less known today (cabaret star Stella Kadmon) to the unknown (actor Hans Wengraf, scriptwriter Ernst Neubach). About Brecht's American exile I knew

Comments

[amenirdis]

Fascinating!

I always enjoy hearing you talk about this, and about the differences and shades of meaning that are so opaque from where I'm sitting. I always learn something interesting from you.

[kalypso_v]

Fascinating account of Brecht and Laughton. Yet another great performance of Laughton's that we're missing (along with the unfinished I, Claudius).

Brit picks - belief in, rather than into; and we use visa as a singular (pl visas).

[selenak]

That's a great Lenya icon. Also, thanks for the Britpick, though I must say that having learned Latin as my first foreign language, "visa" as a singular word just feels wrong!

[kalypso_v]

Closest I could get to Brecht... I'm afraid I cropped the cigarette out.

"Visa" doesn't worry me, but it's one of those nouns like "agenda" where you can't get the British to understand that it's a plural already! And the American "math" for "maths" always annoys me, because the S there is a nod to the fact that it's mathematics from ta mathematica.

[shezan]

"Because of the lightness of touch, the sweetness of tone. People couldn't believe he was German."

Well, yes, that (recall to what German stylistic horrors we were exposed, never mind the other kind), and of course his movies, which were far more often based on Austrian authors like Schnitzler and Zweig - Werther is an exception.

... and where was Otto Preminger from?

[selenak]

Preminger: Vienna, she says smugly. :)

Stylistic horrors: come on. In the 20s, the German cinema had to offer so much more than expressionism (a label which btw some of the directors who got stuck with it hated - Fritz Lang said to his dying day he had no idea what anyone meant by it) and had some of the best scriptwriters, directors and actors of the world, a true rival to Hollywood. Then of course the guy from Braunau, Austria started the real life horrors and as a minor side issue ensured German cinema as a whole was never that good again.

[shezan]

(I told you, didn't I, about Marcel Ophuls - he has a whole schtick about not using the Umlaut because they were French now - telling me how when he was 14 in Hollywood, Brecht gave him pointers on writing?)

[selenak]

No, you didn't! What did Brecht say?

Re: la famille Ophuls being French now - his father wrote an introduction to the press for the Werther film which in a very endearing way tries to prove that Goethe was really French in spirit (because Frankfurt is "the most French of German cities" - *eyes Frankfurt* -; because during the French occupation period in Goethe's childhood, a French officer lodged in the house (Goethe Senior hated the guy, but the kids, JW and his sister Cornelia, were mostly curious, that's strue); because Goethe studied in Straßburg, and because Napoleon was a Werther fan and mostly came to Weimar to do the fanboy thing and talk to the author. Thus, reasons O., Goethe was clearly someone with a French soul in a German body.