The Empty Plan (Blaise Kirschner and David Panos, 2010)
HD, 78min, sound
Shifting between documentary, historical reconstruction and melodrama, The Empty Plan interrogates the relationship between theory and practice in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht. The film contrasts scenes from Brecht’s exile in Los Angeles from 1941 to 1947 with productions of his 1931 play Die Mutter (The Mother) in the late Weimar Republic, New Deal America and post-war East Germany, exploring different modes of performance of the same script and their relation to changing historical and political circumstances.
The title of the film is taken from Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues, an unfinished theoretical work written during his exile, which considers the possibilities of ‘committed art’ and its practical, theoretical and formal limits at a time when revolutionary mass movements had been defeated and theatre was supplanted by Hollywood cinema as the dominant form of popular entertainment. Brecht writes:
There are times when dreams do not turn into plans, guessing doesn’t turn into knowledge, longing doesn’t get moving. These are bad times for art. (…) I’m more interested in those who, turning impatiently away from a planless dreaming, pass into a dreamless planning, a correspondingly empty planning.
Through the figures of Brecht, his collaborator Ruth Berlau and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, the film reflects on conflicting personal, artistic and political ambitions, questioning the nature of art and the unrealised dream of its supersession through revolutionary practice.
Funded by Arts Council England through Film London Artists' Moving Image Network, co-produced with City Projects and supported by Focal Point Gallery, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Kunsthall Oslo.
THE EMPTY PLAN - exhibition publication, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2011
