Karl Valentin.
Along with Frank Wedekind, the German clown Karl Valentin was one of the earliest influences on Bertolt Brecht. Though it’s safe to say that today his name is only known to Brecht cognoscenti, it wasn’t always the case. “Karl Valentin!” Frederic Ewen writes in his biography of the playwright:
Today his is a name almost totally unknown; but to his contemporaries he was a legend. He has been called the “metaphysical clown.” Consensus has it that he was inimitable (like Charlie Chaplin). His skits, monologues, songs, comic interludes, performed in the local dialects, with mime and gesture conveying even more than words, were to become proverbial. He composed his own sketches, recited his own poems, and joined to himself a skillful band of associates. … [He] appealed to Brecht with imperishable force. A number of sketches Brecht wrote in the twenties testify to the direct influence of Valentin; but even more profoundly Brecht was impressed by Valentin’s mimetic art, that which Brecht was to call the “gestus” — the totality of the imitations of the “unheroic heroes” of the sketches. They were the Schweyks in embryo.[1]
Brecht never had a chance to work with Wedekind, but in 1923 Brecht and Erich Engel, waiting for rehearsals of In the Jungle of Cities to begin, collaborated on a 33 minute film, a jeu d’esprit, with Valentin called Mysteries of a Barber Shop. Brecht and Engel are credited with directing the film from an outline by Brecht; it’s a fascinating, grotesque slapstick comedy which in many ways situates the film very much within the Neue Sachlichkeit movement — not least through the perspective it takes to the mutability of racial identity, erotic frisson, gender ambivalence (note the “Chaplin” character whose run-in with Valentin opens the film), and man-as-machine, made up of replaceable parts.[2]
According to the Wikipedia page for the film here, Mysteries of a Barber Shop was thought lost until 1972, when a print was discovered in Moscow. It turned up on YouTube recently and is posted below. Again, it’s a remarkable rarity — Brecht’s debut as a screenwriter and film director, and a sample of Valentin’s own work (Samuel Beckett also met Valentin during his visit to Munich in 1937, a meeting Beckett would remember for the rest of his life; see the Knowlson biography for details) — and certainly a classic of Weimar Republic and Neue Sachlichkeit cinema. (Keen eyes will identify the woman in the cafe, who appears in the middle of the film, as Carola Neher, later to play Polly in the stage and film versions of Die Dreigroschenoper.) Years before Un chien andalou, Brecht and Valentin had it all over Dali and Bunuel.
Footnotes
- Frederic Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, His Times. New York: Citadel Press, 1967, p. 65. [↩]
- Valentin also had an influence on Brecht through his advice to the dramatist in 1924 as Brecht staged his adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II, Brecht’s debut as the director of his own work. Ewen writes: “At one point, Brecht felt dissatisfied with the performance of the soldiers, and asked, ‘How do soldiers behave?’, to which Karl Valentin … replied, ‘They are scared.’ Whereupon Brecht had each soldier whiten his face, and thus immediately created the atmosphere he was looking for.” (Ewen 130) [↩]
