The year it lives in
Baal is a 1970 West German television film directed by Volker Schlöndorff, adapting Bertolt Brecht’s 1923 play of the same name. It does not aim to historicise Brecht’s text but to transpose its late-expressionist energy into the visual and social texture of 1969 — a deliberate contemporaneity that refuses period costume or nostalgic framing. The film treats Baal not as a romanticised poet but as a corrosive anti-hero: a figure whose rejection of bourgeois morality is inseparable from his self-sabotage, volatility, and incapacity for sustained connection. Schlöndorff and Brecht co-credit the screenplay, meaning the adaptation retains the play’s structural fragmentation, abrupt tonal shifts, and refusal of psychological exposition. Its ambition is not to explain Baal but to hold him in focus — unmediated, unredemptive, and unreconciled. It is a work of deliberate provocation, made for television yet refusing televisual convention: no narrative smoothing, no character arcs, no moral punctuation. Its purpose is diagnostic, not empathetic — to expose the myth of the autonomous genius as a function of privilege, evasion, and entitlement. (158 words)
The look of it
The story follows Baal across episodic encounters — with publishers, actresses, cab drivers, lovers, rivals — each ending in rupture or abandonment. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s performance is physically restless and vocally unmodulated: he leans into Baal’s petulance and charisma without softening either. Margarethe von Trotta, as the actress Johanna, grounds the film’s emotional register with quiet precision; her withdrawal is more devastating than any outburst. Dietrich Lohmann’s cinematography — his first in colour — uses saturated, sometimes garish interior palettes (deep reds, acid yellows) against flat, overcast exteriors, reinforcing Baal’s dissonance with his surroundings. Klaus Doldinger’s score is sparse, percussive, and at times jarringly minimal — a counterpoint to the text rather than an underscore. Editing avoids continuity logic, favouring abrupt cuts and static frames that deny narrative comfort. The production design avoids realism: furniture is theatrical, lighting is expressionistic, and even motorway scenes feel staged, not observed. This is not naturalism but stylised exposure — every choice serves the exposure of Baal’s contradictions, not his coherence. (159 words)
What stays with you
What lands is the film’s unrelenting tone: a sustained, low-frequency unease that never breaks for relief or irony. Baal’s charisma remains legible even as his behaviour grows more repellent — a credit to Fassbinder’s physical specificity and Schlöndorff’s refusal to moralise through framing or editing. The colour palette works as psychological shorthand: interiors pulse with claustrophobic intensity while forests and roads feel drained, indifferent. The decision to shoot on location in and around Munich — using real attics, pubs, and roadside verges — gives the abstraction weight. Even minor performances land with economy: Günther Neutze as the publisher Eisenring registers bureaucratic exasperation in two glances; Carla Egerer as Sophie conveys exhaustion before she speaks. The film’s structure, built on Brecht’s episodic ‘scenes’ rather than acts, holds up precisely because it resists resolution — each episode ends not with consequence but with dispersal. That formal fidelity makes the film feel less like a relic than a warning system: calibrated, precise, and uninterested in being liked. (154 words)
Where it slips
What does not land is the film’s occasional drift into caricature, particularly in secondary male roles — the cab driver, the friend Ekart — where vocal delivery and blocking verge on vaudeville without the compensating wit or rhythm of Brecht’s stage directions. Some of the motorway sequences feel undermotivated, visually repetitive, and rhythmically slack compared to the taut interiors. The decision to avoid period markers extends to sound design: ambient noise is thin, and dialogue often lacks spatial texture, making exchanges feel detached from their settings. There is also a tension between the film’s declared contemporaneity and its theatrical staging — the attic scenes, for instance, retain a studio-bound quality that undermines the stated aim of embedding Baal in 1969 reality. While this may be intentional, it risks alienating viewers who expect cinematic immersion rather than dialectical distance. The film assumes familiarity with Brechtian estrangement; without that context, some scenes read as inert rather than deliberate. A viewer expecting psychological causality will find none — and that is a failure only if the film promised it, which it does not. (156 words)
What it’s really about
The themes that matter are not those of redemption or growth but of entanglement: how genius functions as a socially sanctioned form of irresponsibility; how rebellion can become indistinguishable from narcissism; how freedom without accountability curdles into isolation. The film interrogates the myth of the artist as exempt — from labour, from care, from consequence — and shows that exemption as parasitic, not heroic. Sexuality here is transactional and unstable, never liberatory; desire is depicted as appetite, not intimacy. Class is present not as backdrop but as infrastructure: Baal moves between milieus not as a critic but as a freeloader, dependent on the very structures he scorns. His violence — the stabbing, the abandonment, the casual cruelty — is never framed as tragic flaw but as logical extension. The film’s enduring relevance lies in its refusal to separate aesthetic authority from ethical failure. It does not ask whether Baal is talented — he is — but what kind of world permits talent to flourish without constraint, and who pays the cost. That question remains urgent, not historical. (153 words)
Who it’s for
This film is for viewers who value formal rigour over narrative comfort, who recognise Brecht not as a museum piece but as a living methodology, and who approach cinema as argument rather than escape. It rewards attention to composition, pacing, and textual fidelity — not just what is said, but how it is withheld or fractured. It is not for those seeking psychological insight, emotional catharsis, or stylistic polish; its roughness is integral, not remediable. Viewers who require moral clarity or character development will find it frustrating — and rightly so, as the film rejects both premises. Those who associate 1960s German cinema solely with Fassbinder’s later domestic dramas may misread its austerity as coldness, when it is instead a refusal of sentimental framing. A viewer who values craftsmanship over charm, and precision over accessibility, will find it compelling. Someone who expects cinema to affirm human connection will leave unsettled — and that is the point. (159 words)
Is it worth your evening
Yes, it is worth your evening — but only if you accept its terms: no compromise, no explanation, no reward beyond the clarity of its diagnosis. It runs 87 minutes, and every minute sustains its central proposition without deviation or apology. Its restoration and Criterion release confirm its status not as a curiosity but as a coherent, uncompromising statement — one that gains force with time, not diminishes. Those who dismiss it as dated or obscure mistake its resistance to assimilation for obscurity. It is not difficult because it is obscure, but because it refuses the consolations of narrative or empathy. Anyone who has watched a charismatic figure dismantle their own life — and been asked to admire the dismantling — will recognise its unsparing gaze. To call it ‘hard work’ is to misunderstand its economy: it asks only for attention, not effort. Its value lies in its unwavering focus — rare, unflinching, and still dangerous. (158 words)
