more than“simple empathetic emotional effects.”¹⁸Equallyopposed to anything
tainted by emotions,Bernard Eisenschitz limited his definition of montageina
properlyleftist film to“thevery process by whichanew dramatic art relocates
actors and story withinachain of causality,and the spectator’sinterest is no lon-
geraroused by harmonising with his emotions, but through recognition–of re-
ality–and of what is at stake in thatreality.”¹⁹
The politics of emotion has continued to haunt the film in its status as an
exemplarofradical film practice.Following the 19 74 Screenissue,aBrechtian
readingofKuhleWampeby MartinWalsh found fault with its presumablycon-
ventional (i.e., emotional) qualities, compared to Brecht’smore innovative
work in the theater and the impact of his theoreticalwritingsonthe“Brechtian”
filmmakingofJean-Luc Godard as well asJean-Marie Strauband DanièleHuil-
let.²⁰Morerecent contributions acknowledge the film’sredistribution of emo-
tional and cognitive elements across the public-private, male-female divides.
The privileging of ruptureasamore properlyleftist mode still prevails in Marc
Silberman’sdescription of the film’smodel of spectatorship as one basedon
dramatized acts of cognition and intent on“awakeningthe spectator’srecogni-
tion of the possibilityfor change.”²¹Meanwhile her analysis of sound-image
prompts NoraAlter to describeKuhleWampeas a“fullydialectical film thatop-
eratesonthe interstices between identification and distanciation.”²²And in an
insightfulreading that addresses the difficulty of representing proletarian iden-
tifications in the act of becoming, GalKirn drawsonRancière’snotionofthe
eventto aptlysummarize the problem as follows:
The actual process that is at work in Brechtian politics is the thinkingofthe (im)possibility
of the proletarian subject,asubject that is always-alreadypresent,but is invisibleto the
dominant order (capitalism) and subjected to the dominant (liberal, petit-bourgeois) ideol-James Pettifer,“Ag ainst the Stream:KuhleWampe,”Screen15.2 (1974): 56.
BernardEisenschitz,“Who Does theWorldBelongto? The Place ofaFilm,”Screen15.2
(1974): 70.
MartinWalsh,TheBrechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema(London: BritishFilm Institute, 1981),
10.For acritique of Brechtianism and its affirmation of the emotion-cognition divide, see Murray
Smith,“The Logic and LegacyofBrechtianism,”inPost-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies,ed.
DavidBordwelland Noël Carroll (Madison:University ofWisconsin Press,1996), 130–48.
MarcSilberman,“Whose Revolution?The Subject ofKuhleWampe(1932),”inWeimar Cine-
ma:AnEssential Guide to Classic Films of the Era,ed. Noah Isenberg(NewYork: Columbia Uni-
versity Press,2009), 327.
Nora M. Alter,“The Politics and Sounds of EverydayLife inKuhleKampe,”inSound Matters:
Essaysonthe Acoustics of Modern German Culture,ed. Nora M. Alter andLutz P. Koepnick (New
York: Berghahn,2004),87.
Kuhle Wampeand“Those Who Don’tLike It” 331