Comunication and art: the sociological experiment of Brecht

Abstract

The commercial success of the staging of The Threepenny Opera caused a powerful film company interested in shooting it to contact Brecht. He accepts the proposal, but imposes a condition: that he would write the adaptation for the cinema. The film company accepts it, and Brecht then writes a screenplay from which he suppresses the commercial elements that had been responsible for the play’s success and develops as much as possible the revolutionary aspects of the text. The issue ends up in court. Brecht seizes the occasion to launch a public debate about the relationships between theater and cinema, art and commodity
and, mainly, about the property right of the work of art.