5 - The Aggregate Image and the World Economy

Summary

Abstract: Chapter 5 turns to the emergence of the ‘aggregate image’ in the cinema and economic discourse of the Weimar Republic. It discusses Eisenstein's plans for a film based on Marx's Das Kapital and Brecht's unfinished play Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago (1924), which attempted to dramatize the grain market. Discovered fragments of Balázs's K 13 513: Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheins (‘Adventures of a Ten Mark Note’ or ‘Uneasy Money,’ 1926) – the first ‘cross-section film’ – are discussed along with Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (‘Kuhle Wampe, or: Who Owns the World?,’ 1932). The visual convention of the Querschnitt (‘cross-section’), a radical montage aesthetic, was emptied of its political content in the creation of a corporate vision of the world economy in Melodie der Welt (‘Melody of the World,’ 1929). The cinematic ‘aggregate image’ of the world is placed alongside parallel developments in economics that were used to create an image of the world economy.

Keywords: World Economy, Financial Image, Montage, Statistics, Sergei Eisenstein, Bela Balázs

Macroeconomic Visions

Introduction

In this chapter, I address several key critical representations of finance capital. I am primarily concerned here with filmmakers who adopted montage as a central means to lay bare the inequality of capitalism, as well as the ways in which montage was used to present a new awareness of the global economy. I discuss examples of Soviet montage, both completed and abandoned, including Sergei Eisenstein's plan (begun in the early 1920s) to create a film based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Béla Balázs and Bertold Viertel's K 13 513: Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheins (1926), Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe (1932), as well as Brecht's unfinished play Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago (1924). I will contextualize these works within larger image-making practices of the Weimar Republic that mobilized the idea of the Querschnitt (‘cross-section’) – which had taken hold in Weimar culture across a variety of media – to create an aggregate image.