Baal

By 1982, British filmmaker Alan Clarke—a former soldier, Canadian gold miner, and insurance salesman—had begun to make the slow transition from the BBC, where he had toiled and honed his craft for the previous 15 years, to cinema. Yet as for many TV directors in the United Kingdom, theatrical feature films offered not a full liberation from television, but rather a parallel career track. Upon his premature death from cancer in 1990, Clarke had only directed three features specifically for the cinema theatre: the made-for-cinema remake of Scum (1979) that followed a banned television version (1977), the Brechtian snooker-and-rock-opera Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985), and the bleak working class sex comedy Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987). Today, Clarke’s reputation is built on the TV movies of that same period, namely Made in Britain (1983), done for ITV with a young Tim Roth, or The Firm (1988), produced for the BBC with Gary Oldman. More cinephile circles celebrate the austere BBC specials Contact (1985), Road (1987), Christine (1987), and most notoriously of all Elephant (1989), after which Gus Van Sant’s homonymous 2003 film would take its name. In these radical experiments with the roving Steadicam—then newly introduced in the United Kingdom—a simple scene might extend for minutes as the camera snakes through alleyways, corridors, and vast outdoor spaces in pursuit of the protagonists. In Clarke’s hands, these patterns of movement have the simultaneous capacity of reinforcing the narrative whilst pushing it to the brink of abstraction.

Adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s first published play, Baal (1982), starring David Bowie, was Clarke’s final film before his eureka moment with the Steadicam dramatically transformed his working methods. Prior to this technological breakthrough, Clarke’s TV films and teleplays had been more heterogeneous. Penda’s Fen (1974), Diane (1975), Nina (1978), or any number of his Wednesday Plays or Play for Todays, show an artist grappling with the limits of the television form (long lenses, reusable sets, multiple cameras) and finding creative ways to subvert them. Greeted with bafflement by hostile TV reviewers, Baal was billed openly as a star vehicle for David Bowie, then at the height of his popular success. Clarke and producer Louis Marks had visited the star at his home in Switzerland after seeing him on stage on Broadway the previous year in The Elephant Man, a brief run of performances that Bowie would later say unlocked him as a more versatile performer in the minds of many prominent producers and directors. In the artistically ambitious and well-studied David Jones, Clarke and Marks found a willing collaborator for a project that demanded a serious embrace of difficult material. Bowie confessed to them that he had been obsessed with Brecht since the 1960s, when an abiding interest in Germany and its cultural history had taken root in him—see also David Hemmings’ Just a Gigolo (1978) or Ulrich Edel’s Christiane F. (1981), both of which show later in Batalha’s series. Sandwiched between the release of Under Pressure, his 1981 collaboration with Queen, and Let’s Dance (1983), Bowie’s star appeal was such that the challenging Baal was chosen to premiere in a primetime slot on BBC1 on a Tuesday evening. Playing against the competition of a sentimental drama starring an aging Lawrence Olivier however, the work appeared somewhat to be teed up for failure.

Shot like the earliest silent films—theatrical and flat, with characters entering and exiting space from the edges of the frame—Baal is an exemplary translation of Brecht to the teleplay format. Using ironic split-screens, declamatory title cards, and artificial backdrops, Clarke flaunts the artificiality of this piece of theatrical television. In his final film tethered to tripods and tracks, the greatest British filmmaker of the postwar era sticks to long lenses that rigorously keep the action at arm’s length—a provocative and eccentric gesture given the broadcast quality (poor) and scale (small) at which this would have been seen by British households. In an interview with BBC Sounds the following year, David Bowie confessed he found Baal “a strong piece of television, but not very accessible.” Mirroring the complaints of many contemporary critics and TV reviewers, Bowie noted how difficult it was even, “to see the action—our characters were so diminutive on the screen. Alan’s cameras,” he added, “were almost in the next studio—talk about long shots!” It is therefore perhaps both a relief and a betrayal to see the film restored and shown in the cinema.

Yet in transposing Brecht to British television via Bowie, Clarke concocted something like pure cinema: an audacious melding of form, material, and performer, from the barest of means. As the criminal womaniser Baal, Bowie is grizzled, venal, sexy in his sheer repugnance. The greatest glam rockstar of the postwar era, who then complained of only being offered roles as “green aliens who play rock and roll”, allows himself to be ugly and brutal with no vanity whatever. When Bowie sings Brecht's lyrics, strumming a banjo and singing direct to camera, as he does in the opening moments of the teleplay and periodically throughout, the effect is completely electric.