Baal

As an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play (first written in 1919 but revised several times after that), Schlöndorff’s 16-mm television film Baal (1969) is a bow to German cultural tradition and in particular to the anarchism of late expressionism and Weimar culture. Drawing once again from the stylistic approaches of the French New Wave, Baal unites these German and French sources to map a path forward to the New German Cinema of the 1970s.
The film is at once a highly literary presentation of the Brecht text and an exploration of the newer, freer film vocabulary that had emerged from the international young cinema movements of the 1960s.

The film follows Baal, a young, ingenious, and unstable poet-balladeer with a scandalous zest for life, love, and liquor, through multiple sexual encounters and cruel, shocking personal adventures that end with his premature death. —Volker Schlondorff’s Cinema