a question abt BRECHT (tracer hand to thread among others)

caheirs wasn't known for its leftist sympathies; but i'm sure they liked 'hangmen also die' just the same. which irritating book is it you're reading? i nearly died reading colin maccabe's godard: sound: images: politics, but it was worth it in the end.

cahiers were v.anti the pcf line on aesthetics it's true: some of them were v.left themselves tho (kast for example, and rivette later on) (and bazin's entire pedagogic project was intrinsically v.leftwing i'd say)

sterl i wz bending the stick!! i think the interraction between artist and audience is much more complicated than that "if/then" post suggests - i don't like the audience part of the dealy being swept dismissively up into "reception theory"

haha i wd rather die than see a play by david hare - most boring playwrite evah!! - but i quite like his theoretical writing, he did a great piece on noel coward and subversion!

oh yeah, it came out just this year! the person who lent it me has removed the dust jacket (why?) (i'm v.careful w.books!) so it looks older

i don't really know much abt brecht, that's why i started the thread - i wz confused at the various difft ways 'brechtian' wz being thrown about, which didn't add up

haha, maccabe quotes someone as saying that godard only ever reads the contents page of any book, and maybe page one: same as RICHARD JOBSON then!!

brecht is as much a loser as williams/miller/stringberg, because, as mark rightly points out above, it's all about LOOK, THIS IS WHAT WE WANT YOU TO FEEL, whether this is by directly saying, "Look, man is sad, feel sad too" or "look i am a man. according to the script i am sad now, perhaps you'd like to think about feeling sad." it's all so controlling. the true joy of theatre (oh-oh, here he goes) is watching OTHER HUMANS DOING STUFF in front of you, hey! they could come and touch you and everything! and the reliance on character/plot/"naturalism" is so demeaning to an audience. this is why pantomimes are pretty much the only living theatrical form left for me...

(apols for gibberish, i hope it makes at least a little sense)

ooh, anyone fancy a fortnight in frankfurt? this is what i call performance, forced ents kick serious theatre ass.

but it was no 'cabaret'.

do you know tyler durden?

Directors cut of the relevant bit from the opening.

"Bertolt Brecht, Jarvis Cocker, Sizzla -- class war cabaret lives on. I suspect the Weimar antifa signification is long lost (since Nico sang "Deutschland Uber Alles" at least) but still there's the allure of the musical format itself: the implicit stage providing room for vocalists to stretch into the immediacy of artifice laid bare, for nuances opening into performatives of sleazy prole seduction. "

Also mark do you think "bent the stick" is an overused phrase and where does it COME from?

erm i don't think it's overused especially - i don't remember ever seeing it on ilx eg

it's actually a v.poor phrase, in respect of guessing the meaning anyway

Naturally I stand by all I said upthread.

i rewatched histoire(s) de la cinema (pt 1&2) and pierrot le fou last night, mostly on fast-forward

the book is annoying and i think slightly disappointing rather than bad - CM is aware of the thrall he's under and wriggles lots, but in the name of tactical aesthetic solidarity declines ever to "bend the stick", so his critique is really spasms of "oh i say" moralism rather than stepping back further and saying (eg) THIS BIT JUST FAILED ON ITS OWN PRECEPTS or whatever

on the other hand it is packed with info, biographical and theory-contexutal, and is interesting and clear (but to me if anything too scanty) on the various currents in french left thought in the 50s and 60s

i wish he had explored the godard <=> debord interface more, it gets half a page, and i always tht there was lots going on there, unspoken (debord i think basically considered jlg a rip-off artist, of his own ideas...) (also jlg announced himself a maoist, which guy wd have found contemptible...)

(i can see that he didn't want just to rehash the PRESENCE OF STRUCTURALISM IN FRENCH CULTURE dealy, so soft-pedals it, but what it actually needs is someone stepping in and taking it entirely outside the factional argts of the day)

(maccabe actually studied under althusser briefly so he probbly cannot bring himself to do this - he is still a bit identifying one side against another in feuds that have lost their meaning) (what brechtian techniques shd be unleashed in the academic critical biography haha)

you're ahem likely to be better read on currents in french intellectual thought at that time than most of the target audience (it was gonna be an academic rather than bloomsbury book i think) -- i mean as far as i'm concerned if a book got a few more godard films well known then that wd be sort of enough, because it's crazy that so little is out there.

given his place in film culture it's odd there's so very little about godard written from a position of knowledge on the different intellectual groupings of the time.

the maoist turn does look contemptible -- and within about six months j-p gorin, having taken up a juicy program of touring lecturing etc renounced it.

is the hollywood take on this to place greater emphasis on casting? mark mentioned reality tv upthread...

(this is a v.complicated process though which is increasingly often failing i think) (ie inadvertently getting MORE brechtian)

first-tier casting = "executive producing" = the actor gets final cut

i am v.pro reality TV as it fucks w.everyone's antennae

it's often a famous first role that sets the type for an actor, when the director may not have a complete grasp of what the actor will bring to the role. that might be an occasion for everyone to push each other - mike leigh's method, if it works. after that, maybe type-casting and minimalist directing: failure (or success?) all around. (but for a while (wrt hollywood films) i thought i heard something like the expression of the director's genius was all in the casting...)

mark do you kno anything about "Alexander Technique" and "mask work"? i think it may impinge - anna k had as good of a mask as anyone i can think of (and she used it to liberate her body from her mind like the best of em, cf the pool-hall wiggle in "ma vivre sa vie" after the guy does the MIME balloon trick for her; it's like look at the fun she has, yet her expression NEVER CHANGES)

(pf, my brother is cool: he identifies with underdogs, which is how jamie plays himself on that show. but, yeah, cooking shows in the first place...)

david thomson: "It was the discovery that he loved Karina more in moving images than in life that may have broken their marriage"

(extrapolation from thomson's argt: brechtian 'distancing' from bourgeois emotion-wringing blah blah actually made it harder to grasp properly that the single repeating problem in godard's films is his inability to feel, ever: a founding flaw is constantly presented as a political triumph...)

this is a toughie isn't it -- whether we 'feel' with jlg. one doesn't much, but i think 'le mepris' and 'vivre sa vie' work on that level, possibly despite themselves.

act out the following using no words:
"i'm trying to communicate w/o language! why don't you take me seriously?"

in the godard films i've seen, it's as though the text itself is being mimed. i think there's a similarity in their techniques (from what i read by/about brecht for a western civ class many years ago and what i've learned on this thread) - the disassociation of text from action - but in godard's work the action has its own grace. i think the problem with this approach is that the meaning of language is context dependent. eliminating the context impairs communication. i don't think disembodied ideas really work.

(ie i think the structure of the defence cuts against the spirit of the thing defended)

*(cf adorno on the underdog: to admire his pluck is to admire the system that made him the underdog)

2 or 3 thing is pretty much my fav Godard overall where his technique, the self-consciousness which he used it and called attention to "here is my technique and here is why i am using it" and a sense of emotion and urgency all most closely cut together.

an also there's pre "technique" godard up thru Contempt at least?

cf adorno on the underdog: to admire his pluck is to admire the system that made him the underdog

this is a very acute point isn't it? i often find this with mike leigh, esp the heroic women in 'life is sweet' and 'all or nothing'. it's as if inequality is okay because these women are heroic; whereas the middle classes are spiritually hollowed out; and therefore don't really benefit.

I found this thread because I was trying to see if anyone knew of a bk that looks at how Brecht's theories/epic theatre operate in cinema?

It seems to come up, if not ALL THE FKN TIME then quite often: not only JLG or Fassbinder, but Ghathak, Rocha, Oshima. It isn't just a case of matching politics only, or is it? I wonder whether it gets into the structures and types of films made in a deeper way...like in Death by Hanging, Dillinger is Dead, etc.

But reading this now I think the ans seems buried within, and maybe I shd watch one of his plays sometime.

Brecht's poetry. Going through about 500 poems. In the intro Brecht is quoted as saying that these poems would be the best argument against his plays. You can see what he means by that, by someone who had that sense -- like many who worked for a better future -- that sacrifice goes along with commitment.* it seems that most of them were published after his death, and that is certainly true for this translation which is a labour love of collaboration between sets of translators and a couple of editors (including Ralph Manheim, who bought Celine's early novels and cracking looking trilogy, which I'll make my way through later this year, to a wider audience).

This is divided chronologically: his thinking on the theatre and acting is there as well as his poetry. At first you think this could be divided by a set of topics but its probably right as so much of these are political. They could have had dated the poems below but its great to see how the theatre (what he does), politics (what he sees) and relationships (what he feels) (and of course all the bits in brackets are fluid) are there at play and alive in the poet's mind at all times.

*you could see that sacrifice of expression as a problem with potentially progressive modes of art and politics at that time.