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

(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.

ON EVERYDAY THEATRE

You artists who perform plays
In great houses under electric suns
Before the hushed crowd, pay a visit some time
To that theatre whose setting is the street.
The everyday, thousandfold, fameless
But vivid, earthy theatre fed by the daily human contact
Which takes place in the street.
Here the woman from next door imitates the landlord:
Demonstrating his flood of talk she makes it clear
How he tried to turn the conversation
From the burst water pipe. In the parks at night
Young fellows show giggling girls
The way they resist, and in resisting
Slyly flaunt their breasts. A drunk
gives us the preacher at his sermon, referring the poor
To the rich pastures of paradise. How useful
Such theatre is though, serious and funny
And how dignified! They do not, like the parrot or ape
Imitate just for the sake of imitation, unconcerned
What they imitate, just to show that they
Can imitate; no, they
Have a point to put across. You
Great artists, masterly imitators, in this regard
Do not fall short of them! Do not become too remote
However much you perfect your art
From that theatre of daily life
Whose setting is the street.

Take that man on the corner: he is showing how
An accident took place. This very moment
He is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd. The way he
Sat behind the steering wheel, and now
He imitates the man who was run over, apparently
An old man. Of both he gives
Only so much as to make the accident intelligible, and yet
Enough to make you see them. But he shows neither
As if the accident has been unavoidable. The accident
Becomes in this way intelligible, yet not intelligible, for both of them
Could have moved quite otherwise; now he is showing what
They might have done so that no accident
Would have occurred. There is no superstition
About this eyewitness, he
Shows mortals as victims not of the stars, but
Only of their errors.

Note also
His earnestness and the accuracy of his imitation. he
Knows that much depends on his exactness: whether the innocent man
Escapes ruin, whether the injured man
Is compensated. Watch him
Repeat now what he did just before. Hesitantly
Calling on his memory for help, uncertain
Whether his demonstration is good, interrupting himself
And asking someone else to
Correct him on a detail. This
Observe with reverence!
And with surprise
Observe, if you will, one thing: that this imitator
Never loses himself in his imitation. He never entirely
Transforms himself into the man he is imitating. He always
Remains the demonstrator, the one not involved. The man
Did not open his heart to him, he
Does not share his feelings
Or his opinions. He knows hardly anything
About him. In his imitation
No third thing rises out of him and the other
Somehow consisting of both, in which supposedly
One heart beats and
One brain thinks. Himself all there
The demonstrator stands and gives us
The stranger next door.

The mysterious transformation
That allegedly goes on in your theatres
Between dressing room and stage – an actor
Leaves the dressing room, a king
Appears on the stage: that magic
Which I have often seen reduce the stagehands, beerbottles in hand
To laughter –
Does not occur here.
Our demonstrator at the street corner
Is no sleepwalker who must not be addressed. He is
No high priest holding the divine service. At any moment
You can interrupt him; he will answer you
Quite calmly and when you have spoken with him
Go on with his performance.

But you, do not say: that man
Is not an artist. By setting up such a barrier
Between yourselves and the world, you simply
Expel yourselves from the world. If you thought him
No artist he might think you
Not human, and that
Would be a worse reproach. Say rather:
He is an artist because he is human. We
May do what he does more perfectly and
Be honoured for it, but what we do
Is something universal, human, something hourly
Practised in the busy street, almost
As much a part of life as eating and breathing.

Thus your playacting
Harks back to practical matters. Our masks, you should say
Are nothing special insofar as they are only masks:
There the scarf peddler
Puts on the derby like a masher’s
Hooks a cane over his arms, even pastes a moustache
Under his nose and struts a step or two
Behind his stand, thus
Pointing out what wonders
Men can work with scarves, moustaches and hats. And our verses, you should say
In themselves are not extraordinary – the newsboys
Shout the headlines in cadences, thereby
Intensifying the effect and making their frequent repetition
Easier. We
Speak other men’s lines, but lovers
And salesmen also learn other men’s lines, and how often
All of you quote sayings! In short
Mask, verse and quotation are common, but uncommon
The grandly conceived mask, the beautifully spoken verse
And apt quotation.

But to make matters clear: even if you improved upon
What the man at the corner did, you would be doing less
Than him if you
Made your theatre less meaningful – with lesser provocation
Less intense in its effect on the audience – and
Less useful.

(1930)

That's one of my favourites - any selection would have to include that - and I think Brecht is best served by a selection, as good and natural a poetic voice that he so obviously was.

So Brecht's War Primer looks great. I think the piece starts really well and good on its contents then proceeds to conclude it isn't very good, after all that build-up:

Yet War Primer suffers from the same formal problem as Brecht’s other great works: it is too aesthetically interesting to be genuinely alienating, and too broadly didactic to be truly convincing as critique.

The above isn't so bad (weirdly enough Brecht would probably agree) but at that point the piece totally turns and I can't quite understanding what he is getting at.

Until his complete poems are reissued though this is probably the best representation of his poetry in English.

A new translation of his poetry!

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/book/9780871407672/collected-poems-of-bertolt-brecht

this was a good thread even if momus was being as dense as usual

(Worldwide territory on that ISBN, to save the next American to stop buy a google)

http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/180179144227/why-brecht-now-vol-i-lotta-lenya-sings-wie

But we put our schemes into effect. We built planes at various levels on the stage, and often made them move up or down. Piscator liked to include a kind of broad treadmill in the stage, with another one rotating in the opposite direction; these would bring on his characters. Or he would hoist his actors up and down in space; now and again they would break a leg, but we were patient with them.

Let me put the question in its proper perspective by saying that I saw all the rehearsals and that it was not at all due to shortcomings in [Peter Lorre]'s equipment that his performance so disappointed some of the spectators; those on the night who felt him to be lacking in "carrying-power" or "the gift of making his meaning clear" could have satisfied themselves about his gifts in this direction at the early rehearsals. If these hitherto accepted hallmarks of great acting faded away at the performance, this was the result aimed at by the rehearsals and is accordingly the only issue for judgment.

Brecht was particularly impressed by an actor called Karl Valentin, who had an exaggerated, clownlike series of gags and gestures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-NGN49Oz54

every time this thread resurfaces i get cross all over again at momus's just-googled-wikipedia-level interventions #ffs

LOL

Tracer Hand in 2003:

>>> Brecht complicated the actor's job, sometimes almost to the point of unperformability: often a character would explicity stand in for "the German bourgeoisie" or "the Army", and his actions could be read as the whims and defensiveness and vulnerabilities of that particular institution or class. What makes this so radical, and what actors and directors have still not grappled with AT ALL - in fact I think they've given up on it, like a stack of bills you know has to be paid but which you'd rather wish out of existence - is that real people's actions, and the attainment of their goals, are constantly undermined by forces external to them (above and beyond the director/God). Even when you think you're "free" you're enacting the desires of your class, your job, your family, etc. and you will play roles appropriate to these different parts of yourself; you say things you never dreamed of saying before you took on these things as part of your identity.

On a practical level, Brecht's scheme potentially erases what for the actor often seems like an uncrossable divide: between acting the CHARACTER and acting your OWN INSTINCTS. You can't dispense with the latter, because they're the only tools you've got. You can't dispense with the former because then you're not being true to the play. As far as I understand Brecht (which I admit is not very far; I've certainly never read Cahiers re: him or anything) he suggests that real people, you and me, act out fake little characters for ourselves evey day of our lives.

In Stanislavski/Method-related acting class, we were often expected to create our own private backstories of our characters, involving perhaps our own memories adapted to those of character, and this could obviously involve social class, the maid who is thinking about professional and private concerns, how she's going to respond to what she heard that the cook's been saying about her etc., so not like there's an inherent contradiction between that and what Brecht is talking about and prob how it worked out in practive.
Also we were sometimes told to stop Acting so much, which goes w Brecht wanting more of just basic Lorreness, which may be what Godard meant, Karina provided enough camera-satisfying presence that the director should have sense enough not to get into building up interest (though sometimes nec. with others, incl. the photogenic who don't know how how or when to move etc)

Nina Simone - Moon Over Alabama

"Numéro un" in March of 1977,
shown here performing Bertolt Brecht's "Moon Over Alabama."#NinaSimone #BertoltBrecht pic.twitter.com/XIFM9A5yNM

— windfall (@SadiKemalARSLAN) June 1, 2023

I tell u wemust die

ok i'm here now what

Your first posts in this thread are grebt!

I have his collected poems. It is not enough.

Reading Brecht again and found this in the uncollected poems from the war years pic.twitter.com/r6NxV1ciUh

— Jon (@TheLitCritGuy) September 6, 2023

Can someone explain Brecht to me, specifically how his distancing effect ties into the political dimensions of his art?

My impression, picked up mostly second hand via references, is that this distancing effect is there to make the viewer think as opposed to feel, to adopt a more critical stance towards the actions portrayed onstage as opposed to being swept up in them - something along the lines of in Greek tragedy we cry because the suffering is inevitable and in his plays he wanted to show that the suffering could be prevented?

I don't really get this idea - if a play does something to take me out of the action, breaks the fourth wall, etc. this indeed makes me think as opposed to feel, but what I'm thinking about is the artifice of the play, the formal intentions behind it, and not at all what's now happening onstage...I no longer think "this person's suffering could be avoided" because I no longer think "that's a person", I think "that is a character created by the author and anything happening to them is a contrivance thought up by them".

Anyway I don't really know what I'm talking about but I've seen ppl's admissions of ignorance lead to good chat on ILX before so am hoping to learn something from all the Brechtians in the chat.