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

Brecht's form of theatre, which he called Epic was developed from forms that appealed in proletarian theatres and music halls, in a conscious attempt to escape the bourgeois cliches of the 'well-made play'. Brecht was particularly impressed by an actor called Karl Valentin, who had an exaggerated, clownlike series of gags and gestures. Brecht used Valentin as well as other clowns like Chaplin as models, developing an idea he called 'the quotable gesture'. This was the collision of the gestural repertoire of clowns with Brecht's desire to remind the audience at every moment that they were in a theatre, and that theatre was something artificial and hence changeable, just like society itself. So actors were encouraged to 'alienate' their gestures by seeming to 'quote' them, repeat them, enlarge them, make them unnatural.

You see this clearly echoed in Karina's gesture in, for instance, Godard's 'Une Femme Est Une Femme': ludicrous gestures like the actors walking around the apartment holding floor lamps, or gags like making words out of book titles, are repeated. The actors do dances as if projecting to the back of a music hall. They do indeed use their whole bodies, 'quoting' their gestures.

(also: brecht and godard now paradoxically survive entirely in the art-museum worldets of the bourgeoisie viz the "wellmade channel" = Arte TV etc)

Brecht quoted in order to estrange -- it was part of the Verfremdungseffekt. Estrangement encourages critical skills; it makes you struggle to puzzle things out for yourself. 'Why is Karina carrying that lamp about the house?' Bourgeois theatre quoted with the opposite intention: to keep the naturalist fourth wall illusion going, to prevent thought or criticism. 'He has the gun because he's angry that someone stole his money'.

(also: brecht and godard now paradoxically survive entirely in the art-museum worldets of the bourgeoisie viz the "wellmade channel" = Arte TV etc)

Agreed, which is why we must cry, with our dying breath even, VIVA THE TRANS-NATIONAL AVANT GARDE!

Brecht was very influenced by Chinese theatre, and wrote an essay entitled 'Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting'. I was at a kabuki performance in Osaka this summer, and it was easy to see how Asian theatre continues this anti-identification style (anti-Method); the actors stopped in the middle of the play to sing current pop hits and collect 10,000 yen notes from matrons in the audience. Each time they did some gesture they were known for (a funny blind man with cane act, for instance), they stopped the action to acknowledge fans in the audience calling out their names.

'The dramatic theater's spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too-- Just like me--It's only natural-- It'll never change--The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable--That's great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world--I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.

The epic theater's spectator says: I'd never have thought it -- That's not the way -- That's extraordinary, hardly believable -- It's got to stop -- The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary -- That's great art; nothing obvious in it -- I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.'

A gneral reason why it feels unfair: we are not mistresses of our fates; we are baked beans in the guts of the living.

But more specifically: one thing that BB was (I do *not speak of JLG here) was "politically canny". And one aspect of that, I think, was that he knew that the ultimate fate of eg. his work would not be determined by the way he wrote it, how many verses he put in, etc -- but by World History or smaller and more local variants thereof.

The despised TE taught me some of this, ten and a half years ago. In a way I still think he was right; unsurprisingly no doubt.

Possibly it is necessary to step back and see what we, or you, or I *can* get out of poor BB, rather than enumerating all the things that we think we cannot.

I don't believe this distinction still operates though. Epic-theatregoers are (70 years after the arrival of the genre in this form) surely confirmed in their expectations, not confounded: caused to feel smug about things they already always knew, not question or puzzle or think for themselves?

gneral = general

*not = *not*

Breaked = Brecht

Tweaked = Twecht

Speaked = Speight

Gannet = Garnett

Baths = Barthes

Godot = Godard

Verfremdungs = A

S = Z

pf i don't think BB is invalidated necessarily: I do think the specifics of technique may have lost their force (this is probbly one of the things jlg wz wrestling with)

(eagleton on the other hand can't be rehabilitated that easily)

Pinefox demonstrating canny 'alienation effect' posting there!

(ie in the thing on charles II on tv this minute one of CII's minister's is played by someone who was in THE OFFICE last year: this is a dimension of the "epic" aspedt which has become very tangly indeed)

There could be an argument that 'Kill Bill' uses a sort of Epic, and that Epic techniques overlap with postmodern tropes, and therefore fill The Simpsons etc. What these lack, of course, is Brecht's political commitment.

it's not so much "it depends how it's done" as "it depends how the audience use it": it's become much more chick-egg i suspect

(this is one of my long-standing objections to eagleton maybe: that i think his armatures of clarification constitute the return of the thing which he claims to be working to dispel)

(the dynamics of revolutionary pedagogy have always been a conundrum of course)

what would be the acting styles which reminded us to think of these forces also?

also: the sheer density of layers of cultural production in the us entertainment industry (even within a relatively monolithic and directly political org like murdoch's) makes the space for potential variety of contradictory effect greater... the stasi as an org was pretty much committed to shutting down everything across the board

(though i think there are stories of burbage having to be pissy and moody all day when he had to do the Dane or whatever.)

'"The intellectual isolation here is enormous," Brecht compained. "Compared to Hollywood, Svendborg was a world center." His ideas, such as "the production, distribution and enjoyment of bread," were not taken seriously by movie moguls. In 1947 Brecht was accused of un-American activities...

Am I the only one who would love it if Tarantino's next movie were about the production, distribution and enjoyment of bread? (Without anyone's face getting blown off in the process.)

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.

i am called out in the thread title so feel somewhat duty bound to say something.. though i am no brecht scholar! so i suspect some of this is wrong, but for what it's worth - i don't think it's so much about wanting to take you completely outside the fiction of the play - although that can have its own salutary political effect eg thinking about who wrote it and why, who commissioned it and why, remembering that actors are people etc - it's about displacing you from identification with a "hero". a few reasons for this

1 - in order to function to maximum dramatic effect a hero was usually held to need to exist in a privileged space in order to pursue their goals eg be a king or a prince or a police officer, for whom the normal boring rules of society don't get in the way of their action. identifying with this sort of person is inherently a bit fash

2 - as you say the process of identification itself feels blinkered, snaring you into a single point of view, a single individual's wants and needs, rather than seeing how these wants and needs are produced by social forces

not too much legacy for this style of drama these days needsless to say but someone who comes to mind is aki kaurismaki - think about how you actually DO get quite emotionally invested in what happens in his movies despite the actors' blank affects. their acting sketches a situation which is itself moving, rather than their acting illuminating their souls (or whatever)

Thanks Tracer that's all very helpful.

So how does this displacing work, in practice? I think perhaps "Brechtian" has become a shorthand that doesn't actually evoke what Berthold was about - when I see it used it's for stuff like Lars Von Trier's Dogville, and from what you write it's rather more subtle than that?

I can think of a lot of anti-protagonist works, though I don't know whether they are in any way Brechtian - all those sprawling 19th century novels with tons of main characters, or TV shows like Deadwood and Black Sails that are about depicting a community rather than an individual's psyche.

With Kaurismaki I imagine the blankness of the actors both as a signifier of their Scandinavian repressedness and a part of the rules of the director's universe, in the same way that characters being portrayed by anthropomorphic animals might be.

I've always taken it as yes trying to cut off easy emotional responses and then something like an extended version of the 'who wrote this?/actors are people' thing, like it's not letting sit back and watch the magic thing in the frame - this thing you thought you were doing, paying money you earned to sit in a room and watch some make believe, is a strange activity and part of the system too - you're in this.

That's been my understanding but I've never looked deep into it. fwiw I think it's v hard to do well & has diminishing returns - slapped on as a 'clever' move without a real politics or real thought.

Maybe 60s-70s Godard has a version of that nest of ideas that I like.

But i think maybe the canonical form is play-within-play in which the inner play (which takes up most of the action, and is often kind of fabular) is discussed/analysed in the outer play (Caucasian Chalk Circle) so that pushes towards a kind of 'think don't feel, analyse don't identify' function for the v-effekt more than 'implicate the audience', which is maybe extending too far.

"thinking is praxis, feeling is passive" also a binary that anyone in 2024 could poke many holes into but I won't take Brecht to task for that

i mean it's also very much an imposed modern binary, those 30s guys were all different flavours of dialectician!

(i have thoughts on this which diverge a bit from the discussion so far but more urgently i have to write a pitch this morning, to a magazine that actually pays well)

xp
yeah, I'd also say that he's a messy figure and a wild talent so that yup there's a theory but the works spill all over at their best - emotion, flash & fun

(tbc I read his poetry mostly, sometimes the drama and only very very occasionally see it staged, so given alienation is more in staging than script I really am shooting in the dark a bit)

I want mark s thoughts but cannot pay well

Never seen a Brecht play (or engaged with him besides the poetry) but I think where I've seen non hero deployed best was in Potemkin? Its been a few years since I watched it but it felt like a process (revolution) was being detailed where things happen to individuals but also groups.

yes. and the films of Tati, while they have a protagonist, are concerned with groups and crowds. and they reject the kind of POV film grammar that puts you “in his shoes”

I saw Mother Courage once (w/ Glenda Jackson), which was great and had a fair few laughs in it too. Oh and Life of Galileo (w/ Simon Russell Beale). I don't like the theatre much though.

While Brecht often reduced 'feeling' and 'rational logic' to binary opposites in his theoretical writings (such as his notes on "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny"), this is in part due to him being a canny self-publicist who understood the PR benefits of oversimplification.

In practice, his plays from the 1930s and 1940s toy with the audience's emotions like a concertina, drawing you into empathising with a protagonist from time to time only to distance you again at the end of a scene. Works such as 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui', for example, are eminently watchable with a lot of comic potential. I saw Robin Askwith in the lead role of Ui at Warwick University back in the day, and his casting in the role (encouraged by Leonard Rossiter, no less!) cleverly made use of Askwith's charisma to which the audience are occasionally invited to succumb before snapping out of the spell.

If Brecht's theatre has now fallen out of favour - although there was a fairly long critical legacy in the works of Heiner Müller, Volker Braun etc. -, it's in part due to Brechtian theory being underpinned by a belief in the inherent 'Veränderbarkeit' ('changeability') of society, and that prioritising critical reflection over 'Einfühlung' as an audience reaction could help to bring this about. Writing against the backdrop of exile and National Socialism, Brecht was more often than not trying to convince himself as much as his audience that social change was inevitable, and his private writings were invariably much more pessimistic about this.

Rainer Werner are you there?

xp great post

Agreed. Longtime lurker and theatre person here. Brecht’s playwriting has a lot in common with Shakespeare, another manipulator of emotional identification and distance, and he admits as much in his more honest moments. There’s a big difference between Brecht as an artist and Brecht as a theoretician, as well as a difference between what he actually wrote and what’s been boiled down as “Brechtian” theory. There are also many camps of orthodox and heterodox Brechtians active, especially in German theater, where his influence is still massive.

Part of what makes Mother Courage powerful is that the audience does identify with her emotionally, while at the same time being shown how her choice to pursue profit during wartime above all things is literally monstrous, it leads directly to the deaths of her three children. She’s like a proletarian, foul-mouthed, singing King Lear, who similarly provokes sympathy and revulsion from audiences.

On that note, don't pass up The Threepenny Novel, which is also an account of ruthless and uselessly destructive stockholder capitalism in wartime. I found it as effective as any of the plays, tbh.

The Brecht songbook is also slept on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d2-EBkfBBU

lots of good posts itt, thanks all

I think where I've seen non hero deployed best was in Potemkin? Its been a few years since I watched it but it felt like a process (revolution) was being detailed where things happen to individuals but also groups.

One example I forgot to mention is Rene Clement's Battle Of The Rails, filmed a few years after occupation, about the railway's involvement in the resistance. Shot mostly with non-actors who were there, I don't think you even catch anyone's name, it is entirely about the Railways as a collective.

Thing is though both with that and Potemkin words like "distance" and "alienation" feel wildly out of place - these are highly emotionally charged works that carry you along with them and could not I think be accused of making viewers think too much...you are fully invested in the protagonist, it's just the protagonist is the Working Class and The French Resistance, respectively.

Eisenstein is pre-Brechtian or at the very least an early contemporary, and his theory aiui is based more on the affective emotional power of montage, that quick cuts could produce a pseudo-Pavlovian response in audiences. But he studied theater under Mayakovsky and there’s a common lineage between Brecht, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Tretiakov and Russian formalism. Brecht is similarly attracted to the fragment but he deploys it in a totally different way and for a totally different purpose than Eisenstein.

That difference is also why Eisensteinian film grammar was so easily appropriated by Hollywood - most obviously in the Untouchables by De Palma - whereas Brechtian gestures remain mostly arthouse or European.

really good revive