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

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