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

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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.

woof, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 10:25 (two months ago) link

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.

woof, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 10:40 (two months ago) link

"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

Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 10:44 (two months ago) link

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)

mark s, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 10:48 (two months ago) link

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

woof, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 10:50 (two months ago) link

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.

xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 12:02 (two months ago) link

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”

Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 4 September 2024 12:14 (two months ago) link

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.

Defund Phil Collins (Tom D.), Wednesday, 4 September 2024 13:07 (two months ago) link

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.

Wry & Slobby (Portsmouth Bubblejet), Wednesday, 4 September 2024 14:47 (two months ago) link

Rainer Werner are you there?

Defund Phil Collins (Tom D.), Wednesday, 4 September 2024 14:55 (two months ago) link

xp great post

budo jeru, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 14:56 (two months ago) link

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.

drew in baltimore, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 15:17 (two months ago) link

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.

drew in baltimore, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 15:30 (two months ago) link

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.

glumdalclitch, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 15:40 (two months ago) link

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

drew in baltimore, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 15:45 (two months ago) link

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.

Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 16:05 (two months ago) link

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.

drew in baltimore, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 16:09 (two months ago) link

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.

drew in baltimore, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 16:14 (two months ago) link

really good revive

difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 4 September 2024 16:16 (two months ago) link


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