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

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.

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