Brechtian
Brechtian refers to the theatrical and literary techniques associated with German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. It emphasizes the alienation effect, breaking the fourth wall, and encouraging critical thinking in the audience. Brechtian literature often features episodic structures, direct address to the audience, and a focus on social and political issues, aiming to provoke reflection and dialogue rather than emotional identification with characters.
5 Key excerpts on "Brechtian"
- Franc Chamberlain, Bernadette Sweeney, Franc Chamberlain, Bernadette Sweeney(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Brecht associated this dominant tradition with the dramatic theories of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–c. 322 BC). Speaking from the perspective of a historical materialist, Brecht claimed that the Aristotelian tradition was underpinned by ideas and practices that impeded social revolution. These included: the idealist notion that consciousness determines human being; the fatalist idea that human nature is unalterable and given at birth; and the universalizing tendency to downplay social difference and promote instead humankind’s shared ‘common humanity’. Brecht also argued that these ideas were embodied in dramaturgical devices, such as an uninterrupted linear dovetailing of events that focused attention on the unfolding of the protagonist’s given destiny. The aspect of Aristotelian performance that he regarded as particularly ill-suited to a revolutionary agenda – because it reproduced the familiar and presented it as given and eternal – was its emphasis on imitation and associated psychological processes such as empathy and catharsis. Against this ‘dramatic theatre’ of present-tense, dialogue-based drama, Brecht pitted a dialectical epic theatre, which interrupted the drama with narrative commentary and illuminated the world as a construct open to change. Arrangement The term Brecht used during rehearsal to describe a dynamic and socially significant type of sculptural choreography...
eBook - ePubBrechtian Cinemas
Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier
- Nenad Jovanovic(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
...1 Introduction Revisiting Brecht and Cinema One of the most abused critical terms we have is “Brechtian.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum G IVEN THAT B ERTOLT BRECHT ’ S dealings with cinema were only intermittent, resulting in comparatively few films and writings on the medium, the ubiquity of his name in film criticism is astounding. One encounters it in discussions of practitioners as diverse as the Brothers Taviani (Padre Padrone [Father and Master; 1977], La notte di San Lorenzo [The Night of the Shooting Stars; 1982]), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady [2004], Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [2010]), and Russ Meyer (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! [1965], Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens [1979]), and throughout the decades spanned by their careers. The continued and varied relevance of Brecht for film practice and theory has been joined by an increasing breadth of meanings that Brecht’s name connotes, the fact that inspired Rosenbaum’s quote above. This book at once narrows the term “Brechtian,” so as to help enhance the scientific rigor of Brecht-inflected film scholarship, and expands it, so as to reflect the diversity of ways in which Brecht has impacted cinema. The term “Brechtian” can have at least three broad meanings in the context of theater and film studies. The most obvious of these is historical: a play by Brecht is Brechtian just as King Lear is a Shakespearean play. The least ambiguous sense of the adjective, this is also the least common of the three...
eBook - ePub- Stephen Unwin(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Nick Hern Books(Publisher)
...Some members of the Ensemble complained that Brecht’s insistence on exploring dialectics and contradiction became quite maddening in his last years. The Modern Brechtian Director The modern theatre director, working in a Brechtian fashion, can use the full panoply of Brechtian techniques: the ‘alienation effect’, the ‘epic theatre’, acting with gestus, and the exploration of contradiction; he can emphasise pictorial clarity, use realistic elements in a way that recognises that their disposition is temporary, acknowledge the material facts of the theatre in the stage picture, and employ bright lights; and he can employ literal elements such as signs and placards, present the music in individual and separated numbers, and so on. All of this can be helpful. But directing in a Brechtian way derives, above all, from an attitude to the material and to the theatre’s role in society. If the director doesn’t ask the right questions about the text and interrogate the content of the drama itself, the technical paraphernalia is best avoided. And so, in deciding to take up what I call ‘the Brecht challenge’, the modern director needs to make sure that he shares some of Brecht’s sceptical, materialist and dialectical approach to the world. So what can the young director learn from Brecht’s approach? We could perhaps boil it down to five salient points: 1. The emphasis on the story Remember that good drama shows the way that things change and that story is the best way of conveying this change. And so it’s essential that you ensure that every twist and turn of the story – however minor – is laid out as clearly as possible and treat the telling of the story as your primary duty...
eBook - ePubSigns of Performance
An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre
- Colin Counsell(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 BRECHT AND EPIC THEATRE THEATRE FOR THE SCIENTIFIC AGE The theatre of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) conformed to no single style, for style, he argued, should always be dictated by the work's polemical purpose. Over the span of his career he experimented with a variety of theatrical modes. His early plays employed an Expressionist-like form, perhaps evidencing the influence of dramatists Frank Wedekind and, more obliquely, Georg Kaiser. His collaborations with Erwin Piscator at the Berlin Volksbühne or ‘People's Stage’ were drawn on a large, spectacular scale, in contrast to his simple Lehrstücke or ‘instruction pieces’. For the latter Brecht drew upon the model of Japanese Nôh theatre, just as the so-called ‘new playing style’ of his production of Antigone at Chur, Switzerland, featured elements adapted from the classical Greek stage. Best known of all, perhaps, are his late, more traditionally crafted productions, the 1947 American staging of his Life of Galileo starring Charles Laughton or the Berliner Ensemble's 1954 The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Equally, Brecht's critical writings reveal a wealth of borrowings and influences, ranging from the traditional German popular theatre such as could still be seen in fairgrounds in Brecht's youth, to Chinese acting, English and Spanish Renaissance theatre, and contemporary agitprop groups like Russia's ‘Blue Blouse’ companies, as well as canonical authors such as Shakespeare and Büchner, and even cabaret (see Calandra 1974). The continuity of Brecht's work, then, lies not in its style...
eBook - ePubWalter Benjamin
Critical Constellations
- Graeme Gilloch(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...For Benjamin, Brecht as exemplary polytechnical aesthetic engineer expressed the decisive experiences and articulated the essential responses to the increasingly unstable, threatening political con-ditions of the time and the ‘implosion’ of traditional bourgeois culture. Amid such crises, political necessities, not philosophical niceties, were the main imperatives behind Brecht’s and Benjamin’s writings and the ground of their perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless unyielding, friendship. At the same time, it is important to recognize that Benjamin’s fascination with the techniques of epic drama also involves an important continuation, elaboration and reconfiguration of his enduring attempt to ‘recreate criticism’ – criticism, that is, no longer understood as a distinctly (or even principally) literary endeavour, but rather conceived as a wider cultural undertaking and, above all, an urgent political intervention. In this respect, the politicized vocabulary now adopted by Benjamin is clearly recognizable as an extension and radicalization of many of the earlier concepts and insights pioneered in Einbahnstrasse : the critique of the mediocrity of conventional bourgeois scholarship, the search for more immediate forms of cultural production, the emphasis upon literary technique and, above all, the figure of the engineer as a new kind of aesthetic producer and critic. Moreover, and more surprisingly, there are, as I have suggested in this chapter, a number of subtle, intriguing correspondences between some of the dramatic principles of Brecht’s epic theatre and critical ideas found in the Trauerspiel study: for example, Benjamin’s advocacy of the discontinuous treatise form as a cognitive, philosophical practice finds a clear echo in the interruption of action as a pedagogic imperative, and the notion of origin as the instant in which a constellation manifests itself prefigures the gestural moment in epic drama in which recognition occurs...
