Brechtian Cinemas

Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier

Nenad Jovanovic

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438463650
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage—a principal source of artistic estrangement ( Verfremdung ) in earlier Brechtian films—has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.

1

Introduction

Revisiting Brecht and Cinema

One of the most abused critical terms we have is “Brechtian.”

—Jonathan Rosenbaum

GIVEN THAT BERTOLT 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. One is more likely to encounter the word “Brechtian” in a commentary of a play by Peter Weiss or Naomi Wallace, or—potentially more confusingly—of any theater production that opposes the narrative and/or stylistic norms of Aristotelian realism (which illustrates the word’s second usage), than in a discussion of Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan, 1939).

There is a conundrum posed by the practice of applying the same term “Brechtian” to the works that display narrative, stylistic, and political differences as great as are those between, for instance, Weiss’s The Investigation (1965) and Takashi Miike’s Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006), or between Wallace’s In the Heart of America (2001) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. The Investigation is a documentary-drama based on the 1963–1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, employing the contradictions among the witnesses to the genocide as a principal structural feature, while Big Bang Love focuses on the erotic attraction between two murderers in a juvenile detention center. Wallace’s play bitterly criticizes the American Gulf War, paralleling it with the war in Vietnam, whereas Meyer’s film is a minimally plotted spectacle of campy humor and large bosoms. Both Big Bang Love and Ultra-Vixens are, then, at odds with the partisan politics of all Brecht’s mature works. What allows for their comparisons with Brecht (albeit problematically) are their formal operations: the former film flaunts its artificiality through a minimal setting and lighting scheme and through scenes whose claims to objectivity are uncertain, while the latter refrains from continuity editing and uses reflexivity (exemplified by Meyer’s appearance in one scene carrying a film camera around the set).

A third usage of “Brechtian” applies to discussion of editing stylization, where an attempt is made to cinematically adjust Brecht’s theatrical strategy of foregrounding the constructedness of a presentation to aid the spectator in creating a critical distance from it. Those to whom the term is applied in this way emphasize in various manners the “spaces” between shots, as smallest units of the filmic chain, instead of aiming for the impression of unity between discrete segments of the spaces that those shots represent, as do filmmakers who work within the continuity editing system.

These varied senses of the term “Brechtian” can serve as the lines along which to divide the existing scholarship on Brecht and cinema. One group of texts employs historiographic approaches to the topic, highlighting Brecht’s writings on specific films and the medium in general, and the films on which he creatively collaborated: Martin Brady’s “Brecht and Film” (2006), Angela Curran’s “Bertolt Brecht” (2009), Wolfgang Gersch’s Film bei Brecht (Brecht at Film, 1975), Walter Hinck’s “Kamera als Soziologe” (Camera as a Sociologist, 1971), Thomas Elsaesser’s “From Anti-Illusionism to Hyper-realism: Bertolt Brecht and Contemporary Film” (1990), Roswitha Mueller’s Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media (1989), Marc Silberman’s “Brecht and Film” (1997), John Willett’s “Brecht and the Motion Pictures” (1998), “The Lessons of Brecht” section of Robert Stam’s Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1995), Karsten Witte’s “Brecht und der Film” (“Brecht and Film,” 2006), and certain portions of Maia Turovskaia’s Na grani

e iskusstv: Brekht i kino (At the Border of Art: Brecht and Film, 1985) and Martin Walsh’s The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema (1981). The texts vary chiefly in their respective emphases, but commonly reflect upon the cinematic influences on Brecht, and point to the impact of his ideas and techniques on film studies (manifested most persistently in the version of psychosemiotics proposed by the contributors to the British journal Screen in the early 1970s) and film practice (shown in a range of cinemas and film movements, most distinctly in certain films of the French Nouvelle vague, Brazilian Cinema Novo, and New German Cinema). The other group of texts is informed by what David Bordwell disparagingly refers to as “SLAB” theory (the initials of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes, writers whose ideas—linked by their use of semiotics—the theory amalgamates). Dominant in film studies until the rise of Bordwell’s and Carroll’s oppositional “cognitivism” in the 1980s, the “SLAB” discourse has produced numerous texts, the most influential of which (Jean-Louis Baudry’s “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” [1999 (1970)], Peter Wollen’s “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est” [1999 (1972)], Colin MacCabe’s “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian theses” [1974], and Stephen Heath’s “Lessons from Brecht” [1974]) are summarized and critically commented upon in chapter 1, along with Dana Polan’s and Murray Smith’s critiques of it (“Brecht and the Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema” [1974], “A Brechtian Cinema? Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film” [1985] and “The Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism” [1996], respectively). The lack of a recent book-length study that employs a phenomenological perspective to tackle the broader subject of Brechtian cinemas (as opposed to any one filmmaker’s Brechtianisms) provided a further impetus for writing this volume.

Our era of unbridled liberalism has seen a proliferation of versions of Brecht that downplay his politics to one level or another, regarding them as fish bones that have to be removed for the dramatic or interpretive meal to become edible. A more holistic approach to Brecht considers not only his theories but also his Marxist agenda. This choice finds its rationale in the ongoing relevance of Brecht’s work for the cinematic practices that acknowledge his dramatic theory as a decisive influence. As John J. White suggests, Brecht’s thinking about theater developed in a linear fashion, becoming increasingly informed by Marxism in the mid-1920s. According to White, the change of emphasis from political to artistic radicalism that occurred in the middle phase of Brecht’s work as a theorist of theater, and the decreased presence of recognizably Marxist ideas in his work from the period, should both be attributed to the circumstances of exile: in his countries of asylum, Scandinavia and the United States, Brecht was required to refrain from political activity, even in the aesthetic realm (White 79). This book, then, regards Verfremdung and related Brechtian concepts as possessing a political function.

Brecht’s politics and the best examples of his film practice intersect at the notion of dialectics. The filmmakers who constitute this book’s focus are selected for the diversity of formal ways in which their work uses his method as a structural principle, and for the cultural diversity they represent. The choice of Lars von Trier, a Dane, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and Peter Watkins, filmmakers who worked in different European countries and the United States, illustrates that the phenomenon of Brechtian cinema is not exclusive to the German cultural context, where Brecht has long enjoyed the status of a canonical writer.

Some readers might expect to encounter additional case studies in a book bearing a title that promises a degree of comprehensiveness. Alexander Kluge and Harun Farocki, two major filmmakers who have eloquently expressed their indebtedness to Brecht, are excluded from this consideration because the prevalence of the nonfictional mode in Kluge’s later works and in most of Farocki’s oeuvre does not fit the book’s concern with stage-like stylization. The careers of two other influential practitioners in relation to whom Brecht is often mentioned, Glauber Rocha and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ended too long ago for their films to exemplify Brechtian filmmaking today, as one of this volume’s central concerns. Lastly, Jean-Luc Godard, whose several 1960s and 1970s films nod to Brecht’s literary and theoretical output, is left outside the scope of my investigation owing to the abundance of scholarship on his work.1 (Nonetheless, he is frequently invoked in these pages, as a good specter).

Of course, the filmmakers discussed here at length are worthy of exploration for more reasons than their relation to Brecht. This book’s secondary goal is to delineate the formal characteristics of Straub and Huillet’s, Watkins’s, and von Trier’s cinemas as they have developed against a backdrop of changing cultural and social circumstances, and to update the rich critical dialogue the filmmakers have elicited. Huillet died two years after the appearance of the last English-language study on her and her artistic and life partner, Ursula Böser’s The Art of Seeing, the Art of Listening (2004), but Straub continued to produce prolifically (often in various collaborations). Since the appearance of the only book in this language dedicated solely to his work, Joseph A. Gomez’s Peter Watkins (1979), Watkins has produced Resan (The Journey, 1985) and La commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), ambitious films that have largely fallen under the public radar. On Lars von Trier there is not a scarcity of commentaries, but the filmmaker’s rapid production rate and the polarized views on his relationship to Brecht2 merit this addition to the existing literature.

The four filmmakers increasingly use the profilmic event as a source of Brechtian estrangement, at the expense of such specifically cinematic techniques as camerawork and editing. This trend seems conditioned by the ongoing shift of Hollywood as a globally dominant film industry from its ideal of stylistic transparency to the use of attention-grabbing cinematography and cutting as defining characteristics. To offer but one among abundant examples, the James Bond installment Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008) establishes a narrative connection between the scene of a horse race and the sequence of an interrogation turning into a chase only after it has crosscut between the two lines of action for a good minute. For the indicated duration, the viewer is kept perplexed about the race scene’s connection to the story world.

Bordwell considers the described changes of Hollywood style sufficiently extensive to be given a distinct name: “intensified continuity.” He identifies the following four strategies as characteristic of the evolved Hollywood style: (1) increasingly rapid editing; (2) “forcing the perspective” through the use of bipolar extremes of lens lengths; (3) reliance on close shots; and (4) wide-ranging camera movements (Way 121). All these strategies aim at distorting the everyday perception of “reality,” or—in the words of the Russian Formalists and, in a modified form, Brecht—at making the familiar strange. Mainstream cinema’s adoption of a language that does not want to be overlooked—to invert the linguist Berthe Siertsema’s oft-quoted observation—necessitated the change of emphasis of Brechtian filmmakers, with their aim to estrange. As a logical consequence of their opposition to verisimilitude (in the sense of what Brecht terms “surface realism”), these filmmakers’ later works are progressively more theatrical.3

The Titular and Other Key Terms

As Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait suggest, theatricality is often used interchangeably with a variety of related but distinct concepts—from mimesis to theatrum mundi, from ritual behavior to performativity (33). The writers do not identify the context in which the term was first used in 1837, but the assumption seems safe that the original usage was restricted to theater as an art, and that the word originally denoted the medium’s various contemporary conventions. The term acquires a decidedly more complex meaning with its appearance in Russian as teatralnost. It is widely considered that Nikolai Evreinov, the theorist and practitioner who coined that term (Féral, “Theatricality” 95), found inspiration in the concept of literariness (literarnost), introduced into critical discourse by the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism. Presumably because theater addresses different senses, Evreinov’s definition of the former concept is much broader than the Russian Formalists’ literariness, that peculiar quality of literature separating it from other artistic forms and extra-artistic reality (Jestrovic, “Theatricality” 55). Evreinov attributed the principle to all actions resulting in transformation of the elements of the subject’s environment or to those actions themselves, as well as to the human beings’ will for transformation (which he referred to as “theatrical instinct”). The array of meanings attached to “theatricality” was broadened yet further with the term’s 1990s penetration into the international critical discourse.4 Three overlapping approaches to theatricality can be discerned in the literature on the subject: a predominantly historical one, which aims to elucidate the notion by tracing the changes of its negative connotations across the millennia of theater history; a predominantly phenomenological approach, which associates theatricality with not only the medium itself but also other kinds of human endeavor; and a predominantly semiotic approach, which focuses on the notion within the context of theater per se.

The historical line of inquiry into theatricality typically starts with that part of its etymological history that links it to such negatively marked traits as fakeness, superficiality, and extravagance. Representatives of this methodology—among others, Jonas Barish (The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 1981), Marvin Carlson (“The Resistance to Theatricality,” 2002), and Davis and Postlewait (Theatricality, 2003)—are engaged in a dialogue with the tradition of Western theater detractors running from Plato, Tertullian, Rousseau, and Nietzsche to Sartre on the one hand and to Michael Fried on the other.5

The phenomenological approach to theatricality might be called “expansionist,” as it involves transferring the idea of theatricality from the context of the medium into the totality of social activities. Starting in the 1950s with the work of the anthropologists Milton Singer and Victor Turner, the move necessitated a new vo...