Dan Sallitt wrote:

>>Some posts ago, someone questioned my saying Mizoguchi resembles Brecht,
>>the objection being that Mizo gets us emotionally involved whereas
>>Brecht alienates us. But this is an Anglo-American corruption of what
>>Brecht wanted, which was to increase emotional involvement.
>>
>>
>
>Could you elaborate on what Brecht really wanted? What I said was,
>"When I think of the adjective 'Brechtian,' though, I think of the
>artist pushing the viewer back away from a certain pleasurable
>identification, forcing them to a distance so that the pleasure of
>immersion doesn't obscure some other consideration." But I'm no expert
>on the subject. - Dan
>
>

I am not an expert on Brecht. I never saw a spectacle produced and
directed by Brecht personally, nor have I had the good fortune to
discuss these questions with anyone who has. My sense is that
"Brechtian" became an adjective in the 1970s that was routinely used (by
academics, naturally) in ways that went diammetrically counter to Brecht
himself.

What I believe Brecht meant is, I think, summed up in my post, right
after the words you quote above: that "alienation" or "distance" is not
supposed to make us less emotionally involved, but more emotionally
involved. The analogy to music is my own, but I hope Fred Camper will
endorse it.

My point is that I am using Brecht within the problems posed on this
group between "form" and "content" and to what degree we should be
consciously aware of framing, cutting, camera movements, etc.

In response to your invitation to elaborate, may I quote a long footnote
from my book about John Ford, dealing with Jean-Marie Straub's assertion
(to the fury of Richard Roud, who loathed Ford and adored Straub) that
Ford is more Brechtian than Brecht? This was written in reaction to the
"diammetrically-counter" academics.

Here we go:

When Straub made this remark to the author in 1975 (after seeing
Pilgrimage and Donovan's Reef) he was referring not so much to Ford's
acting style—in that sense no films are truly Brechtian—as to Ford's
manner of stripping naked social ideologies that are elsewhere
unacknowledged. To Joseph McBride, Straub said Ford is the most
Brechtian offilmmakers, "because he shows things that make people
think...by [making] the audience collaborate on the film" (McBride and
Wilmington, John Ford, p. 108). McBride analyzes Fort Apache in this
light, pointing out how Captain York donning Colonel Thursday's hat at
the end is a Brechtian device [like the cardinal donning the pope's
robes in Brecht's Galileo], and that we see clearly that an insane
system needs the dedication of noble men to perpetuate itself.) Less
simply, one might call Ford Brechtian because every element in his
cinema is engaged diaIectically with every other element (whether one
speaks of elements of—or between—style, content, myth, ideology, or
whatever), with the result that Ford's films are self-reflexive and
transparent in their workings.

This notion—essentially the thesis of this book—flies violently in
the face of a recent critical tendency to regard the “classical” cinema
of Hollywood as a monolithic system that sought to mask its "codes"
(e.g., its montage) in order to create an apparently unmediated
representation of the real world; it sought to entertain passively and
left unacknowledged its own governing ideology. (Cf., Stagecoach: my
argument with Browne ("Spectator-in-the-Text"); also Burch, Distant
Observer; Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye [New York: Oxford,
1983]; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres [New York: Random House, 1981]).
“Modernist” (i.e., some post-1960) cinema, on the other hand, subverts
our absorption in emotion, story, or character, and exposes its "codes"
(e. g., by showing the camera, discordant editing, having an actor speak
directly to us), in order to force us to relate intellectually rather
than through emotional identification.

In these circles, Straub is admired as epitomizing 'modernist'
cinema, while Ford is often derided (although not by most of the
above-named critics) as a sentimental reactionary. Thus Straub's
comparison of Brecht and Ford caused considerable head-shaking. It is,
of course, generally agreed that many films cater exclusively to an
audience's desire for passive spectacle (e.g.. Star Wars, some of
Hitchcock); and all research shows that audiences generally watch movies
in order not to think. Nonetheless, the fallacies of "modernist"
critics are multitudinous (even including their arrogation of the label
"modern"). Firstly, their premise of a monolithic classical system is a
pure fantasy that reveals little sensibility for the complexity of
pre-1960 cinema and almost no acquaintance with the actual films
themselves. Secondly, they naively assume that audiences can be forced
to think, whereas "modernist" techniques soon lose their initial shock
and audiences happily re-immerse themselves into the fictional worlds of
even the most determinedly antipathetic movies. Thirdly, because their
basis is exclusively materialist, they, like Grierson and Aristarco
before them, distrust emotions and aestheticism and would destroy the
art of cinema in favor of a cinema of political propaganda.

An examination of Brecht’s 1930 table, in which he gave cursory
comparison between the (bad) "dramatic" and the (good, Brechtian) "epic"
theaters, will, in the light of Straub and this book, show Ford very
much on the "epic" side—the "modernist":
Dramatic Theater Epic Theater
plot narrative
implicates spectator into drama makes spectator an
observer
wears down his capacity for action arouses his capacity
for action
provides him with sensations forces him to make
decisions
provides experience provides a
picture of the world
involves the spectator confronts the
spectator
suggestion argument
feelings are preserved feelings are
propelled into perceptions
man is assumed known man is the object
of inquiry
man unalterable man alterable
and altering
suspense about the outcome suspense about the
progress
each scene exists for another each scene for itself
linear development in curves
evolutionary determinism evolutionary leaps
the world, as it is the world, as
it becomes
what man ought to do what man is
forced to do
man as a fixed point man as a process
his instincts his
motivations
thought determines being social being
determines thought

(Brecht did not intend, obviously, that epic theater be absolutely one
way and not at all the other way; it is a question more of tendency.)

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