Thursday, November 17, 2005
Brecht Video.
Wednesday's class. Same format as before. About the Fourth Wall. About Dialectics. About History and the Future. About Change. Here's a little more detail about the Brecht Video.It started with Helena Weigel as Mother Courage at the end of the play harnassing her cart. She has lost all of her children to the War. She is old, worn out, dull. Almost like a beast herself as she circles the cart round and round.
We then see Weigel, who ran Brecht's Theatre talking about how she believed that people were intelligent. That 'small people' - she was including herself in this - can change things. That they were thinking human beings.
She talked about Brecht working on the text with his actors. How he wanted the actors to keep the text in their hands for a long time; and not learn their parts straight away. She said he also reminded his actors to remember the moments they were ASTONISHED. To keep hold of it and not lose that astonishment there when they came to perform the scene.
The dramatist Karl Weber spoke. He said that Brecht wanted things made REMARKABLE. Things that are not usual. That can be judged. AND CHANGED.
He talked about the 'Arrangement' (a German word, apparently, though he said it with a French accent); the Staging. How Brecht would sometimes try up to thirty different ways of staging the scene before it was felt it told the right story. It was almost as if you could turn the sound down and the pictures would tell the story themselves. We then saw an excerpt from Die Mutter (The Mother) Scene 5 in which Pelagea Vlassova picks up the fallen Red Flag.
Professor Hans Mayer spoke. He spoke about Brecht saying that there should be an Art of Being a Spectator. A new art. That one of Brecht's favourite sayings was: The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating. That if it worked, then it was good.
How Brecht started off as an anarchist. How he played the part of a dangerous guy but was actually only playing it. That when he wrote Baal and Threepenny Opera HE HAD NO VIEW ON HISTORY OR HOW THINGS COULD BE CHANGED. But then by the time of his play Mann ist Mann (Man is Man) he'd read and studied Marxism and from that point on History was central to his thinking. That Man could and should be changed.
One playwright, Friedrich Wolf, a colleague, took him to task saying that in Mother Courage, Courage hadn't changed from the beginning to the end of the play and he answered: I don't care that Mother Courage hasn't changed. I want the audience to change.
Mayer said that when Brecht read the critics when the play was first put on in Switzerland in 1941 (and Brecht was in exile - in the USA?), he thought the production must have got it all wrong because there seemed to be too much sympathy for Courage. He didn't want this. And he worked hard to change it with his own production 10 and more years later.
Mayer also talked about Dialectical thinking. And about how Brecht's audiences didn't always react in the way Brecht wanted them to.
He talked about Brecht getting his own theatre, The Berliner Ensemble in Communist East Berlin after World War Two and how he was asked why he didn't go and work in West Germany. That his reply was that there he would have to do stuff in the usual repertoire. Stuff he didn't want to do. Whereas in East Berlin he could do anything he wanted. And neglect anything he wanted. Below is the:
Berliner Ensemble Theatre Website
The class finished in trying to distinguish between theatre, film and tv in which change doesn't really figure. Trying to get dialectical and non-dialectical models. That dialectics involves twos. Two elements.
We talked about Francis Fukuyama. How he came up with this idea of the end of history. That with the collapse of Communism in the early '90s, the West had 'won'. That there was now to be no more history. History had ended. All we were going to get now was more of the same. Wall to wall Wallmart. Blue-waters lapping beyond the horizon.But how, ten years later, 19 men, some airline tickets and a few Stanley Knives brought a sudden end to the end of history.
That much Anglo drama sees the world in terms of a centre which is being invaded from outside and has to be protected (cf War of the Worlds, Rambo, Alien, Black Hawk Down, Robocop etc). Sometimes the aliens almost win but in the end the status quo is restored by a Bruce Willis hero.
That there is no reason why 'they' attack. They have no reason, full stop. 'They' attack because 'they' are evil or mad or both.
It follows the same pattern with regard to 9/11. They attack us because they hate our freedoms. Our way of life. We bear no responisibility towards the situation. All we can do is destroy them as efficiently as possible. The war on terror.
A dialectical view of the situation might be this:
'Their' point of view is genuinely another point of view. As valid as 'ours'. They are not 'out there' or outside any circle or centre of our creating or imagination. They also have a centre. That out of the dialectic of these two centres will come a third thing.
Task for next week to now read Good Person of Szechuan with this analysis in mind. The idea of the two. Shen Te has to have another to cope with the world: Shui Ta. She has to split herself in two to survive.
How everyone else is being torn apart by it. How the Gods refuse to recognise it. The last image is Shen Te reaching for them to come back and sort this state of affairs out. But they refuse.
The actor speaking the epilogue is really worried that he was unable to satify the audience with an answer. Unhappy audiences = unemployed actors...
