Having reserched Brecht and having no real interest in theatre beyond how it influences cinema, I decided to looking into some films that have been influenced by Brecht's philosophies and analyse them for myself to see how they do this.
The first of my films is Funny Gams (1997, Michael Haneke)
Funny Games depicts the holiday of a wealthy Austrian family. The journey starts in the car, joining the family as they smile as the father puts on the radio and a heavy metal song starts. Behind the credits of the film, the family keeps on smiling, seemingly hearing another kind of song or perhaps unaffected by the aggression of the music. This introductory scene can be seen as a joke commencing at the starting point of the film. However, it does do more than just serve as a joke because it also draws attention to the disconnect between the film world and the construction of said world.
The audience is with the family and part of the family and has already identified with them in the context of the film. After less than five minutes, the viewer is violently taken out of their comfort zone by songs which the characters seemingly can’t hear. Two things are very quickly shown to the audience, one: that this is not going to be a light family occasion filled my merriment and laughter, and two: you are made very aware you are watching a constructed piece of cinema.
Funny Games is one of the best films employing Brecht’s techniques. Of all the movies I analysed, the idea of distance is most vitally important in Haneke’s film. The distance for Brecht was used to provoke conscience and thinking in the audience, Funny Games aims for almost exactly the same thing (with a great deal of success it must be said).
The main scene which links the movie with Brecht, and one of the most famous scenes in the Austrian director’s filmography, is when the mother, Anna (Susanne Lothar), can finally shoot Paul (Arno Frisch, one of the torturers, and give the family the opportunity to escape.
When they are start to run, the other torturer, Peter (Frank Giering), takes the remote and starts to literally rewind the film. Haneke omits any kind of identification, first again supporting the family, giving a moment of victory, only to have it immediately taken from them and thus from the audience. This puts the viewer back to reality, knowing that the family is not going to win. The whole film is constructed in this mode with the viewer, being forced to do nothing but contemplate the fact they are a helpless spectator.
The second film I want to talk about is one that I had already considered and from here decided to research in order to see how it fit my assumption of its Brechtian influences, this film is Lars Von Trier's 2003 film Dogville.
This film references The Three Penny Opera, Von Trier took inspiration from the show’s second most famous song, the revenge-song Pirate Jenny. It became a very popular song, with versions by Nina Simone, Marianne Faithfull and many others.
Von Trier was heavily inspired by the idea of pirates killing everyone to avenge Jenny that he thought a new idea but he made sure that the film concluded in the same way. Grace (Nicole Kidman) is escaping from the law for reasons unknown to the audience. She hides out in Dogville, here she is allowed to stay provided that she does work for the people of the town As time passes she starts to discover that the townspeople don’t like her, and they start grow from suspicious into hostile.
The film is set up in a manner which makes it feel very dream like and one that feels very distant from real life. The scenery in Dogville consists only of white outlines drawn onto a black floor. Every house in the film features the name of the owner in the centre. The main street of the town is just a black floor, and some elements such as flowers are talked about and touched by the characters, but they are not there and are an invisible element, this is a very Brechtian idea, to draw the audience out of the manufactured world by obstructing aspects of it from them, meaning that they must use their own inference and understanding and cannot simply passively take the film in.
One of the interesting aspects of the film is that it takes not only from theatrical distancing elements, but also takes advantage of some things which are possible only with a camera. The film introduces virtually every scene with a shot from above that shows the entire setting of the film. This Godly point of view reveals the artifice of the film, making it clear from the opening that this is just a film.
The division of chapters with names which describes the action is also a direct Brechtian context. As an example, there is the name of chapter 9 “In which Dogville receives the long-awaited visit and the film ends”. The viewer knows from the beginning that there will be nine chapters, but Von Trier lets the viewer know how the film is going to end. This is an exemplary way to remove the audience again from their passive role because there's no narrative twist involved and instead the viewer is more focused on what is in front of them, rather than the narrative and what may happen.
The third and final film I would like to discuss and analyse is Palindromes, the 2004 film by Todd Solondz. The film concerns Aviva, a 13-year-old girl who is forced by her parents to have an abortion and as a result of the procedure cannot have kids thereafter. The story then essentially progresses with Aviva going from misfortune to misfortune as she struggles with her newfound sexual awakening.
In Brechtian plays actors would often play more than one character without using make-up or costumes a as a differentiation between the two roles. In Palindromes this idea works in an opposite way and acts as an extremely successful distancing device. Aviva is played by 8 different actors of different ages, races and genders. This is an experimentation that is rooted in Brecht's teachings, the film makes no apologies or justifications for this and simply acts, Solondz drops in these drastic changes as if they were nothing and simply leaves the audience to deal with the meanings and connotations themselves, Solondz definitely had a reason for doing this, each change is symbolic of course, but the reason this is so Brechtian is that it is made to make the audience engage and analyse the message for themselves.
Aviva goes from a redhead adolescent girl to an adolescent boy, to a black girl to a caucasian woman. In a film full of uncomfortable moments , every time Aviva changes appearance makes the audience uncomfortable and turns the movie into a very unsettling journey which is often not easy to follow. Palindromes is one of the most courageous modern Brechtian experiments, whether or not the experiment can be considered successful. The success and failure of this film really depends on the individual watching it, in the Brechtian sense of what it is aiming to achieve, has it mobilised a large group of people to act on a political view or ideology, no. however, it certainly makes audiences engage with it and stops them from passively digesting the film, so in this sense it could be considered a success.
(these are all of the portrayals of Aviva)
So, in summary, I have realised from these that performance in these contexts isn't important as such, it is more about getting the audience to disengage with the narrative and instead engage with the plot meaning or the messages it is trying to display. As this is what Brecht was always striving to achieve within his audiences.
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