Some Basic Points About Brechtian Acting Versus ‘Naturalizing’ Acting and Theatre


1.    Actors deliberately work to create a visibly and audibly apparent distance between themselves and their characters; to make it clear, and to emphasize, to their audiences, that they are acting, and that they are offering thereby an interpretation, and a commentary, on their characters and what these characters stand for (what type of people or social positions and relations they represent).  The actors do not seek to become their characters or to allow the audience to imagine that they are their characters–to forget that these are actors acting as characters; on the contrary, they work assiduously to do exactly the opposite.  Actors also deliberately work to frustrate any easy or ready audience ‘identification’ with their characters.  Actors moreover often deliberately under- or over- emote (versus naturalizing expectations); they often signify by repeated and/or otherwise noticeable gestures or expressions which they make quite apparent are meant as repeated and/or otherwise noticeable gestures or expressions.

2.    The goal is to force the audience to think critically about what it is watching and listening to, and, more importantly, what this represents and comments upon–while not, by any means, simply, passively losing itself in the illusion that what it is watching and listening to is simply a window onto an actual, natural situation or world.  The audience should be provoked to think critically about its own connection with, or implication versus, what the actors and the rest of the crew are representing in front of it–to shift their ultimate attention to focus on the actual world outside of and beyond the theater, and their responsibility for what happens in this actual outside world.   

3.    The rest of the staging is also deliberately non- or anti- naturalizing as well, forcing us to recognize, again, that what we are watching and listening to is being staged in front of us, is a construction, is an interpretation, and, as such, represents a position, and an interest, versus the subjects it addresses.   Often the set and props are quite minimal, and often various figures interpose themselves between the actors and the audience, such as a narrator or a chorus–and often the production is divided into numerous scenes separated by additional kinds of marked intervals and interludes.   The use of lighting, costumes, music, etc. all add to the deliberately ‘alienating’ effect–alienating the audience, that is, from ‘passification’, from lack of critical (self-)consciousness, from habitualization, from familiarization, from ‘zombification’.  

4.    Most frequently, topical and socially/politically charged subjects are addressed yet in an elliptical manner, by setting these in an at least somewhat markedly different time and place, and by creating elaborate allegorical relations between what we see and hear staged in front of us and what this ‘actually’ represents.  This process of distantiation also works to force us to think critically about a topical matter in a fresh way, and, potentially at least, not simply to fall back on familiar prejudices or easy emotions.  It also compels us to consider larger social-historical, even universal, implications and connections where we otherwise would not consider them because we have a hard time taking sufficient critical distance from what is current, what is present, what surround us, and what we are situated within..  

5.    Much art film (second cinema) and much political film (third cinema) draws heavily upon Brecht’s theory and practice while serious film theory pays considerable direct tribute to this influence.  Dogme 95, the Danish ‘school’ of film making founded by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vintenberg, with its famous ‘vow of chastity’, where the film makers, in part ironically, declare their commitment to breaking with the elaborate technological supports that they argue protect so many contemporary film makers without substantial ideas or significant artistic sensibilities from looking bad because they can hide behind the spectacle of expensive production values, represents just one instance of this long and continuing Brechtian influence.  Dogville is not a Dogme film yet it shows Von Trier’s continued interest in finding ways to move past and break with the limitations of Hollywood-style film making and its enormous influence upon how film makers around the world conceive of what they can and should do in seeking out to treat a subject by way of making a film about it.  Von Trier is one of the currently most famous as well as most notorious of European art film makers working today who delights in provocation, especially versus one or another ‘sacred cow’ or ‘entrenched interest’.