Angelos Koutsourakis

Politics and open-ended dialectics in Lars von Trier's Dogville: a post-Brechtian critique

Dogville is one of the few films by Lars von Trier that has been consistently discussed by the critics in relation to Brecht. Then again, most of the discussions of the film have offered a canonical reading which understands Dogville to be a single-minded ‘anti-American’ parable. These readings have paralysed any fruitful investigations of the films form and the historical transitions that have changed the ways in which art attains its political function. This paper reads Dogville under the rubric of the post-Brechtian so as to rethink the political implications of the films form. I focus on the films employment of theatricality, performativity, and narrative aperture, arguing that the film generates contradictions that resist epistemological mastery. The paper proposes that Dogville goes beyond the closed form of the Brechtian Fabel, and Brechts quest for dialectical enlightenment is replaced by open-ended dialectics.

Utilizing the ‘Ideological Antiquity’: Rethinking Brecht and Film Theory

Bertolt Brecht’s writings have been influential in film theory and cinema. Yet Brecht’s enthusiastic reception on the part of 1970s film theory has been followed by skepticism and criticism on the part of contemporary cognitivist film theory. For many years film scholars understood the adjective “Brechtian” to characterize a set of stylistic devices which are radical in themselves yet not a method. One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that film scholarship relied on Brecht’s writings on theatre (which have so far only been available in unsatisfactory selection in translation) and not on his film essays. Marc Silberman’s brilliant translation, published as Bertolt Brecht: on Film and Radio (London: Methuen, 2001) has not changed Brecht’s critical reception in the discipline of film studies, because film scholars tend to associate Brecht with his reception within 1970s film theory. This article goes back to Brecht’s writings on the film medium so as to trace the misunderstandings of his reception in the field of film studies. I suggest that Brechtian film theory and cinema remains an “unfinished project.” (AK)

History as transition: Brecht's Historisierung in Straub/Huillet's Not Reconciled (1965) and Angelopoulos' The Hunters (1977)

ABSTRACT Brechts concept of the Historisierung (the process of historicizing the represented processes) epitomizes the authors will to represent history in a dialectical way that would challenge the continuum of history. In privileging historical discontinuity over continuity, Brecht aspired to identify the contingent and fluid aspects of history that did not treat the historical mistakes of the past as aberrations, but as the product of certain contradictions that can also be identified in the present. This article discusses the employment of Historisierung effects in certain films by Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet and Theo Angelopoulos and analyses the ways they complicate historical representation. In particular, I focus on the formal elements that destabilize the linearity of historical representation. In a bid to understand why these films frustrate the structuring of time, I analyse these films under the rubric of the post-Brechtian and suggest that they share Brechts favouring of showing history as transitional, without sharing his forward-looking politics.