Word: brecht
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...Bertolt Brecht and living with an East Berlin family. According to his father, young Huessy was "positively impressed" with the regime, but he also clung to his faith in the U.S. Shortly before his arrest, he wrote to his parents: "How can I explain to these people that even though I agree with all their criticism of the American system, the Viet Nam War and racism, that there is still something about America which gives it more potential than any system I know...
...obscene language was rightly censored, and that in any case it was gratuitous in a political film. But for many European intellectuals "obscenity" is an essential part of an "intellectual guerrilla warfare" against the bourgeoisie. One of Le Gai Savoir's last images is a book cover reading Bertolt Brecht- from Rimbaud to Lenin, that is, from scatological to revolutionary. Attacks on bourgeois thought cannot limit themselves to "politics" narrowly defined; epater la bourgeoisie is a political slogan. The censorship of "obscenity" is thus a bourgeois device to restrict free thought. Everything could be discussed under a language that...
...interpret his plays, a good guide is a necessity. He exists in Martin Esslin (The Peopled Wound; Doubleday; $5.95). Author of The Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht: The Man and His Work, Esslin is a genial host of a critic. He shares an avant-garde playwright with his readers in the same enthusiastic way that he might recommend an excellent little restaurant slightly off the tourist track. The Peopled Wound is valuable not because it makes some intuitive new leap of insight but because it gathers in one convenient place most of what has been said and thought about...
...that resembles the director and shares as his defense against the world the same vast resignation and distancing. Bergman devises his own special "alienation effect," with the actors speaking to the camera about what sort of person each character "is," as if they are universal givens. Whereas Brecht and Godard use the technique of actors speaking as themselves to remind the audience that it witnesses art as distinguished from life, Bergman attempts the opposite effect-to minimize the consideration of his stereotypes as isolated individuals, and to imply a higher reality, that the spectacle goes beyond mere portrayal, that...
...saying something about America. The satire of bourgeois revolutionaries, their quixotic attachments, seems particularly appropriate for a modern American audience. So do the caricatures of bloated warmongering pigs. In fact, it all seems close enough to reality that one wonders just where the satire lies. And when we, like Brecht before us, will come to a better understanding of our predicament...