Author: Nenad Jovanovic
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438463634
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Explores the influence of Bertolt Brechts ideas on the practice and study of cinema. In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brechts concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brechts ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brechts own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillets History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkinss La Commune (2000), and Lars von Triers Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montagea principal source of artistic estrangement (Verfremdung) in earlier Brechtian filmshas diminished as a result of the techniques conventionalization by todays Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brechts view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema. This book opens up one of the most vaguely and often ill employed terms within film theory for extremely detailed discussion, providing the most thorough analysis of Brechtianism available to film scholars. It will become a standard reference. R. Barton Palmer, coeditor of Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity
Author: Angelos Koutsourakis
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474418910
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Making a compelling argument for the continuing relevance of Brechtian film theory and cinema, this book offers new research and analysis of Brecht the film and media theorist, placing his scattered writings on the subject within the lively film theory debates that took place in Europe between the 1920sÃǾ2ƠÂ01960s.
Author: Anthony Tatlow
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9789622090682
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
This book contains unique information about Bertolt Brecht and East Asian theatre. It focuses in particular on China and offers first and detailed accounts of important Brecht productions from those directly involved. Hence it grants remarkable insight into the problems of modern Chinese theatre and its relationship to Western theatre and into possible future developments. The book also throws light on Brecht's work and suggests ways of 're-producing' Brecht in the West. It consists of papers presented at a Hong Kong conference by distinguished Western critics (John Willett, Klaus Volker) and prominent practitioners of the theatre in China - directors (Huang Zuolin, Chen Yong), stage designers, translators and scholars. There are also accounts of Brecht productions in Japan and India, which form a stimulating contrast with the Chinese experience. With a wealth of practical examples, the book enables us to appreciate how theatre develops within different social structures. Presenting examples of cultural affinity and cultural disjunction, it also makes a useful contribution to intercultural study.
Author: J. Chris Westgate
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443810185
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Not long after the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, Bertolt Brecht’s name was on the lips of many writing about Broadway. Invoked knowingly—but not always knowledgeably—“Brecht” became something between marketing strategy and erudite justification for another season of Broadway musicals, another ignominy endured by the German playwright whose epic theater has only seldom been understood in the United States. To say that Brechtian and Broadway theatrical traditions represent divergence of philosophy, method, or ambition is to indulge—with the whimsy of Mark Twain—in understatement. Nevertheless, many references to Brecht since 2001 imply compatibility instead of contradiction—a confusion or corruption that suggested the need of looking closely at what Brecht wrote and intended in his epic theater more than seventy years after his first—and, unfortunately, typical—experience with United States theater. Beginning with the 1935 production of The Mother and moving through recent productions of political theater, including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Urinetown: The Musical, and My Name is Rachel Corrie, this anthology considers the encounters of Brecht and Broadway in terms of dramaturgy, performance, and reception. The essays in this anthology explore the political, cultural, and economic constraints shaping many of the encounters of Brecht and Broadway in U.S. theater history. This means looking at how, in many cases, epic theater has been co-opted and commodified by Broadway and what that commodification reveals about the culture of theater. Simultaneously, this means theorizing how epic theater finds—or can find—ways of providing a necessary bulwark against Broadway escapism, and what this suggests for the future of political theater in the U.S. What results is a dialectical history tracing Brecht’s encounters with Broadway, a history that opens-up and debates the complicated and often conflicted influence of Bertolt Brecht on United States theater. “Dr. Westgate's book on Brecht and Broadway is an excellent study of the reception of Brecht's work in the American theater and academe. Brecht, along with Moliere; Ibsen and Chekhov, is one of the most frequently performed playwrights in translation in America. A thorough investigation of the trajectory of Brecht stagings on Broadway has long been overdue. I am very grateful that Dr. Westgate has taken on the task and arrived at such a splendid result. The book is a must reading for any serious Brecht scholar.” —Carl Weber, Stanford Drama Department, Collaborator with Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, Director of many Brecht stagings in the U.S. “This is a provocative collection of essays outlining the sometimes unexpected connections between Brecht and the Broadway theatre. Like Brecht himself, these essays are playful, argumentative, and productively dialectical in their contradictions. The book is both entertaining and educational, and bound to provoke healthy debate. I recommend it as a demonstration of the ongoing relevance of Brechtian theories of theatre to the analysis of mainstream commercial theatre." —Sean Carney, Associate Professor, McGill University
Author: Ela E. Gezen
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640140247
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Uncovers the central role of Brecht reception in Turkish theater and Turkish-German literature, examining interactions between Turkish and German writers, texts, and contexts.
Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0809005425
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Essays of Brecht translated and edited to explain his theories and discussion of his dramatic works.
Author: Janelle G. Reinelt
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084081
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
How contemporary British political theater has evolved and expanded from the legacy of Bertolt Brecht
Author: Dr. Prateek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000222470
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Brecht in India analyses the dramaturgy and theatrical practices of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in post-independence India. The book explores how post-independence Indian drama is an instance of a cultural palimpsest, a site celebrating a dialogue between Western and Indian theatrical traditions, rather than a homogenous and isolated canon. Analysing the dissemination of a selection of Brecht’s plays in the Hindi belt between the 1960s and the 1990s, this study demonstrates that Brecht’s work provided aesthetic and ideological paradigms to modern Hindi playwrights, helping them develop and stage a national identity. The book also traces how the reception of Brecht was mediated in India, how it helped post-independence Indian playwrights formulate a political theatre, and how the dissemination of Brechtian aesthetics in India addressed the anxiety related to the stasis in Brechtian theatre in Europe. Tracking the dialogue between Brechtian aesthetics in India and Europe and a history of deliberate cultural resistance, Brecht in India is an invaluable resource for academics and students of theatre studies and theatre historiography, as well as scholars of post-colonial history and literature.
Author: Tom Kuhn
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0985195657
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
The leading publication on Brecht, his work, and topics of interest to him; this annual volume documents the International Brecht Society's 2016 symposium, Recycling Brecht.
Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Theater
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
This volume offers a major selection of Bertolt Brecht's groundbreaking critical writing. Here, arranged in chronological order, are essays from 1918 to 1956, in which Brecht explores his definition of the Epic Theatre and his theory of alienation-effects in directing, acting, and writing, and discusses, among other works, "The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Puntila, "and "Galileo," Also included is "A Short Organum for the Theatre," Brecht's most complete exposition of his revolutionary philosophy of drama. Translated and edited by John Willett, "Brecht on Theater" is essential to an understanding of one of the twentieth century's most influential dramatists.
