WHOSE BRECHT?

MEMORIES FOR THE EIGHTIES

45

A CRITICAL RECOVERY BY
SYLVIA HARVEY

Brecht Then and Now

Our starting point must be the recognition that Brecht in aiming 'to
apply to the theatre the saying that one should not only interpret but
change the world' worked to produce cultural forms, to unleash energies
and criticisms, visions and stories, appropriate for his own times, and
that times have changed. His experience crosses the two peaks of an
enthusiastic commitment to the struggles of a GermarMeft building for
itself mass political support in the late 1920s and early '30s, and the
quieter, rather, more subdued and contradictory but nonetheless principled commitment to the communist government of East Germany in

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B R E C H T D I E D IN 1956, the year of Hungary and of Suez; his writings and his ideas have continued to circulate, to be remembered and
used in a variety of ways within Western culture throughout the following two decades. But if we wish these ideas to have a life and a currency
for the 1980s we must firstly clarify the ways in which Brecht's timesand therefore his experience and his work-were different from our own;
and secondly we must unravel the multi-coloured threads of those
readings and re-readings of Brecht that placed his ideas in a new context,
that of the unfolding of new theories of culture and cultural production
as these developed in the West in the 1970s. Our recovery of Brecht will
thus be a complex process of remembering through the recollections of
others, and it will entail, at points, a critique of those other memories.

46
The experience of
these times is
expressed vividly in
many of Brecht's
poems; see, for
example, 'To
Those Born Later',
Bertolt Brecht,
Poems, Part Two
1929-38, and 'Bad
Times', Poems,
Part Three
1938-56, e d j
Willett and R
Mannheim,
London, Eyre
Methuen 1976!

'A Short Organum

for the Theatre',
Brecht on Theatre,
ed J Willett,
London, Eyre
Methuen, 1978, p
185. For Brecht's
discussion of
pleasure in
learning, see
'Theatre for
Pleasure or Theatre
for Instruction',
Brecht on Theatre,
pp 69-76.

See Louis
Althusser, 'On the
Materialist
Dialectic', For
Marx, translated by
Ben Brewster,
London, Allen
Lane, 1969. The
debate about
knowledge and
scientific method
has been developed
by E P Thompson
in The Poverty of
Theory and Other
Essays, London,
Merlin Press, 1978
and by Perry
Anderson in
Arguments within
English Marxism,
London, New Left
Books, 1980.

the 1950s. These peaks are separated by the difficult years, the 'bad
times' of fascism and exile from 1933 to 1948.' Our own times have, in
Britain, their own particular difficulties: a crisis of profitability, deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and a sustained attempt at
dismantling both the ideology and the structure of the Welfare State.
These factors provide a distinctive framework for both our criticism and
our cultural production, and we may learn something from Brecht's
attempt at constructing a new culture appropriate for his times only if we
are clear about some of the changes of approach and emphasis, together
with some of the new social phenomena, that characterise the post-war
period.
Firstly, Brecht's commitment to socialism and his search for a cultural
equivalent to that commitment is difficult to recover today. For our age
has not only inherited the language and some of the ideologies of the
Cold War, but has also accumulated difficult and contradictory knowledge about the actual historical practices of socialism. The choice
between 'socialism or barbarism', a choice that seemed clear to so many
in the '30s, became less clear in the post-war period. Moreover, the
discourse of the western mass media (paralleled by mistakes and diversions in the working class movement itself) has imparted to the vocabulary of'communism' and 'class struggle' such negative connotations that
Brecht would have been among the first to hunt for new ways of speaking old truths. We have an additional, historically accrued disadvantage
that the dominant and carefully constructed image of socialism is of
something (and it is seen as a 'thing') dreary, drab, repressive and boring.
Our difficult responsibility is not simply to replace this image with
another, but to embark on those new practices that might give force and
substance to the representation of a lived experience of communalism
and creativity in our cinema, theatre, poetry.
Secondly, Brecht's writings, like those of many of his contemporaries,
are marked by a strong belief in the value of science. It is a belief that
expresses a strong pride and pleasure in the possibilities for human
advancement opened up by the new age ofscience. In the 'Short Organum
for the Theatre' (1948) he equates the scientific attitude with a pleasurable and change-oriented form of learning; this attitude looks at the
'how' and the 'why' of reality, and asks how things could be different; it
proposes the transformation of nature and social reality:
The attitude is a critical one. Faced with a river, it consists in regulating the
river; faced with a fruit tree, in spraying the fruit tree
faced with society,
in turning society upside down.2

The emphasis here on change and on practice separates this cluster of

ideas from later definitions of the category of science (considered as a
mode of knowing or-a 'theoretical practice') associated in the '60s with
the work of Louis Althusser.3 For Brecht, science stands both for the
possibility of exact and certain knowledge of the natural and social world
and for the mastery of nature and human history. In this latter respect it

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47

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is linked to that sort of optimistic and teleological marxism of the 'iron

laws of history' that is rather more characteristic of the 1930s than of our
own time.
Thirdly, we can measure the distance between Brecht's world and our
own by looking at the ways in which his ideas about cultural production
were determined by the circumstances in which he found himself. In the
late '20s his support for and identification with the German Communist
Party, a party receiving mass support and leading one of the most highly
organised workers' movements in Europe, offered him a place within
and the possibility of working for a popular left-wing culture. His "was
not, at that time, the position of those in the post-war West who were to
be accused of cultural isolationism, of elitism or vanguardism, of
'preaching to the converted' (a phrase that almost always assumes the
'converted' are a fringe minority). It is the majority, working people, the
poor and the oppressed, who are the imagined interlocutors of, for
example, his poems. Thus he writes:
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.

'Those Who Take the Meat from the Table'

General, your bomber is
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

powerful...

'General Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle'4

Today the absence of a mass left movement is matched by the dominance
of systems of mass communication, and by the cultural effects, for dissident groups, of fragmentation, ghettoisation, marginalisation.
This process of cultural fragmentation or ghettoisation can, however,
be considered in its positive aspect. For one of the most distinctive
phenomena of the last twenty years has been the emergence of new social
movements based upon the recognition of various forms of social oppression not solely explicable in terms of the categories of'class' and 'exploitation'; among these can be counted the movements for black liberation,
for women's and gay liberation, as well as the many anti-imperialist
national liberation movements. A crucial question for cultural theory in
the 1980s will be the extent to which these vigorous but often rigorously
self-enclosed cultures exist as an alternative or in opposition to mainstream and dominant culture. To what extent might these dominated
cultures, and those who produce the means of expression for them, transform the social totality?
If this has seemed like a digression, circling at a great distance around
the question of'Brecht and film theory', it has been a digression designed
to establish the conditions from which we make our raid upon th.e past,
and the circumstances in which we embark upon our purposeful reading
of Brecht. The following section will briefly examine the ways in which
those forms of film theory committed to the general principle of 'polit-

~~^~~~^~~
Poems, Pan Two,
295
' '
^__^^__^^_

ical modernism' have taken up and transformed certain Brechtian

formulations. It should be added that the purpose of this process is not to
uncover the 'real Brecht', to establish the 'authorised version', but rather
to investigate and of course to comment upon some of the 'variants'.

48

The 'Politics of Form': Film Theory in the 1970s

an attempt to undermine the whole paradigm of modernism and, specifically, the aesthetics of its radical avant-garde sector. This surely is to turn
one's back on the whole history of political art in this
century...5

Peter Wollen,
'Manet .
Modernism and
Avant-garde',
Screen, Summer
1980, vol21.no 2,
p 25. See also T J
Clark,
'Preliminaries to a
Possible Treatment
of Olympia in
1865', Screen,
Spring 1980, vol
21, no l , p p 18-41,
and T J Clark, 'A
Note in Reply to
Peter Wollen',
Screen, Autumn
1980, vol 21, no 3,
pp 97-100.

ibid., p 23.

In the course of the same argument Brecht's work is invoked-the often

spoken name of the great fellow traveller, whether the talk has been of
Godard or Straub, Sirk or Oshima, Eisenstein or British Independent
Cinemaand a useful, brief summary is offered of what is taken to be
Brecht's position:
Brecht described many times why a traditional form of realism was inadequate as the sole or privileged form of oppositional art
it tended to be
local rather than global... it favoured the actual rather than the possible
and the observable rather than the unobservable. It was descriptive rather
than explanatory. It effaced contradiction.6

While the concept of 'realism' clearly requires closer investigation,

two comments might be useful at this stage. Firstly, there is, here, a
tendency to equate political art with modernism. In addition, political
art' seems to include the unspoken term 'European' or 'Western'; it
might not be applicable to developments in Cuba or Chile or Senegal.
While we certainly cannot make a sucTden and easy 'escape' by looking
elsewhere, we are the products of our particular cultural history but not
its prisoners; we can learn from and draw upon other traditions, other
histories. This is the value of the 'knight's move'-Viktor Shklovsky's

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Beneath the imprecise, often confusing slogan of the 'politics of form'

many of the central and recurrent debates of film theory in the '70s
struggled to establish a conceptual framework that might link the analysis of the formal properties of the film text to an understanding of its
social mode of existence. This long dream of uniting or relating semiotic
and ideological analysis, together with a desire on the part of some practitioners to combine a radical aesthetic practice with radical social
effects, has resolved itself, or condensed itself into the term 'political
modernism'. This 'political modernism' (whether the term is used as
such or merely implied in a mode of argument) has served as the arena in
film theory within which the aesthetic quarrel of the century, that
between 'Realism' and 'Modernism', has unfolded. For a sense of this
debate's continuity as a painfully live issue, we need only refer to the
recent exchange in this journal between Peter Wollen and Timothy
Clark. Wollen argues that Clark's article on Manet's painting Olympia
amounts to

The episodes must not succeed one another indistinguishably but must give us
a chance to interpose our.judgement.8

For a discussion of
realist epistemology
see Terry Lovell,
Pictures of Reality:
Aesthetics, Politics,
Pleasure, London,
British Film
Institute, 1980.
8

'A Short Organum',

op cit, p 201.

C Johnston and P
Willemen, 'Brecht
in Britain: The
Independent
Political Film',
Screen, Winter
1975-76, vol 16, no
4, p 107.

10

For discussions of
the 'reader-text'
relationship see J
M Lotman, The
Structure of the
Artistic Text, trans
Ronald Vroon,
Michigan, Ann
Arbor, 1977; and
The Reader in the
Text, ed S
Suleiman and I
Crosman, New
Jersey, Princeton
University Press,
1980.

11

It is not possible
to trace here the
implications of the
much-delayed
impact of
modernism on
cinema; modernist
practices had
transformed
methods of
representation
some 40 years
earlier in
European painting
and literature.

It is an idea about textual construction that has gained considerable

subsequent currency to the point where, in certain sorts of critical writing, it becomes a requirement of radical film making:
This repeated breaking of the flow is one of the most essential aspects of
political film-making (allowing the reader to construct a.critical reading of
the text as it unfolds...) 9

This 'double directional' process, a set towards the text and a set towards
the reader, is the central feature of'political modernism'.10 It is, moreover, this particular clustering of concerns that explains the recurrent
fascination with Brecht in the writings of so many cultural theorists. The
work of Brecht is seen to give birth to a new aesthetic: the text is changed
so that the nature of its relationship with the audience may also-in a
distinctive and qualitative fashion-be changed.
The impetus among film theorists of the post-'68 generation to return,
again and again, to those principles of cultural production outlined by
Brecht can be traced to two sources. Firstly, it can be pursued through an
increasing interest in the work of Godard and his radical re-working of
film language to the general impact of modernism on film making and on
film criticism.11 Secondly, we can identify this 'return to Brecht' in an
increasing interest in the relationship between cultural production and
social change, and the accompanying search for the protocols of a radical
art. It may be useful from this point to examine the recovery of Brecht in
the '70s in terms of this interest in modernism and in radical aesthetics,
but also in terms of three of the central preoccupations of film theory in
this period: the concern with realism, with signification and with
subjectivity.

49

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term which we might apply to unexpected, non-linear developments in

the history of art. Secondly, it is unclear from this particular formulation
of Brecht's position whether 'traditional realism' is seen to be inadequate
in itself or only inadequate if it struggles alone in the general cultural
arena of oppositional art. The fundamental question here, of course,
revolves around the definition of'realism'; is it descriptive of a particular
style, or indicative of a general, philosophical approach to the world and
to knowledge?7
Just as there is more at stake in the debate about realism than questions
of style, so too the term 'political modernism' involves not only textual
properties but also extra-textual relations: Thus, for Brecht, the text
itself is deliberately 'imperfect', or, as in more recent terminology, it has
'gaps' or 'spaces'; it leaves a space for the spectator to enter and thereby
complete the work. The text is structured in such a way as to invite the
participation of the audience; its elements are juxtaposed in a way that
entails the active co-operation of the reader:

50

1) R E A L I S M
12

For publication
details see Walter
Benjamin,
Understanding
Brecht, trans Anna
Bostock, London,
NLB, 1977, and
Bertolt Brecht,
'Against Georg
Lukacs', New Left
Review, No 84,
March-April 1974,
reprinted in E
Bloch et al,
Aesthetics and
Politics, London,
NLB, 1977. '
Victor Erlich,
Russian
Formalism.
History, Doctrine,
The Hague,
Mouton, 1955.

14

Extracts from Lef

and Nay LeJ were
published in
Screen, Winter
1971-72, vol 12,
no 4. The
connection
between Lef and
Brecht is
minimally
established on the
basis of Brecht's
friendship with
Tretyakov. Brecht
wrote a poem for
Tretyakov,
'Recommendation', Poems, Part
Two, op cit, p
250; see also W
Benjamin,
'Conversations
with Brecht',
Understanding
Brecht, London,
New Left Books,
1977, p 108, and S
Tretyakov, 'We
Raise the Alarm',
Screen, Winter
1971-72, vol 12,
no 4, pp 68-73.

Literary forms have to be checked against reality, not against aesthetics even realist aesthetics."

Whether the canons have been those of'realism' or those of'modernism'

it has proved easier for some producers and critics to adhere to them than
to search for
faithful images of life... discovering the causal complexes of society/
unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in
power... l8

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13

Brecht's conversations with the critic Walter Benjamin only became

generally available in English in 1973, the seminal essay 'Against Georg
Lukacs' in 1974; even in German they only became generally available
in 1966 and 1967 respectively12. So the great 'Brecht-Lukacs' realism
debate of the 1930s was not publicly available at that time; it is our
generation that has witnessed it in one of those historical moments when
dead letters and silenced voices are brought to life again. Of course it was
not the 'magic' of finding lost documents that gave Brecht's ideas their
particular force and currency in the '70s, but a particular and complex
conjunction of critical attacks upon Stalinism and upon 'Socialist
Realism', together with a corresponding advocacy of experimentalism in
aesthetics and modernism in particular, and the discovery of the 'lost'
left precursors or practitioners of literary and cinematic modernism: the
Russian formalists and futurists of the 1920s. Despite the availability,
since 1955, of Victor Erlich's magnificent study of Russian formalism,13
it was not until the publication of English translations from the journals
Z.e/(1923-25) and Novy Lef (\927-28) in the early '70s that this particular conceptual tradition entered film studies.14
The most obvious point of connection between the Russian futurists
of the '20s and Brecht lies in their shared approach to specifying the relationship between aesthetic form, social reality and social change. While
Lukacs vehemently defended a particular style of realism, that associated
with the nineteenth century realist novel, Brecht and the futurists
argued that the question of realism could not be settled for all time on the
grounds of style: 'In no circumstances can the necessary guidelines for a
practical definition of realism be derived from literary works alone.' 15
Rather, realism involved an attitude to social reality, and the task of the
artist was not to adhere to particular stylistic conventions, specifiable in
advance, not to 'cling to "tried" rules of narrative, venerable literary
models, eternal aesthetic laws', but to 'render reality to men in a form
they can master'.16
The test of the usefulness and validity of an aesthetic form lay not in its
relationship to particular aesthetic recipes (whether these were 'realist',
or, we might now add 'modernist'), but in its appropriateness for the
representation of social reality at a particular moment in time. It was for
this reason that Brecht wrote:

Brecht was not an advocateof formal experiment for the sake of experiment, and was occasionally sardonic about the role of the avant-garde:
For a vanguard can lead the way along a retreat or into an abyss. It can
march so far ahead that the main army cannot follow it, because it is lost
from sight... 19

'Against Georg
Lukacs', Aeslhelics
and Politics, op cit,
p76.

16

ibid, p 81.

' ' Brecht on Theatre,

op cit, p 114.
18

'Against Georg
Lukacs', op cit, p
80, p 82.

Realism is not a mere question of form. Were we to copy the style of these
realists, we would no longer be realists.
For time flows on
Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work.
New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order
to represent it, modes of representation must also change.'?0

In one of those odd reversals of history, some of the anti-realist theorists

of the '70s made a mistake very similar to that of Lukacs: they tended to
assume that texts could be defined as 'radical' on the basis of stylistic
properties alone, rather than on the basis of the tripartite relationship
between textual properties, contemporary social reality and historically
formed readers. It is the engagement with knowing the world in order to
represent and transform it that is central to Brechtian aesthetics. This
process of knowing is to be understood as historical in the sense that it
involves the questions 'by whom?', 'for whom', 'under what circumstances?', and a sensitivity to the problem of access -whether to particular sorts of buildings or to particular sorts of discourses.
In addition, Brecht's realism already involves a certain theory of signification. For while language or 'human discourse' are of a categorically
different order from 'reality' (in this sense language could never be
perfectly adequate to the real), nonetheless the impulse to transform
reality itself and not simply its representations entails a realist epistemology, a correspondence theory of knowledge and language. It is Brecht's
interest in changing the world that (notwithstanding the specifically
sensuous and non-cognitive properties of art) leads him to an aesthetic
grounded in a realist epistemology, and, by implication, to a belief that
language with its both generalising and referential properties can

51

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His defence of innovation was linked to his search for those forms which,
as far as possible, offered an adequate representation of reality from the
point of view of, and on behalf of, those social forces struggling to change
that reality. So art had to change, not because the consumers buy that
which is 'new and different', but because reality itself was changing. It is
in this sense that Brecht still claims for himself the general nomenclature
of realism, and film theorists who have placed him within the 'antirealist' camp would be more exact if they called him 'anti-illusionist' and
not 'anti-realist'. Negotiating these terms can be a hazardous process
compounded by the tendency of a single word to stand in for a variety of
often conflicting meanings. But once we are clear that for Brecht the
term realism involved questions of epistemology, not questions of style,
we may see why it is that he is a realist, but not a realist in Lukacs' sense
of that word:

13

20

ibid, p 72.
'Against Georg
Lukacs', op cit, p
82.

52

produce valid knowledge of reality, or, more precisely, of the social

world. Such a realist epistemology is, therefore, both to be separated
from certain forms of discourse theory and to be distinguished from any
particular set of stylistic recipes.

2)

SIGNIFICATION

2,

.
As we cannot invite the audience to fling itself into the story as if it were a
Theatre is the
river and let itself be carried vaguely hither and thither, the individual
Epic Theatre',
episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily
Brecht on Theatre, noticed. The episodes must not succeed one another indistinguishably but
op cit, 37.
must give us a chance to interpose our judgement.21

22

'A Short
Organum, op cit,
----

This process of 'noticing the knots' or of foregrounding the means of

representation has been a familiar one in modernist theory and practice
since the time of the cubists. What modernist art offers the spectator is

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It was Brecht's theorisation of the techniques or 'signifying practices' of

epic theatre that allowed his work to be recruited for the modernist cause
in contemporary film theory. For Brecht's epic theatre is anti-naturalist
and anti-illusionist, a theatre of investigation and analysis, a theatre of
ideas that produces generalisations from the particular, and abstract
knowledge from the concrete. From the point of view of modernist
theory it is also a theatre that is in certain ways conscious of itself as
signifying practice, and that draws attention to its own means of production, its own processes of representation. This latter quality of selfreflexivity largely derives from the devices of distanciation or alienation.
Through both the development of certain techniques of acting and of an
episodic method of plot construction ('each scene for itself rather than
'one scene makes another' 21 ), the means or mechanics of representation
are foregrounded, the audience becomes aware of the drama as one
possible representation or account of reality. This foregrounding of
devices, however, is not so much designed to produce a sense of aesthetic
'play'-that particular sort of aesthetic pleasure which is offered to
highly educated audiences on the basis of a recognition of the transgression of certain aesthetic codes and taboos. Rather it proposes to offer the
audience a place from which it can develop its own criticism of and
judgement upon the actions represented. The problem with the process
of distanciation, of course, is that the audience needs to be distanced in
order to exercise its critical faculties, but not too far-it must not be. so
distanced as to lose interest. Similarly the invitation to participate in the
work of producing the meaning of the play or film must be perceived as a
pleasant invitation and not as a sentence to 90 minutes of hard labour.
Brecht tries, in his advocacy of particular techniques, to hold in balance
the three factors: distanciation, a foregrounding of the means of representation, and an invitation to the audience to make their own critical
assessment of the actions represented:

If any properly social consideration of the processes of signification

entails questions of referentiality and effectivity, it also involves an
analysis of the audience's pleasure in reading and an understanding of
the institutional forms within which the acts of 'reading' or 'consumption' take place (what Brecht called the question of the 'apparatus').
Brecht's ideas about pleasure in the theatre (they cannot really be
described as a theory of pleasure) are diverse. At times 'pleasure' entails
entertainment, humour, wit, fun ('a theatre that can't be laughed in is a
theatre to be laughed at' 24 ), at others it seems a conceptual, cognitive
matter, involving signification ('Pleasure comes from giving meaning to
things' 25 ). Brecht argued for the necessity of defending the epic theatre
'against the suspicion that it is a highly disagreeable, humourless, indeed
strenuous affair'26, and urged its development as a place of entertainment, a place for enjoyment; a place of lightness and ease, quickness and
wit:
. . . our playing needs to be quick, light, strong... We must keep the tempo of
a run-through and infect it with quiet strength, with our own fun. In the
dialogue the exchanges must not be offered reluctantly, as when offering
somebody one's last pair of boots, but must be tossed like so many balls.27

It is these elements of'ease', of'lightness of touch' and of humour that

seem not to have been taken up in that European modernist tradition
which includes the cinema of Straub, Huillet, Godard and some English

53
23

'The Modern
Theatre is the
Epic Theatre',
Brecht on Theatre,
op cit, p 37.

24

The Messingkauf
Dialogues, London,
Eyre Methuen,
1965, p 95.

25

Stephen Heath,
'Lessons from
Brecht', Screen,
Summer 1974, vol
15, no 2, p 115.

26

'Theatre for
Pleasure or
Theatre for
Instruction',
Brecht on Theatre,
op cit, p 72.

27

Brecht on Theatre,
op cit, p 283.

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not the impression, reflection or illusion of reality, but a sense of those

very processes of representation through which reality is mediated to us
in artistic form. The sudden magic of the signified is displaced from us,
eludes our grasp, as we understand it to be the product of a particular
process of signification, the product of a particular 'way of seeing'. But it
must be said that for a political modernism this process of displacement
cannot take place within the general framework of philosophical relativism (one way of seeing is as good as another way of seeing and is judged
according to criteria of internal coherence). Rather, it must operate
within the framework of a realist epistemology and a correspondence
theory of knowledge. Brecht's work is not only concerned with the
difficulty of representing the world, but also with the vital necessity of
knowing it. His theory of distanciation and of the 'separation of the
elements'23, like the cubists' refusal of the single point perspective
rendering the illusion of a three dimensional world, can be seen to
involve a recognition of the materiality of discourse, but this recognition
never floats free from the activity of a discourse referring outside itself,
beyond the immediate discursive system. So a productive tension is
maintained, and must be maintained in any political modernism,
between the act of representation and a sense of the 'that to which the
representation refers'. Such a tension is further complicated by the ways
in which the work itself aims to open up new sets of possibilities for its
readers or spectators (its 'public'), spectators whose interest in changing
the world takes them beyond an interest in seeing it represented.

54

It should be noted,
however, that the
work of these filmmakers can
generate humour
for an audience
with access to a
specialist range of
literary and
cinematic
refrences; the
particular
limitations that
class position and
educational
experience place
upon the
recognition of
humour have been
insufficiently
explored.

29

'Theatre for
Pleasure or
Theatre for
Instruction', op
cit, p 74.

30

' T h e Modern
Theatre is the
Epic Theatre', op
cit, p 34.

31 it,;,
ibid,

p 34.

^Understanding
Brecht, op cit, 102.

independent film-makers of the '70s.28 What is, of course, often so

difficult to resolve in practice is a 'lightness of touch' with seriousness of
purpose, the telling of jokes in and about a world that is no joke. This
'lightness' of touch should not be confused with a superficiality of
approach, and the cultural producer has an enormously difficult task in
attempting an account or analysis of a complex social reality ('The foundation of... a business like Standard Oil is a pretty complicated affair,
and such things cannot be conveyed just like that.'29). Brecht's point,
perhaps, is that the end product of such hard work by the producer
should convey a sense of ease and clarity, a sense also of delight at seeing
something clearly or seeing something afresh, at seeing 'natural' or
'commonplace' events in a new light. A weighty combination of selfreflexive discourse and dense analysis has made some of the works of
political modernism too heavy to ride the waters of general or pleasurable consumption; they have sunk to the silent and submarine depths
where only the sharks of cultural theory cruise the waters. But these
works of the recent past are still needed to build a cultural future, their
various approaches to the problems of representation and analysis need
to be drawn upon, recovered, renewed and adapted for a more general
circulation.
If the work of signification and the construction of radical texts cannot
be considered apart from the question of pleasure, the circulation of
these texts cannot be considered apart from the question of institutions.
In a post-war world dominated by systems of mass communication and
by accompanying theorisations of'one dimensionality' or of the 'closure
of the universe of discourse', Brecht's earlier investigations of institutional relations or of the 'apparatus' are intriguing but inadequate. Both
Brecht and Benjamin grasped and expressed the need to change both the
existing relations of cultural production and the existing means of
cultural consumption. Brecht specified the ways in which the primary
social function of the existing cultural apparatus, that of'providing, an
evening's entertainment'30, largely determined the nature of the work
exhibited by the apparatus, and he criticised the naive or muddled thinking of certain cultural producers:
For by imagining that they have got hold of an apparatus which in fact has
got hold of them they are supporting an apparatus which is out of their
control.... Society absorbs via the apparatus whatever it needs in order to
reproduce itself.31

Benjamin argued that it was the task of the cultural producer to make
the cultural apparatus a terrain of struggle and thus to move towards the
transformation of the social function of the institution. Thus he argued
that the producer must transform himself
from a supplier of the production apparatus, into an engineer who sees his
task in adapting that apparatus to the ends of the proletarian revolution.32

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28

3)

SUBJECTIVITY

It has become a central and distinctive principle of film theory in the '70s
that questions of signification cannot be separated from questions of
subjectivity. The analysis of the production of meaning has correspondingly shifted from an analysis of textual features to an analysis of the textreader relationship, and to the role of the reader in 'producing' the
meaning of the text. Barthes' work on the 'readerly' and the 'writerly'
text has validated the latter (the text which maximises the work or participation of the reader) at the expense of the former34. An investigation of
the ways in which the subjectivity of the reader is constructed has thus
inevitably become crucial to any study of the modes of consumption of
filmic texts, and the characteristic terms of study, for the 1970s, have
been drawn from developments in psychoanalysis, and from work on the
relationship between language and subjectivity. The recovery of Brecht
has been undertaken from within this framework, and although his
terminology is clearly not psychoanalytic, it is compatible with and
indeed contributes to an understanding and validation of the processes of
'active reading' propounded by those film theorists working within a
broadly psychoanalytic tradition.35. The traditional conceptualisation of
reader and text as separate, completed, discrete, 'self-contained' is
undermined or refused in Brecht's formulation of the role of the reader
or spectator. In the practice of the epic theatre both text and reader are in
some way decentred, and out of a qualitatively new relationship a new
cultural phenomenon is to be distinguished. Brecht (as well as many of
the film theorists of the '70s) argued that it was the responsibility of the
progressive cultural producer to foster this new relationship, to recog-

55

33

Very little of this

empirical work on
audiences has been
undertaken outside
of broadcasting
and press research.
But for one
important example
of such work see
David Morley, The
'Nationwide'
Audience, London,
British Film
Institute, 1980.

34

See Roland
Barthes, S/Z, New
York, Hill and
Wang, 1974, p 4.

35

See, for example,

Stephen Heath, op
cit, p p 103-128.
This issue of
Screen was devoted
to Brecht; a later
issue, Winter
1975/6, vol 16, no
4, published
transcripts of the
1975 Edinburgh
Film Festival
Brecht Event.

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Of the two sets of formulations Benjamin's is perhaps the most hopeful for present practice. The danger of Brecht's formulation is that it
presents the institution as absolutely determining and containing any of
the possible voices of dissent. Any development of the theorisation of
cultural institutions (the ever present context of the text, whether a
cinema or an art centre, a conference hall or a community centre) would
require both a theory of dominant and subordinate cultures, and some
empirical knowledge of the actual practices of the various cultural institutions, their characteristic modes of address and the social class of their
consumers.33 This last question concerning the social class of those
served by a particular institution also raises questions of 'cultural competence' or of'reading capacity'. For the ability to decipher certain codes
or certain code-breaking operations is culturally and socially determined; and as there are institutions of cultural production and consumption so also there are institutions of reading; a reader approaches a text
from within a particular 'apparatus of reading'. Any cultural producer
who fails to investigate the relationship between social class and reading
competence produces in a vacuum.

56

36

Stephen Heath, op
cit, 112.

37

Paul Willemen,
"Notes on
Subjectivity',
Screen, Spring
1978, vol 19, no 1,
pp 41-69.

38

'Theatre for
Pleasure or
Theatre for
Instruction', op
cit, p 72.

nise the phenomenon and to allow it to develop.

The work, Brecht argues, would be incomplete without the active
participation of the reader:
It is also as spectator that the individual loses his epicentral role and disappears; he is no longer a private person "present" at a spectacle organised by
theatre people, appreciating a work which he has shown to him; he is no
longer a simple consumer, he must also produce. Without active participation on his part, the work would be incomplete 36

Learning has a very different function for different social strata. There are
strata who cannot imagine any improvement in conditions: they find the
conditions good enough for them... But there are also strata 'waiting their
turn' who are discontented with conditions, have a vast interest in the practical side of learning... know that they are lost without learning; these are
the best and keenest learners.3S

Brecht's theatre 'for pleasure and for instruction' is designed to offer

substantial knowledge and the scope for substantial criticism to these
social groups. It is this concern witrra subjectivity conceived of in collective and class terms that has been largely absent from the psychoanalytic
tradition in film studies. It is a concern that must now receive urgent
attention.

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The emphasis here is on the subjectivity of the reader completing or

producing the meaning of the text, and is in this respect quite different
from those '70s theories of the 'reader-inscribed-in-the-text' for which
the subjectivity of the reader was a mere effect of textual strategies.
There has been considerable confusion here, in the theorisations of political modernism, as to the procedures whereby subjectivity is constituted;
these confusions can be expressed, if in an exaggerated and schematic
form, by the question: 'Is the reader a figment in the imagination of the
text, or is the text a figment in the imagination of the reader?' Paul Willemen usefully contributed to the clarification of this debate in pointing
out the ways in which the subjectivities of readers are constituted, historically, elsewhere than in the moment of relationship with a particular
film text; and that the process of subject construction includes but
exceeds, the moment of encounter with a single text.37
One crucial addition that Brecht's conceptualisation of the reader-text
relationship brings to some of the '70s formulations of subjectivity, lies
in his recognition of the factor of class difference in specifying subject
positions. He spoke of his works being designed to 'divide the audience',
and believed that they provided a pleasurable means of learning, but
only for the members of those social classes who had an interest in
learning, who needed to learn. For Brecht the passion to learn is a
characteristic of exploited and oppressed social groups:

Cultural Production in the 1980s: 'You Never Know Where

You Are With Production'

57
M

Understanding
Brecht, op cit,
p 118.

In conversations with Benjamin, Brecht commented upon Lukacs and

the other official exponents of Socialist Realism in the 1930s:

__^_____^_^_

They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them

uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production
is unforseeable. You never know what's going to come out. And they themselves don't want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise
control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat.

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There are many factors at the present time contributing to the censoring
of debate about production, and in some cases contributing to the
censorship of production itself. Firstly, in the West, there is the power of
those who own and control the means of cultural production or who
control access to the means of production: the owners of private capital
(those who keep an 'open mind' but a tight purse), the heads of studios,
the executive producers of television companies, the heads of production
companies and of commercial agencies, and, in the case of state finance,
the privately appointed not publicly elected members of those boards
and committees that act as the guardians of cultural excellence. In all of
these cases any form of public accountability concerning the quality of
the product is non-existent or minimal. Secondly, there is the power of
those who either control the means of distribution and exchange or who
control the production of the discourses of criticism ('consumer advice')
which in turn facilitate or impede exchange. In the first category are to
be found the buyers, distributors and exhibitors (whether these work on
behalf of private capital or on behalf of state institutions); in the second
category are the mainstream television and movie reviewers and critics.
Thirdly, there is the power (very limited in our society) of the cultural
critics and theorists. This work of cultural theory has made very little
headway into the mainstream of a broad public understanding and criticism of audio-visual productions, but in Britain it has had its effects in
the realm-grossly underfunded and only partly supported by state
finance-of the 'independent cinema'. It is among these theorists and
within the independent production sector that the ideas or the particular
appropriations of Brecht have most clearly entered into the currency of
contemporary concerns. But the memories of Brecht that have gone into
circulation in this sector have been weighted in a particular way, and
now require some re-adjustment, some reconsideration. For the process
of remembering in the recent past has recovered Brecht the modernist,
not Brecht the entertainer; Brecht the anti-illusionist, not Brecht the
socialist with an interest in mass politics and the forms of popular art.
It would be irresponsible to suggest that the cultural theorists have
been the 'enemies of production' in the sense in which Brecht used the
term. Indeed, of the three categories of those exercising control over
production, outlined above, the theorists have been the least powerful

58
40

Jean-Louis
Comolli and Jean
Narboni, 'Cinema/
Ideology/Criticism', trans Susan
Bennett, Screen

Reader I, London,
Society for
Education in Film
and Television,
1977, p 6.
41

Song of the Shirt

Vezvs and Comment

Film-makers have at times a real fear of theory, a fear that is produced by

the toiie of some theoretical writing, ozving to the apparently prescriptive
nature of its demands and opinions, which are often casually dismissive of
considerable bodies of work.*1

What is required for cultural theorists and producers to move forward

into the 1980s is a closer investigation of the actual practices of recent
cultural production, not in terms oftheir adherence or lack ofadherence to
certain Brechtian 'norms', but rather in terms of the very particularity
and unexpectedness of some of the aesthetic devices adopted and developed. Criticism and cultural theory have not yet sufficiently engaged
with the variety of devices-the unexpectedness-of English 'independent' cinema. We might begin by looking at the range of new documentary techniques developed for the analysis and representation of a
complex and contradictory social reality in Song of the Shirt (Sue Clayton
and Jonathan Curling, 1979) and Taking A Part (Jan Worth, 1979); at
the use of humour in the context of a visual deconstruction of the practices of television journalism in News and Comment (Frank Abbott,
1978); at the deceptively simple inter-weaving of fact and fiction in Often
During the Day (Joanna Davis, 1979); at the new approaches to storytelling in Exchange and Divide (Margaret Dickinson, 1980), and at the
. ambitious use of parable and metaphor, the visually pleasurable and thus

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Jonathan Curling
and Fran McLean,
'The Independent
Film-makers .
Association
Annual General
Meeting and
Conference',
Screen, Spring
1977, vol 18, no 1,
p 116.

and the most subject to attacks from the dominant cultural mainstream
and from a vociferous, anti-intellectual lobby. The attack on theory is a
revolt against reason, the desperation of which has tended historically to
serve only the social status quo. But the particular substance and mode of
operation of cultural theory in the '70s, particularly that form of cultural
theory that ushered political modernism to the centre of the stage, must
now be subjected to assessment and to some criticism. The versions of
Brecht set in circulation after the 'Brecht Event' at the Edinburgh Festival (Summer 1975), out of the special issue of Screen which preceeded
that event (Summer 1974), and through various interventions within the
Independent Film-makers' Association in the latter half of the '70s
tended to concentrate upon the 'Brechtianisms' of distanciation, antiillusionism, deconstruction, the critique of identification processes and
the dismantling of 'classical' narrative. It was a recovery of Brecht
guided by the revival of interest in modernism characteristic of post-'68
French cultural theory, and in line with the 'politics of form' debate for
which film production 'only becomes politically effective if it is linked
with a breaking down of the traditional way of depicting reality'.40 It was
also a recovery effected from within the parameters of an interest in
audience subjectivity largely specified in psychoanalytic terms.
There is no sense in which this process of recovery is now to be refused
or dismissed; rather what is required now is a shift of emphasis, and a
sensitivity to the manner and arena within which cultural theory presents itself. The sometimes unhelpful stance of such theoretical work has
been usefully specified as follows:

memorable rendering of the past as a landscape of conflict, a space for

searching and struggling in In the Forest (Phil Mulloy, 1978).
There is another sort of Brechtianism ripe now for revival. It derives
from the Brecht who combines a passion for analysis with a pleasure in
living, in observingj in accepting change and contributing to change; a
Brecht who combines the capacity for good story-telling with the good
sense in common sense, the impulse to analyse, to 'take things apart' to
see how they work, and with the vehemence and clarity of a direct
address to the only 'audience' that has it in its power to change the world
and existing social relations:

42

59
Poems, Part Three,
1938-1956, op cit,
p452.

I should like to acknowledge the usefulness of Dana Polan's article: 'Brecht and the
Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema', Jump Cut, no 17, April 1978, pp 29-32.
My thanks also to those who commented upon an earlier version of this article: John
Corner, Richard Dyer, John Ellis, and to the organisers of the 'Cinema: The Machinery of
Pleasure' Conference, Northampton, 1980 where some of these ideas were first developed, and the organisers of the 'Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices' Conference,
Asilomar, California 1981 (sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, University of
Southern California and the National Endowment for the Arts) where an earlier version of
this piece was first presented.
\

Exchange and Divide

In the Forest

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And I always thought: the very simplest words

Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.*2
Sheffield, February 28, 1982.