Brechtian Cinemas: Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Peter Watkins and Lars von Trier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation I investigate the stylistic shift in the cinema of selected filmmakers whose work is rooted in Bertolt Brecht’s dramatic theory: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier. Through the work of these filmmakers, I trace the ongoing change in the cinematic applications of the theory. By and large, the change consists of a lessening of the role of montage – a technique that occupies a paramount place in Brecht’s theatrical and filmic practice – in favour of the objects within the camera’s field of view and the sounds within the microphone’s range. Since the ultimate effect for which the Brechtian filmmaker aims is that of Verfremdung, theatrical stylisation – itself estranging within the context of cinema – appears as a natural corollary of the described shift in emphasis. \nI also suggest a causal connection between the aforementioned shift and the growing self-consciousness of the style employed by meainstream cinemas (of which Hollywood is the foremost representative), which often manifests itself in the use of unorthodox editing patterns. Accordingly, I propose that we can attribute the contemporary Brechtian filmmaker’s growing reliance on mise-en-scène elements as a source of Verfremdung largely to the major film industries’ adoption of montage and other specifically cinematic codes that make a film’s style overt. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Brechtian filmmaker – whose political stance is inherently antagonistic to that exemplified by most mainstream cinema, reacts to the normalisation of foregrounded film style by employing the opposite strategy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".