BRECHT, BAZIN AND LUKÁCS

The above quotation comes from Brecht's Arbeitsjournal (Work Diaries) during the time of his American exile. There are more references to Renoir in other journal entries and one notices Brecht's admiration of and respect towards the French cineaste (see BBJ: 237). But how are we to understand Brecht's appreciation of one of the canonical figures of cinematic realism considering the standard view that Brecht rejected realist strategies of continuity editing and advocated anti-realist representational practices? These approaches remain influential today and are repeatedly reproduced in film conferences, student essays and academic publications. Much to the contrary of these conventional readings (examined in detail in the next chapter), Brecht developed his modernist aesthetic as a new form of realism and did not simply advocate a set of formal features that could generate the desired political effects. He argued instead for a more nuanced understanding of realism consistent with his dialectical view of reality. Behind this logic is a political and philosophical view of realism rather than a formal one.

Brecht makes this clear in one of his most prominent clarifications of the term, where he quotes Friedrich Engels’ motto that realism is ‘the reproduction of typical people under typical circumstances’ (Brecht et al. 1952: 433). Therefore, his starting point is that realism epitomises a method of thinking concerned with making social processes visible. Realism is to be understood as a representational strategy dedicated not to the mere reproduction of individual dramatic conflicts and events, but to the uncovering of the causal connections between the individuals and the social environments in which they operate. The raison d’être of this argument is that a realistic attitude does not entail the mere duplication of familiar aspects of everyday reality, such as poverty and inequality, but intends to demonstrate the influence of the social environment on the depicted processes. Illuminating here is Brecht's critique of naturalism. Whereas naturalism was preoccupied with a series of social problems includ-ing class relations and social divisions, it failed to show the interconnections between characters and their social milieu.