AGITPROP AND THECRISIS: BRECHT DIE MACHTDER MANIPULATEURE (BREAK THE POWER OF THE MANIPULATORS, 1967), FASCISM INC. (2014)

In the previous chapter, the first section aimed to underline the connection between the essay as form and the dialectical method. Brecht saw the essayistic mode as a novel way of producing dialectical negations; all the same, in the first theoretical articulations of the film essay by Eisenstein, Balázs and Richter, the parallels between this innovative representational mode and the dialectical desire to identify social processes behind representations of reality were clearly drawn. The underlying ethos in these formulations was that the author/director is no longer a specialist communicating her views to an inactive audience; her or his role is instead to teach the audience to think in processes rather than provide a fixed message. Yet one could interject that this idea produces a hermetic understanding of representation according to which anything goes as far as the act of interpretation is concerned. This is a legitimate concern given that all these theorists saw the essay film as a representational mode that could intervene in reality and raise collective consciousness. The question that begs to be asked then is whether essay films can serve pedagogical functions and intervene in moments of political/historical crises so as to transform people's experience while retaining their dialectical openness without lapsing to herme-neutic relativism. This chapter proceeds to answer this question by focusing on essay films that respond to social/historical crises and have a pedagogical dimension. In the first section, I discuss two agitprop films, Helke Sander's/ Harun Farocki's Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators, 1967) and Aris Chatzistefanou's Fascism Inc. (2014). Both films are products of the political contradictions of their time, the first of the student movement of the 1960s in West Germany, and the second of the present eco nomic crisis in Greece, whose dire effects have led to the emergence of neo-fascism. In the second section of the chapter, I consider questions of the essay film and radical pedagogy through the lens of the Brechtian Lehrstück. I use as case studies Peter Watkins's La Commune (Paris 1871) (2000) and Joshua Oppenheimer's/Christine Cynns's The Act of Killing. Both are structured around a filmmaking process that gives more significance to the learning experience of the participants, which is in turn remediated to the audience.