Could these two books on Bertolt Brecht and cinema mark a renewed interest in the early twentieth-century playwright and author and a reclaiming of his insights for film studies? I am hopeful. For the return to Brecht is among other things a return to an investment in radical politics. With recent turns to aesthetics and affect, a political lens is something film studies could use more of. But I wouldn't want to oversimplify the work of these two monographs, whose aims are not merely to bring politics back to film studies. A return to Brecht offers so much more. Indeed, Nenad Jovanovic and Angelos Koutsourakis also explore the relevance of theater and theatrical techniques for film. However, both do not begin with film but with Brecht and a challenge in the form of a corrective. First, we need to understand what it means to deploy the term “Brechtian” and not use it so arbitrarily. Second, whoever might have claimed that Brecht was not interested in cinema was wrong. While very different in their approaches, at the heart of both of these books is a demonstration of Brecht's continuing importance to and influence on filmmakers (and not simply the usual suspects: Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) in ways that may not have been previously apparent.

I happened to pick up Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema first and was glad to have read the two books in this order. As its title reveals, Koutsourakis's study goes beyond the analysis of film form and narrative. The first half of the book investigates the crossovers between Brechtian theory and film theory. Critical to Koutsourakis's analysis is an undoing of the claim that Brechtian theory is at odds with theories of realism, which became so formative to film theory in its early years with the writings of André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. As Koutsourakis argues, “Brecht's modernism was in actual fact committed to a realist project” (6). Probing the theoretical kinships of Brecht and figures like Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, Theodor W. Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière, the early chapters of the book are—not surprisingly—especially dense but ultimately worth the work for the reader.