BRECHT AND ANGELOPOULOS

The question of the Brechtian quality of Angelopoulos’ political period might initially appear outmoded and obsolete given that a number of scholars have already acknowledged Brecht's influence, predominantly in the filmmaker's historical tetralogy. None of the scholars in question, however, have attempted to approach the Brechtian aspect of Angelopoulos with reference to the former's writings on film, nor from the perspective of the Brechtian concept of Gestus and its application within the film medium. This is the task of the current chapter, which aims to clarify the often hinted at but not theoretically qualified Brechtian aspect of Angelopoulos’ cinema.

Before moving to the main corpus of the chapter, a series of comments with respect to the Brechtian reception of Angelopoulos are in order. Andrew Horton considers Angelopoulos’ valorisation of the reflective spectator as a Brechtian gesture, yet he suggests that the combination of theatricality and reality in Angelopoulos’ films often leads the audience ‘into a deeper fuller emotional bond with the film’ (1997: 14–15). One can retort that Brecht did not argue simply against the employment of emotions; he rather contested the emotional manipulation of the audiences in ways that conceal the social aspect of emotions (Brecht 1963: 30), while simultaneously favouring the production of emotional responses that would politicise representation and divide the audience as per their conflicting political interests. This process of socialising emotional responses so as to create political divisions is a recurring theme throughout Angelopoulos’ historical tetralogy and it is not accidental that during the 1970s he experienced a great deal of animosity on the part of the Greek right-wing political establishment. The tendency among other commentators is either to draw attention to the dispassionate acting style in Angelopoulos’ films, which they consider to be Brechtian (Pappas 1977: 39; Stathi 1999: 42), or to focus on Angelopoulos’ employment of Brechtian theatrical tropes in certain films (Tarr, Proppe 1976: 6; Kolovos 1990: 20; Kosmidou 2013: 130–131; Rollet 2012: 56).

Contra these semantic discussions of Brecht's position in Angelopoulos’ early work, David Bordwell has succinctly identified some key Brechtian elements in the Greek auteur's films without necessarily using Brecht as a point of reference.