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Bertolt Brecht: Audiences
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Brecht uses the term "epic theater" to characterize his innovative dramatic theory. His new type of drama is non-Aristotelian - that is, his aim is not to purge the audience's emotions but to awaken the spectators' minds and communicate truth to them. In order to achieve this end, drama must not hypnotize or entrance the audience but must continually remind them that what they are watching is not real, but merely a representation, a vehicle for an idea or a fact.
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Brecht's works have been translated into 42 languages and sold over 70 volumes. Drawing on the Greek tradition, he wanted his theater to represent a forum for debate hall rather than a place of illusions. From the Russian and Chinese theaters Brecht derived some of his basic concepts of staging and theatrical stylization. His concept of the Verfremdungseffekt, or V-Effekt (sometimes translated as 'alienation effect') centered on the idea of "making strange" and thereby making poetic. He aimed to take emotion out of the production, persuade the audience to distance from the make believe characters and urge actors to dissociate from their roles. Then the political truth would be more easy to comprehend.
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Brecht's influence can be seen in the cinema. Such filmmakers as Lars Von Trier, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak and Jean-Luc Godard were influenced by Brecht and his theory of the Verfremdungseffekt. Often mis-translated as the 'Alienation effect', it is a process of emotionally distancing the audience from the on-stage action.
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Brecht's guiding theatrical principle related to alienating the audience from the events on stage so that they could absorb the social and political significance of the characters' actions. This detachment, referred to as the Verfremdungs-Effekt was achieved through a number of theatrical devices which aim to make the audience contstantly aware that they are watching a dramatic production rather than an illusion of reality.
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