Illumination

Benjamin, Walter. (1968). New York: Schoken Books

What is Epic Theater? (p. 147-154)
Benjamin explains the concept of the epic theater, originated by Brecht, in eight chapters.

1) The Relaxed Audience
The epic theater appeals an interest group and aims an audience to be relaxed and follow the action, as if reading a novel on a sofa. But the audience, being a collective, feels impelled to react promptly. Thus the epic theater should emphasize the action that is based upon the audience's experience and the performance that are mounted artistically in a pellucid manner. In the endeavor to interest the audience in this way, a political will prevails beyond mere cultural involvement in the theater.

2) The Plot
Benjamin states the epic theater purposes to "deprive the stage of its sensation derived from subject matter" (p.148) Thus, he suggests a historical incident or an old story, than an unfamiliar one. He compares the plot of the epic theater with a ballet lesson: first loosening a pupil's joints to the greatest possible extent, therefore purging the sensational.

[This plot scheme makes me compare the movies, Entre les Murs and The Freedom Writers. Whereas Entre les Murs leads an audience to daily events without arousing much sensation in each scene, The Freedom Writers is equipped with mechanisms that make an audience feel the sensational and built coherently toward its last outcome.]

3) The Untragic Hero
With regard to undramatic quality of a man, Benjamin traces back to Plato, who recognized the undramatic quality of the most excellent man. In spite of the dominance of tragic heros in the history of drama, Benjamin argues that the opposite trend has never ceased that says, "It is a mule track, neglected and overgrown, which comes to light today in the dramas of Brecht" (p. 150).

4) The Interruption
As Brecht introduces, Benjamin draws a sharp contrasting line between Brecht's drama and Aristotelian's in that Brecht eliminates the Aristotelian catharsis and emphasizes producing astonishment rather than empathy. "Instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function" (p. 150). Thus, an important task of the epic theater is to discover (or alienate) the condition of life. He argues that this discovery (alienation) takes place through the interruption of happening, as if a stranger appears in the doorway in an ordinary household scene.

5) The Quotable Gesture
Benjamin delineates that interruption is one of the fundamental structuring devices of the epic theater. As quoting a text involves the interruption of its context, actors should "make their gestures quotable" in the process of interrupting the theater.

6) The Didactic Play
"In every instance, the epic theater is meant of the actors as much as for the spectators. The didactic play is a special case largely because it facilitates and suggests the interchange between audience and actors and vice versa through the extreme paucity of the mechanical equipment. Every spectator is enabled to become a participant. And it is indeed easier to play the 'teacher' than the 'hero'" (p. 152)

7) The Actor
Benjamin notes that intervals, such as songs, captions, lifeless conversation, "impair the illusion of the audience and paralyze its readiness for empathy" (p. 153). In the same vein, he argues that actors should demonstrate that he is cool and relaxed. Thus for him, an important concept of the epic theater is "putting on a show" (p. 153).

8) Theater on a Dais ('raised platform')
"Epic theater allows for a circumstance which has been too little notice. It may be called the filling in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the players from the audience as it does the dead from the living; the abyss whose silence in a play heightens the sublimity, whose resonance in an opera hightens the intoxication--this abyss, of all elements of the theater the one that bears the most indelible traces of its ritual origin, has steadily decreased in significance. The stage is still raised, but it no longer rises from an unfathomable depth; it has become a dias. The didactic play and the epic theater are attempts to sit down on a dais" (p. 154).

Theses on the Philosophy of History

Benjamin reads progress while looking at a Klee painting "Angelus Novus":

"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (pp. 257-258)

"Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge" (p. 260).

"History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now" (p. 261).

Understanding Brecht

Benjamin, Walter. (1973). Anna Bostock (Trans.). London, UK: NLB. (first published in 1966 by Surhkamp Verlag)

In the introduction, Stanley Mitchell traces the literary partnership of the revolutionary socialist movement between Brecht and Benjamin. Among others, Mitchell highlights the use of montage found in Brecht that connects the two. To Benjamin, Mitchell maintains, montage is a tool to connect dissimilars in a way to 'shock' people into new recognitions and understandings and 'dislocate' them in modern industrial life. (vii-xix)

The Author as Producer (85-104)
(This address was delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, on 27 April 1934.)
In his criticism of modern literacy, Benjamin asserts that writers should possess political correctness as well as progressive literary techniques. His perspective is clearer in another article, Conversations with Brecht, in the same book.

[T]he attainment of technical progress in literature eventually changes the function of art forms (hence also of the intellectual means of production) and is therefore a criterion for judging the revolutionary function of literary works. (p.106)

In this vein, he regards the Soviet press as a revolutionary place for literarization of living condition, where readers gain access to authorship as an expert.

Benjamin criticizes two literary bourgeois left intelligentsia movements, Activism and New Objectivity that function as a counter-revolutionary mechanism, despite their intention, because the writers do not build solidarity with proletariat as a producer, but only in the mind. Herein Benjamin brings in Brecht, who coined the phrase 'functional transformation' to emphasize a progressive intelligentsia who literates production means and participate actively in the class struggle. In echoing Brecht's notion of the use of production apparatus in the direction of Socialism, Benjamin criticizes that New Objectivity merely supplies production apparatus with a vision of change:

The characteristic feature of this literature is the way it transforms. political struggle so that it ceases to be a compelling motive for decision and becomes an object of comfortable contemplation; it ceases to be a means of production and becomes an article of consumption. (p. 96-97)

[Here what Benjamin means by production becomes clearer. I think it is to trigger political actions among the people and let them become collaborators. His demand to progressive writers is not trivial. He repetitively mentions that commitment is necessary but not sufficient and urges writers to turn readers or spectators turn into collaborators by means of utilizing improved appartus in their work.

In other words, his products must possess an organizing function besides and before their character as finished works...The crucial point, therefore, is that a writer's production must have the character of a model: it must be able to instruct other writers in their porduciton and, secondly, it must be able to place an imporved apparatus at their disposal. This apparatus will be the better, the more consumers it beings in contact with the produciton process--in short. the more readers or spectatirs it turns into collaborators. (p. 98)

Benjamin exemplifies Brecht's epic theatre, a technique used against creating an illusion among the audience by interrupting actions. In other words, epic theatre uncovers the conditions of our life by interrupting the dramatic processes so that the audience, distantiated from what is performed on the stage, can recongnize them as real with astonishment, not as in the theatre of naturalism.

The purpose of epic theatre is to construct out of the smallest elements of behavior what Aristotelian drama calls 'action'...It sets out, not so much to fill the audience with feelings--albeit possibly feelings of revolt--as to alienate the audience in a lasting manner, through thought, from the conditions in which it lives. (pp. 100-101)

Conversations with Brecht (105-121)