The Show About the Show as a Brechtian Text

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 It shares with the TV series also a thematic preoccupation with the real and audio-visual representations of it. To cite but the most pointed example, the film features the actress Rebecca Lord in the roles of both Caveh's wife Caroline and a prostitute that the protagonist becomes attracted to as a result of her resemblance to the former. One of the "behind-the-scenes" sequences integrated into the film shows Caveh discovering through an Internet search that Lord is an escort herself – a fact that the film leads us to believe she had not shared with Zahedi. Contrasting the world obsessed with personas and appearances is Zahedi's commitment to honesty, which we witness him fulfill at the cost of his personal relationships. His girlfriend Karla, thus, leaves a restaurant date with Caveh after he explains his lateness with a "masturbatory episode" that he experienced.2 In Yacavone Citation2021a, the qualifier "recognized" – which usefully draws attention to the viewer's decisive role in a film's meaning-making process – is included in the definition.3 For a more detailed introductory discussion of Brecht and cinema, see, for example, Jovanovic 2017: 1-62.4 See, for instance, Brecht Citation2000: 164.5 For a key example of the critic's teleological view of cinema, see Bazin Citation2005.6 For a compelling argument on these and other proponents of the view that cinema possesses a natural ability to make apparent the properties of pro-filmic events that pass unnoticed in the context of everyday perception, see Turvey 2008)7 For a clear delineation of these related terms, see Šlaisová Citation2012.8 For all the sternness of such Brecht's plays as The Decision (Die Maßnahme, 1930), which approvingly portrays the execution of an individual in the name of a revolutionary cause, the simplistic but common view of Brecht's supposed enmity to emotion rests less on his body of artistic work, than on the film theorist's go-to document about Brecht and emotions: the "Notes" schema that contrasts the "ratio" of Epic theatre to Aristotelian theatre's "emotion." John J. White's (Citation2004) extensive discussion and Darko Suvin's (Citation2008) succinct one trace the development of the questionable binary. Suvin proceeds from a 1939 letter, where Brecht notes that empathy (Einfühlung) "has been more or less dispensed with in some works of art," only to immediately add a caveat that the observation "obviously" does not apply to emotion (Gefühl). Suvin convincingly marries the distinction to the categorization of emotions by Max Scheler, a contemporary of Brecht's, and recommends Scheler's fellow-feeling or sympathy (Mitgefühl) as a stance that describes the Brechtian middle ground between the alternative, extreme stances of indifference without emotion and uncritical "emotional contagion" of empathy.Despite the convincing arguments by such commentators as White and Suvin for the centrality of emotion in Brecht, on account of the differences he recognizes between sympathy and empathy and between emotion and identification, the view of him persists as a rationalist inimical to feeling.9 Like the majority of Brecht's other film projects, "A Model Family in a Model Home" was consigned to relative obscurity until New York-based visual artist and filmmaker Zoe Beloff Citation2015) discovered its traces in Berlin's Brecht Archiv, and resurfaced it through a compelling essayistic film.10 The phrase is a reformulation of Brecht's Gestus des Zeigens (the gest of showing) (Brecht Citation1988–2000, 22, 641).Additional informationNotes on contributorsNenad JovanovicNenad Jovanović is Associate Professor of Media at Wright State University, USA. His articles and book reviews have been published in Apparatus, The Brecht Yearbook, Film & History, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Literature/Film Quarterly, Studies in Documentary Film, Theater Symposium, Theatralia, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He is also the author of Brechtian Cinemas: Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier (SUNY Press, 2017).