Brecht on Theatre by Bertolt Brecht

Author:Bertolt Brecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Three Notes on Verfremdung and the Elder Breughel

1) Verfremdung Techniques in the Narrative Pictures of the Elder Breughel

Anyone making a profound study of Breughel’s pictorial contrasts must realize that he deals in contradictions. In The Fall of lcarus the catastrophe breaks into the idyll in such a way that it is clearly set apart from it and that valuable insights into the idyll can be gained. He does not allow the catastrophe to alter the idyll; the latter rather remains unaltered and survives undestroyed, merely disturbed. In the great war painting Dulle Griet not the atmosphere of war’s terror inspires the artist to paint the instigator, the Fury of War, as helpless and handicapped, and to give her the features of a servant (see Plate 17). The terror he creates in this way is something deeper. Whenever an Alpine peak is set down in a Flemish landscape or old Asiatic costumes confront modern European ones, then the one denounces the other and sets off its oddness, while at the same time we get landscape as such, people all over the place.

Such pictures do not just give off an atmosphere but a variety of atmospheres. Although Breughel manages to balance his contrasts, he never harmonizes them.

Neither does he practise the separation of comic and tragic; his tragedy contains a comic element and his comedy a tragic one.

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