Word: brecht
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...less specific about the poets who influenced him most: Brecht, Bridges, Cavafy, Frost, Graves, Hardy, David Jones, Lawrence, De la Mare, Marianne Moore, Wilfred Owen, Laura Riding, Edward Thomas, William Carlos Williams. The vastness of the list tends to obscure its two surprising omissions...
...Correspondingly, Bergman's troupe are less actors than musicians. Cued by the bang of a cinematographer's clap-stick, each performer is allowed to stop the flow of the film and analyze the character that he or she is portraying. That now-familiar device stems from what Brecht called the V-Effekt: estranging the audience from the action. Merely watching, say Brecht and Bergman, is not enough. Reality has rent the artist's fabric; now he forces it to pierce the viewer's mind...
...merry-go-round lurches out of control. The carousel spins elliptically, dangerously, until the singer reaches an unbearable frenzy -and shatters. Audiences that witness such tours de force know what it must have been like in the '30s, when the young Lotte Lenya sang the works of Brecht and Weill, and cabaret fused with...
Ironic Couplets. The resemblance to Brecht and Weill does not end with Elly. The elusive melodies seem, at first, to be mere cloaks for Brel's verse. But they bear constant repetition -indeed, some enthusiasts have come to the Brel show as often as 56 times. As for his lyrics, the terse, ironic couplets recognize revelations beyond politics and fashion; they know that every man is an expatriate from the province of youth...
...tinkering with the conventions. The normal, large singing-dancing chorus was stripped down to about six members. The book was scant, and songs, rather than being integrated into the text, often formed whole scenes in themselves. Prince also toyed with the device (belonging to both the Greeks and Brecht) of using the chorus as a musical commentator on the action...