American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Academia has long grappled with the relationship between filmmaking form and content. Film history courses are driven, in part, by aesthetic innovation, and it is not uncommon to study the editing advances made by D. W. Griffith and the silent-era Soviet filmmakers, the exploration of deep focus photography by Orson Welles and Gregg Toland, the shift to location shooting by the Italian neorealists, the implementation of jump cuts and freeze frames by the French New Wave, and the long-take sensibility of experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. The interest in formal innovation is complemented by skepticism toward conventional Hollywood form. Playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht has impacted academia, and in his theoretical essays, he took dead aim at the naturalist theater co-opted by Hollywood, in which characters must establish their names, relationships, problems, and the play’s themes through seemingly casual conversation. Brecht felt that the logically built, well-made play in which a problem snowballs into a nail-biting drama of high suspense and then culminates in a cathartic climax engaged the viewer’s emotions without touching the intellect. His alternative approach (“epic theater”) sought to block emotional identification while provoking thought. The destruction of stage illusion, he believed, would create a distance between audience and characters, enabling a detached, critical attitude and a better understanding of the human condition. Brecht’s theories have helped shape race- and gender-related film theory. By destroying conventional filmmaking form, one also destroys the unfortunate race, class, and gender bias tied to that form. “New meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema within the text of the film,” Claire Johnston wrote in the 1970s. “Any revolutionary strategy must challenge the depiction of reality; it is not enough to discuss the oppression of women within the text of the film; the language of the cinema/the depiction of reality must also be interrogated, so that a break between ideology and text is effected.”