Verfremdungseffekt Research

These are some interesting facts, that I found out about Verfremdungseffekt. The distancing effect, more commonly known (earlier) by John Willett's 1964 translation the alienation effect or (more recently) as the estrangement effect (German: Verfremdungseffekt), is a performing arts concept coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht first used the term in an essay on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as "playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious" The term of Verfremdungseffekt is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of making strange or "priem otstranenie",which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claims is the essence of all art. Not long after seeing a performance by Mei Lanfang's company in Moscow in the spring of 1935, Brecht coined the German term to label an approach to theater that discouraged involving the audience in an illusory narrative world and in the emotions of the characters. Brecht thought the audience required an emotional distance to reflect on what is being presented in critical and objective ways, rather than being taken out of themselves as conventional entertainment attempts to do. Shklovsky is perhaps best known for developing the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization (also translated as "estrangement") in literature.He explained the concept in the important essay "Art as Technique" (also translated as "Art as Device")which comprised the first chapter of his seminal Theory of Prose, first published in 1925. He argued for the need to turn something that has become over-familiar, like a clichè in the literary canon, into something revitalized: "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 12) The distancing effect is achieved by the way the "artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him, the audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place." I also discovered what methods he used to alienate the audience: . Mask (and unmasking). . Bizarre objects and sets, which were representational rather than literal. . Set in fictional places to allow you to examine the culture of a pre-existent country. . Music, Poetry and Singing.