Distancing effect

The distancing effect, also translated as alienation effect (German: Verfremdungseffekt or V-Effekt), is a concept in performing arts credited to German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht first used the term in his essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as performing "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". These remarks find their precedent in an essay largely devoted to the theory of Brecht's epic theater, "The Author as Producer," written by Walter Benjamin in 1934. This way of formulating the technique would have been familiar to Brecht from his conversations with Benjamin before he met the Russian playwrights Shklovsky or Tretyakov (to whom he later attributed the coinage), insofar as Benjamin wrote the essay with the intention of showing it to Brecht when they roomed together at Brecht's cabin in Denmark during their mutual exile in the summer of 1934. In all likelihood Brecht conceals Benjamin's participation in this process due to concerns about the SS at first, and then later on account of his own concerns about the Stasi. In this article Benjamin speaks of the central formulas: "Epic theater must not develop actions but represent conditions." The use of montage and musical intermissions between action pierces the illusion of the audience's identity with the action, rather than heightening it. Benjamin compares the montage technique to the way that radio programs are broken up by advertisements. "[Epic theater] sets out not to fill the audience with feelings as to alienate the audience in a lasting manner, through thought, from the conditions in which it lives. [This...