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Introduction
Bertolt Brecht and his aesthetics are an established methodological way of understanding and valuing Theo Angelopoulos's work. Indeed, several scholars have characterized the cinema of Angelopoulos as Brechtian and devoted much attention to its Brechtian defamiliarization (Verfremdung) effects, commonly known as V-effects. For example, Isabelle Jordan argues that The Travelling Players is an epic film "exactly in the same way as the non-Aristotelian Brechtian theater is considered epic" (2000, 232, my translation.). She goes on to point out how the filmmaker presents important historical facts in the film by focusing on unknown people and side events; how he provides no psychological explanation about the characters; and how he uses songs in a Brechtian manner (2000, 233-240). In the same way, Barthélémy Amengual proclaims that there is a lot of Brecht in Angelopoulos's cinema (2012, 36), while Sylvie Rollet states that Angelopoulos "adopts a dramaturgical concept similar to Brecht's 'epic theater'" (2012, 54). Finally, Ángel Quintana (2012, 160) discusses Angelopoulos's "image-symbol" and use of epic theater in order to conclude that the filmmaker "searches for a way to interpret the main characteristics of the epic theatre in cinematic depiction."
Writing The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation in the late 1990s, Andrew Horton's tendency to interpret Brecht's positions by positing a binary approach that places empathy as opposed to estrangement, or didacticism as opposed to reflection, paved the way for such oversimplified Brechtian readings of the filmmaker's work. In a few surprising instances that are important for our purposes here, however, Horton broke away from his binary interpretations of Brechtian aesthetics when he claimed that while "Angelopoulos often refers to Brecht," and the films themselves cause "the audience to think" (Horton 1997, 14) critically and react, they also engage the audience emotionally and so break the Brechtian alienation effect through the mixture of theatricality and reality in his films (14-15). Yet there is a contradiction inherent in Horton's argument. The supposed Brechtian distance between thinking and feeling is lost in much of Angelopoulos's work precisely through its theatricality, namely, his use of Brechtian ideas of theater and stylization-and not through cinematic naturalism or the "phenomenological realism of the photographic image" (Rollet 2012, 60), that is, the creation of illusionary images...