III: Meta-cinema and the legacy of Brecht and Godard
The self-referential aspect of Brook�s film relates to a much wider artistic intent. He constantly seeks to remind his audience that what they are watching is a cinematic construct. The disorientating framing of scenes and close-ups, sporadic long, high and low angle shots, plays with focus, rapid editing, use of montage, panning and tracking shots combined with the use of title cards to bridge narrative gaps reveal how Brook embraces his chosen aesthetic whilst simultaneously deconstructing it. In the infamous cliff scene, the audience, like Gloucester, are lured into the impression of �ascent� by numerous low angle shots. The illusion suddenly shatters with a cut to an overhead shot that once again frames a character in pitiless isolation. Emphasising the grotesque element of Gloucester�s plight, Brook also exposes both the character�s and audience�s mutual susceptibility to the illusionary. By suggesting the legitimacy of portraying the �world as screen� instead of the �world as stage� and yet at the same time emphasising its artificiality, Brook�s King Lear challenges its audience to engage with its own reading of the text rather than idly accept it. By these means, he aimed to achieve in cinema a way of creating a �multiplicity of meaning� similar to both Shakespeare and Brecht in the theatre, making an audience engage with his images independently.
This approach originates strongly from Brook�s grounding in the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht and the films of Jean Luc Godard. Like Brecht, Brook is concerned with making a work that speaks to a contemporary audience rather than constructing a faithful but forgettable museum piece, and recognises this effect in Brecht�s infamous �alienation� technique:
A necessary theatre could never for one moment take its sights off the society it was serving. Alienation is above all an appeal for the spectator to work for himself, so to become more and more responsible for accepting what he sees only if it is convincing to him in an adult way .
In order to make a work that it simultaneously engaging and provoking, Brook�s first act was to eliminate anything deemed superfluous, that could absorb the audience�s attention at the expense of something more important. This is partly the basis for Brook�s heavy editing of the text (combined with the acknowledgement that it was necessary for film) and his wariness of making the costumes, location or action of the film become a distracting spectacle . Similarly with sound effects, no music is played to deliberately emphasise the significant (for example, the door to Lear�s throne-room slamming). What we are left with is a work of art adamantly self-conscious of its artificiality, and furthermore one which, like Brecht , breaks up the rhythm of images with title cards that remind us what we are seeing is not photo-realistic reality.
In the continual use of various camera techniques, and by consciously dislocating the �naturalistic� relationship between word and image, Brook also pays homage to the work of Godard. He was a director who deliberately set out to break the tradition of narrative based, photo-realistic film in order to remind an audience that the very concept of depicting �reality� in film was a false and rhetorical exercise:
By photographing a scene and at once smashing its apparent truth, [Godard] has cracked into dead illusion and enabled a stream of opposing impressions to stream forth� he is deeply influenced by Brecht.
Brook�s reading of King Lear is also heavily conscious of Jan Kott�s writing and so, by extension, the work of Samuel Beckett. In Kott�s reading of both Lear and Endgame, both plays� worlds are places where any omnipotent forces choose not to make themselves known, the fallacy of belief in an �absolute� (either just or true) that might give some form of frame to human existence, being dismissed as absurd. Only the recognition of this absurdity, which in Lear�s case is reached through the process of personal degradation and madness, can lead to true �sight�. But Brook�s intention was not to simply prove Kott right through cinema:
The play is not a black existentialist play showing that mankind is a worthless species, nor a na�ve expression that all mankind is noble and beautiful. The vertical and horizontal are there at one and the same time, to be grasped if one wants to and if one can .
By deciding not to create an ultra-realistic film that purely states �this is how it is� (such a work would have simply been �dead illusion�), but instead make a work of art that underlines its artificiality, Brook challenges his audience to consider how much the �world is a screen� proposition is valid. Just like Brecht�s alienation devices, each distorted camera shot, title card or zoom-fade combine to create a �series of alienations: each rupture is a subtle provocation to thought� .
