Obviously one could do dozens of films that are related to Brecht. Maybe you could talk about the jump from Brecht's theatrical ideas to the filmic work in the '30s that you're showing. And how that lineage reached the films of the '60s. In terms of his theories that are relevant to film, certainly it's what he called the Verfremdungseffekt, or making strange, so the viewer doesn't identify with characters, but where there's a distance created which makes you aware of the workings of the text and also aware of your own freedom. Somehow through that the viewer becomes a much more active participant.
Films can lend themselves to distancing because of what they achieve through cutting.
Right, and I think that all of these films do feature some Brechtian devices. It's not necessarily that they're all Brechtian films. I definitely wanted to show some of the New German Cinema movement films, because they're explicitly connected to Brecht. Since I wasn't showing Fassbinder, the obvious choice was Kluge, whom we show quite a lot at Cinematheque, but otherwise he's an unknown. Yesterday's Girl is his first feature.