ABSTRACT
Up to a Point marked the end of Alea's Brechtianism. In The Viewer's Dialectic, Alea made clear that in the process toward de-alienation, both identification and distancing must be present. Beginning with Memories and ending with Up to a Point, Alea, like Brecht, put the accent on distancing. But after finishing Up to a Certain Point, Alea seems to have “rediscovered” the power and efficacy of emotions as a legitimate tool for mobilizing the viewer's dialectic. I put the word “rediscover” in quotation marks because Alea had already discussed the important role of emotions in The Viewer's Dialectic and, even before that, in an interview published in 1977:
One of those unforgettable moments which helped determine my vocation as a film director was my first encounter with Film Sense, by Sergei M. Eisenstein. This happened around 1948 or 1949…. It was for me a decisive book, even when the result of that initial reading and of the discussions it provoked among my friends was a serious indigestion of confused theories about montage, audiovisual counterpoint, film and dialectics, et cetera. A period of maturation and settling was necessary for those ideas to be fully assimilated and for them to flourish in practice.… But certainly, those initial worries have never abandoned me, that enthusiasm for the discovery of something new, those ideas that the brilliant teacher set forth. Eisenstein was not only a great artist, but also a revolutionary, and both in his films and in his writings he always sought to communicate his concerns, to arouse the viewer's sensibility and activate his intellect, so that he could not remain passive, complacent, or drugged, but ratter active, restless, lucid, and armed with a more profound vision and understanding of the reality in which he must struggle. This is for me the ideal of all truly revolutionary art, and it was in Eisenstein's work that I first fully witnessed it. 1
