Kentridge’s brilliant production of Berg’s Wozzeck situates the opera at a key historical turning point: the eve of WWI’s previously unthinkable destruction happening simultaneously with the dawn of cinema.
I am still working out all the implications of this masterstroke, but I am especially struck by the way it associates Wozzeck’s terrifying apocalyptic visions with cinema. Throughout, these visions are externalized via film in a memorably disturbing and provocative way.
I think Kentridge means to suggest that visionary experience and its expression in art — see Isaiah, Blake — is at a turning point and is about to be supplanted by masscult.
What had been internal, a visionary understanding of the world based on the perception and understanding of human beings, is being replaced by shared hallucinations imposed externally, fed to the audience in readymade form
and largely welcomed as a potted worldview that is universally shared and and easily consumed.
This, of course, conttnues to facilitate and rationalize capital's production of the previously unimaginable horrors that Buchner and Berg attempted to convey.
Here Kentridge describes his production as an attempt to create a "machine for thinking."
Some of that thinking, on my part at any rate, had to with the connections between industrialized warfare and industrialized culture.
