Wozzecks on the big screen

Cinéma Galeries

This fall, in the run-up of its new production of Wozzeck, La Monnaie is joining forces with Cinéma Galeries for two screenings of films that echo the opera’s poignant themes.

Georg Büchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck did not merely inspire Alban Berg’s masterpiece. In 1979, Werner Herzog set about adapting the play too, just a few days after completing Nosferatu the Vampyre, using the same, exhausted film crew. The inimitable Klaus Kinski stars in the title role, along Eva Mattes Marie. Filming was completed in 18 days, and the editing in less than a week. Like Berg’s opera, Woyzeck depicts, with great poetry and unsettling intensity, its protagonist’s descent into the abyss of this own tortured mind, culminating in a murder that will seal his fate...

The post-traumatic stress suffered by a former soldier, Sergiy, is also at the heart of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, which imagines a fictional Ukraine in the aftermath of the war with Russia. In this post-apocalyptic dystopia, the director explores the psychological scars left by the conflict on the main character, who is unable to resume a normal life.