The empathy is emphasized by a relentless series of film projections backstage: short takes from Hitchcock and new films that appear and disappear, reappear, sometimes big and dangerous, then covered by other images, extinguished and repressed. That’s about the way it happens in our heads when we think, feel, fear and enjoy. It’s not a single memory that Penelope Wehrli shows us here, it is all of our memories: the mysterious beauty of Ingrid Bergmann and Chernobyl burning as signposts for what is being dealt with. The cursed seventh chamber.
All of the means are not chosen by chance. They belong to the spirit of the opera.
When ˝Duke Bluebeard’s Castle˝ was written, humanity had just made two revolutionary scientific discoveries to make things visible that had been invisible up to that point– with all the risks of uncontrollable chain reactions.˝ (Sven Rech, SR 2 KulturRadio, 10. 3. 2008)