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The role of the paranoid-mystic and abused soldier Wozzeck is a perfect character for Klaus Kinski. Herzog is right not to interfere too much with this portrayal (and Kinski is in almost every shot) by simply setting up the camera and standing back. Kinski is typically intense, but he manages to glaze this with a perpetual preoccupation with something else, something as if off-camera.The problem is, there's nothing off-camera. The script is very close from Buchner's play but nothing in Herzog's production reflects it. There is none of the expressionism suggested by the DVD cover/advertising poster. The general look of the production is period-realist and close-framed. The action jumps, unmoderated, from one scene to the next, often losing a sense of dramatic causality. Herzog's strict adherence to the text eschews the opportunities afforded by film and left me feeling rather bereft...The crisp, document-realism of this film has only one sequence modulated with music - the one addition that could really transform it. Clearly, a production of Berg's opera on the same material has music built into it (and what music!) and, notably, music inbetween the scenes, providing the breadth and rumination that Herzog has stubbornly refused. It's a satisfactory reproduction of Buchner's text but, Kinski aside, not much more than that. 4/10
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