Erwin Piscator’s total theater as a revolutionary immersive audiovisual tool. The paradigm of <i>Hoppla, Wir Leben! </i>(1927)

Abstract

This article is framed in the immersive dimension of the, increasingly in vogue, dialogue between theatre and cinema; a dialogue that, in fact, goes back to the beginnings of the cinematographic medium, and that has extended until our days in the form of all kinds of experiments that have been incorporating the techniques and technologies of each era. An important turning point in this relationship will take place in the german Weimar Republic, a very specific socio-political context that will make the use of the cinematographic image on stage and its immersive vocation, acquire revolutionary overtones, with the director Erwin Piscator systematizing the use of film as a cohesive element in an ideal of total theatre, deeply linked to the historical avant-gardes, and at the service of Marxist ideology. This will make of him a key link in the chain that would go from pre-cinematography to current documentary and political theatre proposals, in which a series of characteristics will begin to be glimpsed —especially from the production Hoppla, We’re Alive! [Hoppla, Wir Leben!] (Ernst Toller, 1927)— that will inevitably mark the interaction between the stage and the screens.