But Sellars feels that the inbuilt "alienation device" of opera is even more suited to the task: "You have critical distance, and at the same time the music is so overwhelming that it involves you completely".
Rather than toeing the baloney-on-toast "immersive experience" line trotted out by James Cameron et al, Scorsese's nostalgic homage to early cinema uses 3D as an archaic alienation device, reminding us that stereoscopy was around from the birth of the moving image, aligning the process with the Kinetoscopes and hand-tinted prints which have now become fossils of film history.
The audience, thrust out of its dream by these Brechtian alienation devices, is also flattered into becoming collaborators in the filmmaking process.
The clearest of his alienation devices, the projection of captions preceding the scene so that the audience knows in advance what will happen and therefore can concentrate on how it happens, derived from Piscator's jotter screens and film captions.
("They descend to the center of the universe," he says sonorously when Arthur and Odile take the metro). The audience, thrust out of its dream by these Brechtian alienation devices, is also flattered into becoming collaborators in the filmmaking process.
See if you can tell which way he is going to go: "Here she comes again, Mother Courage and her bloody cart, condemning audiences to three-and-a-quarter hours of hectoring lectures, unrepentant Marxism, tiresome alienation devices and a bucketful of condensed misery.
There's a further "alienation", or distancing device, in this production: Lloyd's concept is that the play is being performed by women in a prison (part of the preparatory work involved Lloyd working with the inmates of a women's jail).
Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage is a verbatim play about alienation, communicated through Brechtian devices of alienation (or distancing), such as direct address to the audience.
The 20th century's substitute for the long letter is the transcribed tape recording more, as Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape indicates, a device for expressing alienation than a tool of dialectic.
Rule 3, strangely, encourages a sense of alienation: there must be a device that keeps the audience awake and off-kilter by constantly undermining its expectation of a naturalistic world.
While consumers are rightly dubious about the utility of wearing camera-touting face computers in their everyday lives, given the social alienation that invites, a hands-free device for serving data on objects within the wearer's field of vision has more obvious potential for businesses.
