Two Words, One Answer.
Jean-Marie Straub
 Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danile Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub $24.95 Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet--who have lived and worked together for almost forty years--may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School. Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Bll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Holderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.  Danile Huillet/Jean-Marie Straub: O gt votre sourire enfoui? (Non-US Format, PAL Region 2) $349.00 Tras la muerte en octubre de 2006 de Daniele Huillet, desaparecia no solo una pareja insolita en la historia del cine, sino una parte significative de esta Historia. El retrato de Pedro Costa de Jean-Marie Straub y Daniele Huillet durante el montaje de la tercera version de su film Sicilia! es tambien el de la revindicacion de una cierta moral manifesta en la importancia capital de cortar un plano en el fotograma justo. French audio with Spanish subtitles, NO ENGLISH!  Arnold Schoenberg - Moses und Aron $32.98 ... at least by analogy, extrapolation, or allegory. Witness the conviction held by both the Hanoverians and the Jacobites in England, when Handel was writing "Saul" and "Esther," that they were the new Chosen People, each righteously entitled to exterminate the other. I take Arnold Schnberg's single opera "Moses and Aron" to be more an allegory of Humanity, in its folly unready to surrender the old securities of revealed religion or to accept the unsensuous consolations of modern relativism. One of the rewards of relativism, of course, is that YOU can formulate your own interpretation of this most philosophical of all operas. It's widely maintained that Aron and Moses was never finished, that Schnberg intended a third act but couldn't wrap it up. Personally, I find the ending as staged here by the Vienna State Opera very satisfactory. Moses sitting alone in desolation on the stage, murmuring about his failure to express the inexpressible, to wring finite meaning out of infinity. My friend from Utah!, Y.P., has scooped me in his modest objections to the staging. The music has to be strong to pin my eyes and ears to a TV screen for 110 minutes, with all the clumsy shuffling! So much shoving and lurching, and yet so static! The Slovak Philharmonic Chorus needs a serious workshop in body awareness. And I was really looking forward to the four naked hussies copulating with the Golden Calf! Luckily the music is strong - very strong, even if the orchestra lacked transparency - and unique. The pairing of a speaking actor, Moses, and a singing actor, Aron, orating simultaneously is electrifying. Thomas Moser sings his role of Aron with just enough diffident insecurity and strain to sound like Yahweh's second fiddle. Another level of allegory: Schnberg certainly considered himself the Moses of music, leading the orchestra out of bondage to late classical/romantic tonal chromaticism into the Promised Land of serialism. How shocking to find that I'm no longer shocked. This opera and Berg's Violin Concerto, to my ears, are the most affective and commodious of all twelve-tone compositions. Perhaps a more polished CD performance would satisfy many Schnberg devotees, but I like opera on DVD. Even the sight of a bunch of stodgy Slovaks in black suits and yarmulkas shaped like fezes clumping about on stage helps me shut out other sounds and thoughts. |
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