3 - The Power of Speech (or the Voice), of Seeing and the Path: Moses And Aaron
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter contains a detailed analysis of Straub and Huillet's 1974 filmic adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses und Aron. It pays closes attention to the similarities and differences between the films and how the filmmakers’ choices of adaptation and mise-en-scène, which flatten out the opera and its story, result in an analytic posture that allows viewers to see the powers at play in the opera in a more objective manner.
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“One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.”
– Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-BirdsAs early as 1970, Straub had declared a difference between Moses and Aaron, then in pre-production, and Othon:
[Moses and Aaron] will not only be a film about the relationship of the dialectic to the people, […] it will be a film about the people. The opposite of Othon, which is a film about the absence of the people. This will be a film about the people and its presence.
All things considered, this claim is less surprising than it may at first appear. After all, among other things, the opera Moses and Aaron is “about” a people and its creation: the people of Israel. Yet, we must also recognize a shift here, a gap, and, finally, a problem the film poses: between the unrepresentability of God and the unrepresentability of the people. The people are literally present in Moses and Aaron—or visibly represented. The opera stumbles constantly over their literal presence.
For Adorno, Schoenberg's opera admirably poses the problem of objectivity, which for him was fundamental to modern aesthetics. The opera's subject—the simultaneous birth of the Jewish people and monotheism—requires transcending the individual, which is for Adorno, moreover, the task of all contemporary art. Adorno finds that these problems deeply infuse the composer's techniques and his approach, and it is only through these questions that the extreme rigour of their application can be understood. This tension towards objectivity acts deeply on the opera and leads it to its conclusion, the contradictions inherent to the idea perhaps becoming embodied in the work's limitations.
Huillet and Straub's film is also constructed solely on and through this Schoenbergian objectivity.
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- Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub'Objectivists' in Cinema, pp. 71 - 126Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020