As early as 1970, Straub had declared a difference between Moses and Aaron, then in pre-production, and Othon:

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.