Introductin to an Accompaniment to a Cinematograhic Scene

Introductin to an Accompaniment to a Cinematograhic Scene -- Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet made the 16-minute short film Introduction to an Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene in 1973. Straub and Huillet were Marxist film makers, apparently lifelong companions, who collaborated on all of their movies. (Huillet died in 2006). They are probably the most important modern film makers of the last sixty years whose films are almost never screened and remain essentially unseen. Intensely anti-American, Straub appears to have thwarted the distribution of his pictures by DVD in the United States – it doesn’t appear that any of Straub-Huillet’s films have screened at US art houses since The Chronicle of Anna Marie Bach was briefly shown in NYC in 1968. (It didn’t help matters that Straub-Huillet dedicated that picture, a rigorously clinical biography of the German composer, to the “freedom-loving North Vietnamese”). Straub-Huillet have a reputation for making pictures that are impossibly austere, difficult, and obscure. Introduction to an Accompaniment is an exploration of an enigmatic eight-minute musical composition written by Arnold Schoenberg in 1930 – “An Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene”. The score, Schoenberg’s Opus 34, is a curiosity – mood-music for a film that doesn’t exist. Schoenberg, a “control freak,” uncharacteristically did not specify the exact program for the film that he was illustrating or accompanying (Begleitung) – he simply notes that the mood is “threatening danger from catastrophe.” The ominous music, composed in 12 tone series, seems to presage the rise of Hitler and Nazism; indeed, Schoenberg, a Jew, fled German shortly after writing the piece, notwithstanding a suggestion from his friend, Kandinsky, that he teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Straub and Huillet’s film explores the question of whether art should make its ideological basis explicit. Schoenberg’s music is all allusion, necessarily implicit, concealing its program which might be to depict the composer’s unease at the rise of anti-Semitic forces in Germany. Straub-Huillet labor to make everything explicit, to avoid any kind of trickery or illusion, to make their points as directly and manifestly as possible. Yet, of course, the film demonstrates that Straub-Huillet’s demanding materialist approach to the material doesn’t clarify anything – rather, their rigidly logical, almost geometric approach to film making, raises more questions than it answers. This is not a defect in the film which is bracing, invigorating, and extremely interesting – Straub-Huillet understand that by expressing their Marxist points explicitly, they don’t definitely answer or settle anything; rather, their use of historical documents (in this case, a text by Brecht and a histrionic, self-pitying letter by Schoenberg to Kandinsky proclaiming the composer’s assertion that he is completely apolitical) create a dialectic, a debate among the materials of film, music, document and commentary revolving around the issue of what an artist can and should make explicit, how art should function, what can be said and what must be left unsaid. The film is fantastically rigorous – because Schoenberg’s music is identified with the opus number of 34, for instance, there are exactly 34 shots in the movie. At all points the film explicitly shows how it is produced: the documentary texts are portrayed as being read in a recording studio by proponents of writing (you can’t call them actors). Straub-Huillet have the actors pause mid-sentence, breaking the natural cadences of the German text, as an equivalent to the black frames that are inserted as caesura in the images. The film is certainly daunting enough – but unlike Godard’s Histoire du Cinema(s) – it’s not solipsistic; you have a sense that Straub-Huillet want very badly to communicate with you and will use every means at their disposal to establish the dialectic on which the movie rests. One can see why European cinephiles were both alarmed and intimidated by Straub-Huillet. Straub speaks in a deep booming “command-voice” – he is the very picture of a grim Stalinist comrade. And Huillet, whom we see briefly playing with a cat, is, if anything, even more steely and alarming – she is, in fact, truly terrifying. (Straub- Huillet’s next film, a movie-version of Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron is dedicated to Holger Meins, a member of the Red Army Faction.)