Moses und Aron

Moses und Aron -- With typical defiant bravado, Straub and Huillet dedicated this 1975 film of Schoenberg’s opera to Holger Meins. (Meins was a Red Army Faction urban guerilla notable for developing molds to allow women to carry bombs by simulating pregnancy; he died as a result of a hunger strike in November 1974 – Meins was trained as a cinematographer.) The film begins with a close-up of an excerpt of the Luther Bible (the book of Exodus) that seems to be a justification for terrorism. Once commenced, however, the film follows Schoenberg’s libretto literally and all political commentary is implicit – this New Yorker Films DVD comes with an essay that cites Theodor Adorno’s exegesis of the opera as a work in defiance of the consumer ethic that drives Capitalism; the opera supposedly defies consumption which is another way to say that it is so astringently atonal and aggressively difficult that no one could possibly enjoy it. Straub-Huillet’s film is completely self-assured and mathematically abstract – the picture was mostly filmed in an ancient theater at Alba Fucens in Abruzzo; the camera slowly tracks around the ruins, moves in a limpid 360 degrees to show the horizon blossoming with clouds, or, is sometimes stationary filming the actors who stand like sculpture in the blasted, sun-baked center of the arena. At the heart of the film, a reference to the land of “milch und hoenig” induces a gorgeous insert of the Nile and cultivated fields near that river before the camera tracks to the side to repose its glacial gaze on the barren desert wasteland. The project is an impossibility about an impossibility. Schoenberg’s libretto is almost completely theoretical and abstract – the words concern the philosophical problem of representing that which, by definition, can not be represented – that is, the omnipresent, eternal, all-encompassing monotheistic God who is everywhere and nowhere in particular. In Schoenberg’s version of Exodus, Moses breaks the tablets of the law because that inscription, and the law that it inaugurates, also poses the risk of becoming an idol, an icon of what should not be represented. Schoenberg makes Moses, afflicted with a stammer according to the Old Testament, use Sprechstimme for his words; Aron, Moses’ intermediary and spokesman, sings, often quite beautifully. (Inevitably, Schoenberg’s opera follows the rule that the tenor is the hero – Aron gets all the good lines and seems far more rational, wordly, and warm than the impersonal, chillingly ideological and austere Moses.) Straub-Huillet’s agenda is a to make a picture of a film that espouses the notion that pictures should not be made – the movie’s technique is classically dialectical: images that seem to be about almost nothing, nonetheless, beautifully depict a text that says that no image should be made and that depicting things is the Ur-sin (while Aron asserts that human beings inevitably require, and necessarily produce images). The final shots are particularly exemplary in their remote, icy beauty: Aron lies bound between Moses and armed men. But Moses is required to forgive Aron’s transgressions with the Golden Calf because to do otherwise would be bind God, that which can not be bound or confined, to His own law – if God is obliged to execute His own law in accord with His commandments, then God is not God. All of this is dramatized in the Act III in words spoken by Moses and Aron against a startling backdrop of high mountains and a desolate, acrid-looking briny lake – Schoenberg didn’t complete the opera and so there is no music accompanying this part of the film. I have wanted to see this film for many years – the New Yorker DVD of the film was first announced in 2008, but was not issued until December 2011 (New Yorker films went bankrupt in the intervening time; the formidable Danielle Huillet, Straub’s life-partner, died, and Straub made headlines by saying that “As long as there is American imperialism, the world will never have enough terrorists –“ further expressing his hatred for the USA by refusing to license the distribution of his films in that country.) The film is supposed to be a transcendent experience. It is certainly powerful and fantastically rigorous – but, to use Adorno’s phrase, it is, perhaps, too “unconsumable” and too majestically pure to be enjoyed.

An interesting side-light: Schoenberg spells “Aaron” as “Aron” because he was extremely superstitious and did not want to have his opera named with a title that contained 13 letters.