Moses und Aron + Workshop: ‘On the Aesthetics of Equal Distribution’
Event Information
Description
An afternoon dedicated to Moses and Aaron, Arnold Schoenberg's opera and its adaptation by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
2.30pm: Screening of Moses und Aron (Moses and Aaron, 105 mins)
approx. 4.30pm: Workshop 'On the Aesthetics of Equal Distribution' with Ute Holl
Moses and Aaron is an opera composed by Schoenberg to his own libretto between 1930 and 1932. The third act remained unfinished. The libretto tells the story of the calling of Moses, who lacked the gift of oratory, to lead his enslaved people to the Promised Land, his conflict with his brother, Aron, and the people’s descent into idolatry and ritual sacrifice. The film offers a political reading of Schoenberg’s work, focusing on the confrontation between Moses, Aaron and the choir, who, according to Straub, represent the people. The film makes visible the histories of colonialism, migration and exile, putting the emphasis on the struggle of the people against oppression and on the conflict between word and image (‘Thus I too have fashioned an image, false, as an image must invariably be.’). The opera was filmed live and in direct sound, with pre-recorded orchestral music, in the outdoor setting of the Alba Fucens amphitheatre in southern Italy. The film is dedicated to filmmaker and political activist Holger Meins.
Moses und Aron, Moses and Aaron, 1975, 35mm (two shots in 16mm) on DCP, colour, 105 min.
‘On the Aesthetics of Equal Distribution’ || Workshop by Ute Holl
The workshop will explore the adaptation of Arnold Schoenbergs aesthetics of twelve tone composition through the filmic forms developed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. On that basis it will discuss the issues of migration and exile, law and media, resistance and ‘the missing people’ as raised in the film Moses und Aron and extend it to the work of the filmmakers at large.
Ute Holl is Professor of Media Aesthetics at Basel University. In her book The Moses-Complex. Freud, Schoenberg, Straub/Huillet, Zürich (2016) (German edition: Der Moses-Komplex : Politik der Töne, Politik der Bilder, Zürich 2014) she analyises how the figure of Moses has become a subject of psychoanalysis and, in the arts, of Schoenberg twelve tone music and Straub and Huillet’s cinema, detailing the historical contexts of these approaches and synthesizing them to explore the relationships among media, migration, and politics.
Ute Holl's general areas of research are the history of cinema and perception, the epistemology of audio visual media, media history of electro acoustics and cinema sounds, as well as experimental and ethnographc film. Her most recent books are Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (2017); Gespenster des Wissens. (Co-ed with Claus Pias, Buckhard Wolf, 2017).
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