Sounds of Resistance
Huillet/Straub and Arnold Schönberg

When Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub were invited to present some of their films at the Akademie der Künste in December 1999, the works they showed included their three “Schönberg films”, and they reminded the institution of its own history: his exclusion as an Austrian Jew by the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1933, was the beginning of Arnold Schönberg's exile. Alongside Bach, Pavese, Hölderlin, Brecht, and others, Schönberg belonged to those in whose work Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub found the resistance they were seeking for work on a film. By interacting with Schönberg’s composition style as well as his steadfastness, which made the politically conservative Schönberg into a radical innovator of music, they formulated central aspects of their own work.

In her book, The Moses Complex (2014, English 2017), media theorist Ute Holl discusses the thorough permeation of musical composition, cinematic construction, and the scope of political possibilities, which she found in Huillet/Straub’s second Schönberg film, Moses and Aaron (1974). The objective here is to experience and understand how one medium adapts to another; finds itself in it; translates itself. The screening of Moses and Aaron on 7th October is framed by a two-day workshop with Ute Holl and guests (7th and 8th October). Participation is free of charge. Registration is welcome: info_at_sagensiesdensteinen.net.

_{The fllm set for Moses and Aaron (1974) in the antique amphitheatre of Alba Fucense, Abruzze, Italy.}

Refuse Collection

On 9th October, the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin will settle into the concert hall of the Akademie der Künste to rehearse a revised edition of Arnold Schönberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, which the composer Ming Tsao specially composed for this project under the title Refuse Collection. He takes up the challenge which Huillet and Straub also faced when they chose this short piece as the basis for their first Schönberg film. “Imminent danger, fear, catastrophe” reads Schönberg’s terse directing instruction for this musical score. The film Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's 'Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene' (1972) becomes part of a multi-layered performance, which takes its title from a poem by the contemporary poet J. H. Prynne: “Refuse Collection” ‒ garbage collection, yet at once also the retrieval of what has been discarded, ignored, and which resists the forces of homogenisation. Before this experiment premieres on 12th and 14th October, it can be viewed in a public rehearsal on 11th October.

The third Schönberg film, From Today Until Tomorrow (1996), can be seen at the opening of the exhibition on 13th September, with an introductory lecture by the cultural theorist Diedrich Diederichsen.: