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Between Powell and Pressburger (The Tales of Hoffmann) and Syberberg (Parsifal), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet give opera's elemental side. Moses (Günter Reich) alone with the voices, the back of a shaggy head in close-up tilts and pans to rocky landscape and cloudy sky. "Who am I, to set myself against the might of blindness?" He and Aaron (Louis Devos) face a skeptic people, monotheism is a tough sell, make with the miracles. (Staffs into snakes and water into blood and back, the real wonder is the panoramic view of a greenish Nile suddenly inserted.) In the desert, "purity of thought will nourish you." A question of representation and its limits, a matter of rigor and delectation. "The symbol expands itself to the image." Schoenberg's unfinished opus translated into plein air cinema, the crumbling Roman amphitheater is just the arena for the camera's expressive starkness. Leadership and oppression, compromise and obstinacy, a pair of bearded twins. The chorus is a rectangle frequently seen from an elevated angle, half Cézanne canvas and half gravel pit. "Do not expect the form before the idea." Three acts, spartan spatial arrangements, music that charges the air. A sustained modernist reading of layers of ancient text, the Biblical myths by way of the Thirties by way of the Seventies. "Before the Mountain of Revelation," the mice play while the cat's away and Straub and Huillet unleash some of their most pristine effects—the winding river of livestock herded before the Golden Calf, the maladroit choreography of idolatry, the pinprick moon in a nocturnal bacchanalia. (Pasolini is a useful model throughout, "holy is genital power!") God and consumerism are the braided inventions, the Promised Land is the movie screen reinvented by inquisitive artists, at once wondrously abstract and tactile.
--- Fernando F. Croce |