Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Differentiation of Culture
- 2 The Destruction of the Symphony: Adorno and American Radio
- 3 The War with Other Media: Bachmann's Der gute Gott von Manhattan
- 4 Radio Jelinek: From Discourse to Sinthome
- 5 Jokes and Their Relation to Film Music
- 6 Allegories of Management: Norbert Schultze's Soundtrack to Das Mädchen Rosemarie
- 7 Straub and Huillet's Music Films
- 8 The Modulated Subject: Stockhausen's Mikrophonie II
- 9 Music beyond Theater: Stockhausen's Aus den Sieben Tagen
- In Lieu of a Conclusion: Mediating the Divide
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Straub and Huillet's Music Films
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Differentiation of Culture
- 2 The Destruction of the Symphony: Adorno and American Radio
- 3 The War with Other Media: Bachmann's Der gute Gott von Manhattan
- 4 Radio Jelinek: From Discourse to Sinthome
- 5 Jokes and Their Relation to Film Music
- 6 Allegories of Management: Norbert Schultze's Soundtrack to Das Mädchen Rosemarie
- 7 Straub and Huillet's Music Films
- 8 The Modulated Subject: Stockhausen's Mikrophonie II
- 9 Music beyond Theater: Stockhausen's Aus den Sieben Tagen
- In Lieu of a Conclusion: Mediating the Divide
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I. Intensive Translation
It may be an ironic tribute to Straub and Huillet's perdurable modernity that their work has resisted academic interpretation for so many decades. As recently as 2004, one commentator noted that “there is little indication” of a larger attention to their work, citing others who described their status as “dinosauresque” relative to the cinematic mainstream. Even the discovery of film music as a topic of research has largely passed them by in favor of Hollywood cinema's “unheard melodies” or New German cinema's more obviously semantically coded use of music. The difficulty of Straub and Huillet's art—its “resistance” (Byg) not only to forms of domination, but even to comprehension itself—is a classically modernist one, which Niklas Luhmann has described as one of communication:
Entscheidend ist, dass, wie bei aller Kommunikation, die Differenz von Kommunikation und Mitteilung den Ausgangspunkt bildet, an den weiter Kommunikation künstlerischer oder sprachlicher Art anschliessen kann. Was soll das?, das ist die Frage. Dass es darauf oft keine eindeutigen Antworten geben mag oder dass die Antworten im Laufe der Geschichte sich ändern, ist kein Einwand, sondern ist gerade für grosse, bedeutende Kunst typisch.
It is precisely the blocking of the “difference between communication and message” that has continued to frustrate the reception of these films (preventing the “Anschluss” of communication that enables the latter, whether public or scholarly).
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- Information
- The Differentiation of ModernismPostwar German Media Arts, pp. 134 - 161Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013