Description

Beneath the frugal surface of Jean-Marie Straub's and Daniele Huillet's 1974 cineastic adaptation of Arnold Schonberg's opera 'Moses und Aron', a tremendous wealth of meaning wants to be discovered. Whereas the opera already plays a highly complex game of appropriating and transforming biblical motifs from the Book of Exodus, the film plays such a game with both the opera and the biblical text. This study aims to appreciate this game's complexity by first considering its two lower layers in themselves. While in both the opera and in the film, the antagonism of Moses vs. Aron becomes that of intellectual hostility vs. popularizing friendliness towards the sensual, in the end it will be shown how Schonberg and the cineasts are themselves affected by this antagonism, all in their own way.

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