Moses and Aaron

As in Straub/Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, the soundtrack comes first: a performance, sung live on location, of Schönberg's passionately dialectical opera. The original is notoriously difficult to stage adequately, and Straub's 'materialist' approach serves it better than any theatrical production is ever likely to; the precise, ultra-concrete images are simple enough to permit concentration on the score, and (again like the Bach film) sufficiently charged to generate a passionate intensity of their own.