2023-05-03 06:27:16
Nno one goes to the cinema as if he or she were a blank wax tablet on which what has been seen leaves its imprint. We have expectations and hopes, there are keywords, synopses, hints, they steer the reception along certain paths and can often also deform it in the process. Before the Berlinale, where it received the Silver Bear for best screenplay, one could read about Angela Schanelec’s film “Music” that it dealt with or was loosely based on the Oedipus myth. This intrigued some, and frightened others. These reactions have to do with ideas and prejudices: how someone feels about Angela Schanelec’s films and about the variation of motifs from old Western culture in the cinema.
In fact, when the film starts, you wish you hadn’t heard any of that. Of course, the question is hypothetical as to how it would have appeared to you without that Oedipus cue to which everything gravitates like iron filings to a magnet, unaware that it’s an Angela Schanelec film. As in a kind of cinema blind tasting. But it could still be worth talking about “music” and putting everything Oedipal in brackets. Then there would be a story full of ellipses. Full of omissions that Schanelec says make it possible for her to tell the story.
A story full of events that are less of a mystery than that we viewers have to fill in on their own account, which remains open to meaning. The willingness to do so has always been the best attitude in a Schanelec film. Just look into a green, hilly landscape. Clouds and fog slide into the picture like a white screen in slow motion, it thunders, it’s getting dark. Then a man in a red anorak carries a woman up a mountain in his arms.
The morning after, two cars are crawling along a serpentine dirt road. The man in the anorak is found passed out. The ambulance driver retrieves an infant from a stone hut nearby. He takes him with him. The camera remains in a darkened room for a very long time, only a curtain moves slightly in the breeze, all attention is focused on the noises, a clatter, a rustle, baby sounds. No one speaks. Then a woman sits on the beach and very carefully lets seawater run over the baby’s sore feet.
The Oracle of Delphi had warned
Oedipus means “swelling foot”, the father had punctured the baby’s feet and had him abandoned in the mountains because the oracle of Delphi had warned him. If you don’t know, just keep watching. A cut spans years, a young man goes to the sea with friends. While they go swimming, he carefully bandages his reddened feet. This is how Angela Schanelec tells it. Everything essential is shown and not a sentence is said.
#Angela #Schanelecs #film #Music