e-flux lectures: Ute Holl, “Aesthetics and the Alien: Straub/Huillet in Moses und Aron”

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron (Moses and Aaron), shot in 1974 and dedicated to Holger Meins, is a study on migration, exile, and on being a stranger or alien. The lecture will look at the strategies of technical media Straub and Huillet apply to work with sounds and images in their film. In the equal distribution of aesthetic elements, their film follows Schoenberg’s rule of twelve-tone distribution of indiscriminate perception. Thus, the film confronts the situation ‘before the law’, violence, and the question of the (missing) people.

Ute Holl is Professor of Media Aesthetics at Basel University. She has recently published the books The Moses Complex: Freud, Schöneberg, Straub/Huillet (Chicago University Press, 2016) and Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.