Opening Night: The Knife Sharpener + From Today Until Tomorrow

‘Schoenberg knew that fashions can be poisonous. Poisonous. That they can spread out like poison gas. That people breath in these fashions and are turned into cripples almost without knowing it. And that it is happening faster and faster. Each fashion lasts for a shorter period. They chase after one another.’

 

– Jean-Marie Straub

 

In From Today until Tomorrow (Von Heute auf Morgen) (1997), Huillet and Straub offer a political reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s rarely performed one-act twelve-tone comic opera Von Heute auf Morgen from 1929. This ‘apocalypse on a domestic scale’, as Hanns Eisler described it, is a critique of modernity and a commentary on the position of women in the last days of the Weimar Republic under the guise of an apparently frivolous comedy of marriage.

 

Set in a bourgeois family home, the film was shot in a studio in crepuscular 35mm black and white, a style which references the silent comedies of Ernst Lubitsch or Carl Theodor Dreyer. Huillet and Straub recorded the film in absolute synchronicity, in direct sound and mono, with the music performed live by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Gielen.

 

The screening opens with The Knife Sharpener (L'arrotino) (2001), an alternative take from Straub and Huillet’s 1992 film Sicilia!, based on Elio Vittorini’s 1930s allegorical anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily.

 

From Today Until Tomorrow (Von Heute auf Morgen) is a UK Premiere and will be screened in its original 35mm format.

 

Programme

 

The Knife Sharpener (L’arrotino), Dirs. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Germany 2001, 7 min., Italian with English subtitles

 

From Today Until Tomorrow (Von Heute auf Morgen), Dirs. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Germany, 1997, 62 min., German with English subtitles