Without music, life would be a mistake.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Illustration by Ivana Milos.
Sometimes during a film, a fleeting moment occurs onscreen that changes everything, and you wonder whether you’ve really seen what you think you have. It was too short, too violent, too beautiful. You didn’t quite understand it, but you felt it. Was it just a dream? Whenever I encounter such moments, I understand something about the way time escapes the grasp of our perception. As my mind lingers on the shot I have just seen, the film moves on. For a second, everything seems unchanged, as if I just imagined this moment. But then I see that the film itself starts to move differently, its colors change, the light has a different taste to it, or the voices of the protagonists seem softer. It becomes clear that something has occurred that has changed everything. This can be a uniquely personal encounter, akin to one's experience of death. At such moments, you can feel at once like everything is different and yet the world has moved on as if nothing had happened.
In Angela Schanelec’s latest film, Music (2023), an adaptation of Oedipus Rex, such a scene occurs when Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) throws herself off a cliff. It’s not her act of suicide that appears unfathomable, it’s how it is filmed and everything that happens around it. As the camera focuses on Iro’s bare feet on the rocks, tensely moving towards the abyss, ready to let go of life, a lizard crawls into the image and climbs her ankle, clinging to it. Nevertheless, she jumps, taking the oblivious animal with her. All of this happens in mere seconds. In the next scene, the funeral car is already waiting. There is no sentimentality, no allegorical meaning, just a physically tangible observation of the seconds separating life and death. The reptile moving into the frame is a witness, companion, and reminder of the world in a moment that it seems to disappear. These fleeting seconds encapsulate Schanelec's sensitivity to the concurrency of movements as she films people, animals, clouds, or the sea. They also highlight the swift way in which everything can change, the consequences each step might have. In the beauty of this scene, I learned something about what it means to be alive.
Music (Angela Schanelec, 2023).
The appearance of the lizard can be seen as a mere coincidence, but it introduces a contradictory presence of life at a moment of death. It thus questions the gravity of suicide, as well as the whole mythological structure undergirding the film’s narrative. Life goes on as long as there is a next shot: a summary of the soothing defiance of Schanelec’s modern rewrite of Sophocles’s play. While for Iro life is too hard to bear, animals roam, waves crash and recede, and somewhere, somebody is playing beautiful music. Such is the nature of the concurrency of life and of cinema, as this scene combines the two poles of this art form: the controlled and staged, as well as the spontaneous and unplanned.
Schanelec told me that Iro’s suicide scene was originally conceived in two shots instead of one. In the first shot, one would see Iro’s feet and the lizard next to it. The second shot would consist of a close-up and Iro’s clothes falling onto the reptile, signaling the woman’s jump to her death. However, the animal unexpectedly climbed onto Bonitzer’s leg, and thus the director decided to use only the first shot and also to show the jump. I think it might be too much to look for a relation between the coincidental, fateful situations in the film and this coincidence while shooting, and yet the decision to include the jump itself (which wasn’t planned) in order to do poetic justice to the animal’s surprising behavior speaks volumes about Schanelec’s filmmaking. For what becomes visible in the lizard’s encounter with Iro’s leg is the very essence of that fleeting moment when life and death meet for one instant, changing everything.
It feels wrong to summarize Music’s narrative, for as in Schanelec’s latest films, The Dreamed Path (2016) and I Was at Home, But...(2019), it’s not the story that motivates the scenes, but a striving to only show what really matters, to visually communicate that which cannot be put into words. That said, the basics can be laid out: The film follows Ion (Aliocha Schneider), a student who was found abandoned as a baby in a cabin in Greece. One day while at the seaside, he kills another man in self-defense. In prison, Ion encounters a woman, Iro, and develops a love for music. Iro will become Ion’s partner and they will have a daughter. However, one day she discovers that the man he killed was her ex-partner, and thus she decides to kill herself. Together with his daughter, Ion moves to Berlin to pursue his career as a singer. Although he slowly goes blind, he finds solace in music and within his artistic family.
Music (Angela Schanelec, 2023).
What Schanelec takes from Oedipus Rex—along with certain motifs (the swollen feet after which the tragic hero is named feature prominently, for example), images, and a general dramatic structure—is the notion of not being able to speak, so prominent in the play. It’s about the power of words that can’t be spoken, the avoidance of truth and its acceptance, the escape from elements that can’t be understood, and the dramatic importance of what it means to know (to see) and what it means not to know (not to see).
Sophocles’s play is full of allusions to the act of seeing, but Schanelec doesn’t go for simple metaphors, nor is she interested in exploring cinema’s ontological relationship to vision. Instead, she offers another art, music, which is neither about sight nor language. Music is maybe one of the most touching examples of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous understanding of music as a patch for wounds too big to heal. Here, the songs Ion sings (most of them sung by Doug Tielli) offer an alternative to the terrible despair of Oedipus. Ion’s deliverance has as much to do with music as with the bliss of ignorance: in contrast to Oedipus, he never finds out whom he has killed.
The incestuous relationship between Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta, between Ion and Iro, remains a mere possibility in Schanelec’s version. It doesn’t really matter, as Iro’s suicide is not informed by the panic of the unbearable that befalls the queen consort of Thebes. Instead, as Iro abruptly moves away from life, her suicidal act is granted an uncanny stillness. In Schanelec’s last three films, all of them fragmenting narratives and bodies, she has explored how elements beyond our control influence our ways of mourning and loving. These elements include time, an indifferent natural world, accidents, coincidences, and, most prominently in Music, fate, or whatever you want to call the events that happen to us as a matter of course, impossible to see coming. Life is more complicated than what it is possible to communicate. This is not a new assessment at all; actually, it is already one of the threads in Sophocles’s tragedy.
Music (Angela Schanelec, 2023).
While the Greek playwright circles around the unspeakable, Schanelec resurrects art—music—as the opposite of communication, art as something that goes beyond what can be explained. She focuses on body parts that, without words, still say a great deal. We can understand a lot about the human condition by paying attention to a shaking hand or a moving foot. Before we can reflect on our responsibility for our actions in life, the film seems to say, we have to be aware of what we are doing. It’s not a given that we are acting consciously.
This doesn’t mean that what Schanelec shows is enigmatic—quite the opposite, it’s clear and simple. But in contemporary cinema it’s unusual to be confronted with a film that is not interested in representing reality but, a bit like Japanese woodblock prints, in the essence of things. The director finds that essence as much in what she shows as in what she doesn’t show. Thus, the camera is not interested in whether Iro jumps or not, but it does care for this threshold separating life and death, the fleeting nature of everything we encounter, the irreversibility of our actions. Like in ancient Greek theater, Schanelec does not aim to grant access to an individual experience (in this case, Ion’s) via identification. Instead, she pursues truth on a higher ground. She pursues something that, put simply, could be true for anybody.