At the same time, there was a huge renaissance of silent film. Even though she was seriously hurt, she chose to ignore her injuries and continued performing. One way, maybe, of thinking about this is to ask how we even talk about the music here. TIMOTHY BEWES: This film, which I am seeing for the first time this evening, reminds me a little of the work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, in its performativity, but also in the radical disequivalence between the visual image and the sound image. Trailer. The gestures have a kind of double function. Some are completely, of course, out of her time. BEWES: We have time for one last comment. Musical, Drama, Comedy. I mean, I am a contemporary of the film. I’m using these words as synonyms, but maybe later we can introduce distinctions. "Der Tod der Maria Malibran" or "The Death of Maria Malibran" is a West German German-language film from 1972, will soon have its 45th anniversary, and it is one of the earlier full feature works by filmmaker Werner Schroeter, who wrote and directed this one. Callas, all the campy things. STEWART-STEINBERG: Isn’t there a strange way in which the music is diegetic? . You would have, let’s say, a displacement of operatic sites into environments that could be caught with a camera. I wrote to Gertrud because I knew she would be here as well, and she said, Oh let’s not do Kluge, let’s do Werner Schroeter’s Der Tod der Maria Malibran. What would be the equivalent impossible situation in the language or medium of opera? So there is repetition built into film itself; the film visualizes itself all the time. I mean, you could say the whole film is a reference to that, but there’s one point where it’s made explicit, and it’s surprising. You can’t sing when you kiss, right? How to sync bodies with affect? As I was watching the film this evening, some of the elements of the film seemed to come together. But it’s not only the postures, as Alex said, but also the gestures. Timothy Bewes, Interim Director of the Cogut Institute, introduced and moderated the discussion. I felt there was a movement over the course of the film. I was a bit scared to show this film. Maria Malibran. Until her death, because at that moment . It is indeed a liberation from film music, from any inner diegetic need. Two mouths can touch in a way, but if two voices were able to touch that would be the real accomplishment of both opera or singing and love, as it were. Whereas love, he says, expects something in return, and is supposed to lead somewhere. The love of opera would be that: two voices really touching. Everything is there. What is the significance of cinema in this structure that you’re presenting us with? So I saw this film as a constant circling around these two impossibilities. So that this is, you know, a repetition that has absolutely no future. So I wanted to make the point that it’s about not just the operatic but specifically the cinematic melodramatic. The image gets a kind of heartbeat. I also ask myself: why is there this fairy tale in the middle of the film? Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death at age 28. KOCH: OK, so taking up this question. The first Film-Thinking event took place on October 28, 2019 at Acoustic Java. I would say, the modernist paradigm. Not to forget that in opera itself and in modern avant-garde music theater, you began to have already this merging with installation art, having screens on stage, having music with accompanied films. The answer in the film is that when something touches you it keeps reverberating for so long that you cannot but keep dying, as it were. I mean, À une passante. But I think there is something else involved here that has more to do with what Alex referred to in his statement: the time and timing of passions. Not in general, but by means of two impossible gestures. They do that all the more since they are snatches, precisely. This is the reason he says that passion is communication — not communication in the sense of communicating something, but more like a contagion, something that has no direction. If I remember correctly, what is said is that ultimately the abnormal fact is not that something exceptional may happen within the next half an hour that interrupts the normal course of things — that diverts the expectation of doing this or that within the next half an hour; the abnormal fact is that we think there is such a thing as a continuity, that we can expect, as it were, to do this or that within half an hour, and that as long as we can do that, we seem to be quite happy and satisfied. We are touched by this film, perhaps. So, we watch differently. It’s a sound-image. This gives it this homogeneity. When that happens, and the continuity of the course of events is interrupted, you are stuck; all you can do is repeat again and again and again the same thing. La Malibran redirects here. . The Death of Maria Malibran Der Tod der Maria Malibran. ALEXANDER GARCÍA DÜTTMANN: I’m very happy to be here tonight with you and Gertrud and Peter. KOCH: I think what was really new — but it was shared by this whole group of directors at the time, when you think about the Fassbinder films — these kinds of schmaltzy melodramatic songs play an enormous role, so what I think was the interesting work Schroeter is doing is not only the editing, but that it goes into a flow. A touchstone for subsequent (and better known) postmodern biographical portraits like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which recasts Bob Dylan as six widely disparate characters, Schroeter’s film is perhaps best understood as an opera aficionado’s self-conscious attempt to recreate the opera form in a fundamentally different medium. . That is extremely important here, because it’s not just, let’s say, a chain of quotes, of operatic gestures, or silent film gestures, but a way to incorporate these gestures into a cinematic body. That’s not enough. You have these very old discs that are playing, historic things. So maybe what the film is about is what it calls the “abnormal fact.” What does that mean? The film is very funny in many ways. Each tableau has a different motif, and each comes across with a decadent romanticism. Lynne [Joyrich] said to me, it’s an example of queer cinema. STEWART-STEINBERG: Curated! There’s also an affect of humor. . Another thing that I read (this anxiety to be able to say something) was the two texts where Michel Foucault mentions this film. I’m going to ask a follow-up question and then I’ll pass the mic to the others. So you can’t see if the eye of the other is against yours, if it touches yours. In many moments, you have these two faces getting very, very close to one another and almost as if the two eyes are about to touch one another. That had a very liberating effect upon me, because I much prefer Schroeter to Kluge and I thought it was a wonderful suggestion. And you can’t sing if you touch the mouth of the other. I was really interested in what Alex said: this quintessence of passion, this sort of quintessence of impossibility. You can do it naturalistically, which is boring, as we know, but here, I think, you have two autonomous movements that are both referring to the fragility of the embodiment of sound in human bodies. The genres are rather more discrete and there is a conversation between them. So — this is when we open it up. KOCH: Yes. I think it’s diegetic only insofar as we have kind of micro-narrations of passion in it, but it’s not diegetic in the sense of a classical melodrama where you would have leitmotifs for the young hero, and so on. There is a repetition and this repetition of vision comes with an alteration. It’s because I’m giving a paper on opera tomorrow, and I thought it would be nice to see a film tonight that would have something to do with opera. The impossibility of being not only with, but being up against, right up against, with the other’s eye or being with the other’s mouth. But after having seen the film, to sort of close my eyes and forget all these things and details and to ask: what is it that remains — without plot, without trying to demonstrate anything. This was one thing. Maybe that’s what there is. What led you to select this film, The Death of Maria Malibran, for tonight’s discussion? I think — and I don’t know if you would agree, Alex — I think it has something to do with what you were trying to say about the quintessence, because all these snatches of tunes, they try to catch, to seize, to grasp the quintessence of something — maybe passion, an affect, I don’t know. GERTRUD KOCH: He’s both. BEWES: I want to ask one more question and then we’ll open it up. The really ingenious thing with Schroeter is that at some point he took it up. It’s not Wagnerian. Stuart? What film shares with theatre, but not with painting and other image-based arts, is that it works with live action, live actors. It’s like isolating a pure eye or a pure mouth that is not meant to convey something. . Not the Kierkegaardian or Deleuzean concept of repetition, nor what Cavell is doing in The Pursuit of Happiness. So, opera being “always too much” — this film being specifically about a particular kind of fascination with opera as a kind of halting of the action and a halting of the linear evolution of life itself. How old is Maria Malibran: 28 years Female Birthday: March 24, 1808 Sun sign: Aries Nationality: Paris, France Death date: September 23, 1836. And when I heard that, I asked myself, is this not something that takes us into the film, into this film? This is also silence. First of all, that there is no love in Maria Malibran, and this claim has to do with the distinction he makes between love and passion: “These women are chained in a state of suffering that binds them together which they are unable to break away from but which at the same time they would do anything to free themselves from. I kept seeing a connection and a re-invented connection between the eye and the mouth. What is it that we watch, then, when one of the things we see — and maybe this is what only film can do, not theater, not opera — is repetition itself, because film is always about at least two images. So, we watch differently. That’s a very different feature of life . There is a moment in the film where you have the repetition of the woman taking back her hair. So, it’s composed and it has these variations between these popular songs and opera arias and absolute music. In modern music theater, and also in the more modern styles of directing operas, the singers also became actors. While the general outline of Malibran's story can be sussed out of what is presented here, the film defies convention and clarity at every turn. Where do we place this film, for example, in relation to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its prolonged shots that focus very closely on Joan’s face, that, in fact, encourage us really to enter into her passion? And then suddenly something happened that I had not thought about before. You asked, Tim, what does this have to do with cinema. ideas and research from the Cogut Institute community. This legendary 2.5" heeled maryjane was inspired by Maria Malibran, one of the most famous opera singers of the 19th century, who was known for her extraordinary flexibility, range, and power. I’ve spoken. So I thought, what would happen in opera? Look at the kisses, the faces, the cheeks, the eyebrows, the teeth in a film like Werner Schroeter's The Death of Maria Malibran, To call that sadism seems to me completely false, except through the detour of a vague psychoanalysis involving a partial object, a body in pieces, the vagina dentata. This was the main aesthetic problem for sound film. Because here the eyes are restored in this kind of miracle that happens in the end to the girl who loses her eyes to that evil sorcerer or whatever he is. It’s like a composition. 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