Angela Schanelec‘s MUSIC is a kind of inversion of Nietzsche‘s “The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.“ Nietzsche aimed at an ecstatic art when he describes the tragedy as a Dionysian art whose origin he wanted to find in the intoxicating, singing, and dancing choir. Schanelec‘s films are vehemently anti-ecstatic. Here the music is born out of the Oedipus tragedy, and the Dionysian is completely banned. It‘s clearly not about psychoanalysis for Schanelec. Her Oedipus doesn‘t kill his father and also doesn‘t marry his mother. Rather, it‘s about a paralyzing sadness that dissolves into music.

In Schanelec terms, MUSIC is stringently told: Jonathan has inflamed feet. He doesn‘t go swimming with his girlfriend and stays in the car. Two young men hold him up. He is shackled by a man and taken to a mountain, but defends himself when another man wants to kiss him. He falls on a rock and dies. This is filmed with maximum minimalism, dispassionately. Jonathan lands in a prison hospital in which quiet young women in subdued uniforms nurse his feet. The prisoners wear a variation of a buskin, the shoes with wooden lifts worn by actors in classical theater. One of the guards, Iro, takes special care of Jonathan. After his release and recovery, they marry and have a child. A section follows in which the people almost behave like everyday people. Then the last part begins, for which Iro previously hung a music playlist on the cell door. There‘s singing. The gestures become static, like in the beginning. Maybe music is healing the grief, maybe it just repeats the sadness. Somewhere Nietzsche is wondering. At the end there‘s a procession.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy