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, the libretto of which was written by Schoenberg’s wife Gertrud, under the pseudonym ‘Max Blonda’. 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 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. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Germany 2001, 7 min., Italian with English subtitles

 

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