Towards “Film Opera”. Kurt Weil’s Musical Experiments In Fritz Lang’s “You and Me”

Abstract

Towards “Film Opera”. Kurt Weil’s Musical Experiments In Fritz Lang’s “You and Me”Fritz Lang’s film You and Me was billed as a “musical revolution”. But it never became one. Anno Mungen describes Kurt Weill’s struggles to reshape the film as a genre. Both in his theoretical reflections and his (not successful) practical attempts as a film composer, Weill was preoccupied with the idea of music as a crucial element of the film/theatre dramaturgy. This idea – as Mungen tried to show,  analyzing three examples taken from Lang’s film – could direct the artist straight towards the category of film-opera. Fritz Lang’s film You and Me was billed as a “musical revolution”. But it never became one. Anno Mungen describes Kurt Weill’s struggles to reshape the film as a genre. Both in his theoretical reflections and his (not successful) practical attempts as a film composer, Weill was preoccupied with the idea of music as a crucial element of the film/theatre dramaturgy. This idea – as Mungen tried to show,  analyzing three examples taken from Lang’s film – could direct the artist straight towards the category of film-opera