History is like the atmosphere: one tends not to notice it until it blows foul, but it’s a wise citizen who takes careful and steady note of its presence. Oxygen was discovered in the seventeen-seventies; the ambience of history (its development as self-consciousness) was discovered by Hegel, who was born in 1770. The force of history, in a politically self-aware age such as ours, is an increasingly central aspect of contemporary art. One filmmaker who captures it on the wing is Pedro Costa (whose “Letters from Fontainhas,” a newly-released boxed set of features and short films, I review in the magazine this week).
I was thinking of Costa on Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall, where my wife, Maja, and I saw Christian Zacharias, pianist and conductor, perform with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. The concert opened with a rare mid-eighteenth-century work (one which was only now receiving its Carnegie Hall début), a symphony in E-flat major by C. P. E. Bach (for those who follow Wotquenne numbers, it’s Wq. 179). This son of Johann Sebastian Bach was perhaps the most famous composer of his day (he was born in 1714) as well as a key composer in the development of musical modernity. C. P. E. Bach was, essentially, an expressionist, a master of subjective emotional representation in music, and Sunday’s symphony, as conducted by Zacharias, offered a series of musical jolts to the sensation—piercing dynamic contrasts, with suave and sighing phrases followed by loud musical spikes; sudden silences; and jagged dissonances tearing through the fabric of melodies. It was a triumph of musical subjectivity, or of subjectivity expressed in music; it was everything except a reflection on subjectivity itself. For this, we need Beethoven.
And Beethoven we got, immediately afterwards, as stagehands wheeled out a lidless piano at which Zacharias then played and conducted the Third Piano Concerto, in the hyper-expressive key of C minor. As a conductor, Zacharias remains quite the pianist—eschewing a baton, he guides the orchestra with his hands, and does so in gestures that make it look as if he were actually playing it—and he emphasized the intense emotionalism of its great orchestral introduction. But when the piano part entered, Zacharias made plain his sense of the ideas at work in the musical drama: the pianist was a hero who strode onto the world stage and transformed the orchestra’s intensities into a self-aware set of constructive actions. It’s as if the concerto were a forerunner of the “Eroica” symphony, with its Napoleonic origins. Through Beethoven and his reflections on musical form and its meaning, emotional specificity gained its universal, self-aware, and essentially political aspirations; the concerto, in Zacharias’s hands, became the embodiment of the historical moment—and the understanding of it—in sound.
A similarly attentive approach to cinematic form underlies Costa’s effort to capture history in motion on film. Whether it’s the suppression of psychology in “Ossos,” the insular stasis of “In Vanda’s Room,” or the symbolic representation of social change in “Colossal Youth,” the forms and styles of Costa’s films are inseparable from what they depict—and are inescapably, if abstractly, connected to the flow of history. His methods are as experimental as science, as passionate as music, and as lucid as philosophy. It’s worth noting (more about this later) that Costa is the director of a remarkable film, “Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?,” about Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at work—the duo that blazed the path for historical analysis through cinematic form. (And their films based on works by Schoenberg show the central role of music in that effort.) In his film “Ne Change Rien,” which was one of the highlights of the 2009 New York Film Festival, Costa rethinks the recording of music on film, in terms of the history of cinema and of his own personal history with his cinematic fathers. His movies are very hard to see here (as far as I know, “In Vanda’s Room” was never released in the United States); the release of this boxed set by Criterion is a major (if not historic) event.