From Today Until Tomorrow (1997) explores one night in a not-quite loveless marriage. A husband and wife return from a party where she has flirted with another man, while he has cast an appraising eye toward an attractive, fashionably dressed acquaintance of his wife's. While relying on long, fixed shots in austere black-and-white, directors Straub and Huillet here depart from their usual penchant for shooting in actual locations, instead building on a large sound stage the set of the couple's apartment. This arrangement allowed the filmmakers to record the sound and the image at the same time, something that had not been possible for Moses and Aaron (1975).
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“What does it mean to be modern? For Huillet and Straub, the danger of becoming modern — or more generally "modernization" — means to despise all that has gone before and to "chase after shadows," where everything becomes "privatized, plundered, and destroyed by... (the idea) of growth and development." Schoenberg's defense for a modern music is given form in his opera Von Heute auf Morgen (1929) based on a libretto by his wife Gertrude under the pseudonym Max Blonda. It is the first opera to make use of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique in which no tone recurs until all remaining tones have been used, thereby destabilizing any sense of harmonic center. Yet this wholly modern technique is used in the service of a libretto that relegates the modern, suggested by sexual liberation through open marriage, to simply fashion and a threat to the idea of fidelity.”
Ming Tsao1
- 1Ming Tsao, "From Today Until Tomorrow,” Balthazar, 2023. Republished on Sabzian as “From Today Until Tomorrow (1997, 62 min.)” on 25 October 2023.
