
Von heute auf morgen (From Today Until Tomorrow). 1996. Germany/France. Written and directed by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. Based on Von Heute auf Morgen, by Arnold and Gertrud Schoenberg (as Max Blonda). With Richard Salter, Christine Whittlesey, Claudia Barainsky, Ryszard Karczykowski. 35mm. In German; English subtitles. 62 min.
Schoenberg’s rarely performed one-act opera, a withering portrait of a suffocating bourgeois marriage, gets the Weimar treatment in Straub-Huillet’s staged film. As the husband retreats into impotent sexual fantasy and his wife into aching loneliness—shades of Erich von Stroheim and Jacques Rivette—they are plunged into a mise en abyme of jagged atonal music and slashing crepuscular light.