The Singspiel (“sung play”) to which this work by Ulla Von Brandenburg refers is a form of opera that developed in Germany in the late 18th century. The artist drew inspiration from these plays, which incorporate sung passages, to create a film for which she has produced all the sound elements. Two songs are performed by Ulla Von Brandenburg, and they mark the two central moments of the work.
The first is a family meal bringing together around ten guests of different ages. The second is a strange performance in an open-air theatre. In this short scene, in which the protagonists of the meal take part or watch, a recumbent figure rises. With the exception of these episodes—accompanied by a song oscillating between dream and guilt, possibly a wake lament—the short film is devoid of all sound.
Singspiel is a film that is both silent and sound-based. The musical treatment evokes the concerts performed during cinema screenings in the early 20th century: an improvised score played live during the screening. But Ulla Von Brandenburg’s accompaniment does not merely run parallel to the film; it inhabits it. Seated around the table, each of the characters passes the song along, mouthing the words as they go. In turn, they become puppets animated by a ventriloquist.
Filmed in a single long take at the Villa Savoye, completed by Le Corbusier in 1931, the film makes the most of this architecture of transparency to move from one space to another, from the interior to the exterior. The rationalism of one of the fathers of modernism is here disrupted by the presence of strange characters who evoke the spectral nature of the cinematic spectacle: bodies that belong to the past but move in the present.
