Joachim Noller

 

Cineastic counterpoint

Film and music in Hans Richter

 

Translation: Philip Marston

 

 

There was a strong current in the early 20th century avant-garde which looked to music to provide a model for artistic renewal in general. This was true of the theatre, literature and the fine arts such as painting and sculpture. Another art form which was only just emerging at the time is less often mentioned in this context: it is the cinema (both avant-garde films and those which followed more general artistic ideas). This should not be thought of, however, as a genre without traditions which appeared “out of nowhere” as it were, since it took the historically evolved modes of pictorial representation and literally “got them moving”, and was able to continue and escalate the innovative impulses confronting e.g. painting and the theatre using the new technical methods then becoming available[1]. The oeuvre of Hans Richter[2], in whose choice of titles for his paintings the terms prelude and fugue repeatedly occur, who speaks in his theoretical writings on representation and the film of orchestration, thorough-bass, and above all of contrapuntal compositional techniques, and whose works for the cinema began in the Twenties with a small series entitled Rhythmus (adding in each case the year it was made), is exemplary for this trend. Richter gave the films music and sound in finely differentiated forms: at first it was a musical, i.e., poetological idea which explicitly, and in some cases implicitly, referred to musical elements; after that Richter was unwilling to forgo adding real sounds, he postulated that it was necessary to have an acoustic dimension which had not, in his view, become superfluous simply because musical ideas were already being transformed into a visual form in the film.

 

On the idea of the musical film

 

The musical idea is not only rooted in a fascination with compositional techniques leading to the intention to apply their principles selectively to other art forms. We are dealing here with poetological and aesthetic ideas which only reveal their “musical nature” in some cases on reflection. It is therefore feasible to follow the path taken by this thinking by not starting with music, but seeing music as the goal, and the musical reference only gradually becomes apparent along the way.

Richter poses the question as to the fundamental function of art. He postulates that it is “an institution of the individual for giving meaning to itself in a transcendental world”. Art serves “to realize a higher unity: the idea of the human being within humanity: the consummation of individuation in a higher form of organization”. It is about achieving an integrated whole, the synthesis of the individual on the basis of a constructive principle. Motivated by the recognition that “we are capable of a more perfect existence”, “the demand for an all-encompassing ethical approach” which aspires to aim “at totality”[3] must be articulated. The new type of art should therefore be an integrated whole, a totality, providing a framework in which meaning can constitute itself. The reasons underlying this approach may be very diverse. Richter himself points to a possible explanation due to contemporary events: “The upheaval of World War I, I am sure, had something to do with this urge for ‘order’. I myself felt the need to establish an Archimedean standpoint, to penetrate the chaos which threatened from every direction. […] So strong was this historical impulse to establish ‘a ‘New Order’ that might restore the balance between heaven and hell’ (as Arp put it), that it expressed itself practically simultaneously, though independently, in various places on the globe”[4].

Yet this is only one component of artistic motivation; and anyway, we do not need exclusively “new” ordering precepts to describe the totality he is speaking about here. In music, advanced as the artistic exemplar here, time-honoured traditions play a significant role: “Thus, in the contrapuntal fugue, we found the appropriate system, a dynamic and polar arrangement of opposing energies, and in this model we saw an image of life itself”[5] - life itself, not merely a single episode or situation: art therefore continues to aim at mimesis, not the imitation of superficially apparent reality (or segments of reality), but holistic imitation, attempting to represent the whole of something which does not only play out within the limited frame of our field of vision at any one time.

In order to represent this totality, a certain form is necessary which - incorporating the time element - takes the form of rhythm. Rhythm constitutes “the basic form” of a film “at least to the extent that it is art”[6]. Rhythm is “as it were, a method for achieving concentration” through bringing the “expression of the movements” into an ordered system[7]. Richter understands “rhythm” as the basic form not only in his abstract, early films, which could be interpreted as an extension of abstract painting in the form of a process. Rhythm is the factor which, from Richter’s poetic perspective, also binds together the different, often highly disparate actions and figures in the films he made later: “I have always tried to articulate a kind of melody of movements found sometimes with animals, with human beings, with landscapes or whatever; but underneath is always the flow of rhythm - of an articulated time element”[8].

The rhythm which Richter wants to realize in his filmic works is really better described as polyrhythm. The painter and filmmaker tries to bring together very heterogeneous positions in his poetics, an attempt that leaves its mark first and foremost on the structure and style of his cineastic works: “The history of art proceeds by means of thesis and antithesis: in the search for absolute freedom, as in Dada - after absolute order and discipline, as in Mondrian - , the search for the miraculous, the German Romantics’ Blue Flower, for a new magic and at the same time the search for reality, for a socio-political content … and everywhere and always again and again in the search for the “new”, the future”[9]. Richter wants to combine de(con)struction with stringent construction, wants to rescue the metaphysical and magical dimension by placing it in an anti-metaphysical ecology of culture, wants to convey socio-political contents under such unconventional conditions etc. The rhythmic processes capable of integrating such opposites must needs be rather complex. And the second key concept in Richter’s poetics chimes beautifully with that: “The most complex and richest form of rigorous rhythmicization is in principle contrapuntal treatment. In outline: the advance of one or more movements to the degree that equal and opposite motions retreat”[10]. When Richter discussed the problems of how to bring about a balance between opposing forces, which held a burning actuality for him, with the composer Ferruccio Busoni, the latter referred him to the “classical” discipline of counterpoint in music as a model, first and foremost in the fugues of J.S. Bach. By “trying to translate this polar idea of order from music into painting” he began “with the simplest relationships between positive and negative” (black and white, up and down etc.) to “make music” on sheets of paper[11].

Bach’s contrapuntal technique was Richter’s “starting point for a ‘harmonization’ of two-dimensional space, in which white and black stood in a dynamic relationship to each other”[12]. White and black stand here for the simplest elementary form of a relationship based on tension, a polarity (the principle of counterpoint, he believed, was also a principle based on polarity[13]), which could in the end develop into extremely complex forms. Man should be enabled “to perceive even complex processes without difficulty”[14]. Constellations of forms in which such processes are realized do not exist for their own sake, but are the expression of human relationships; as we said above, the issue being focused on is destruction and construction (and not only in a purely aesthetic sense), physical and metaphysical imperatives, rationalism and magical thinking, individual and social needs, a polarity which generates tensions, but also develops a centripetal “pull” of gravity.

The ideas of rhythm and counterpoint are central concepts in Richter’s poetics. His films are thus quite overtly shaped by musical ideas, and we must ask ourselves whether they really have need of explicit sound(scapes) or an actual musical and acoustic component. Does not in fact the realization of a musical model make the often ill-conceived add-on of musical accompaniment superfluous?[15] It is in this sense that Richter’s decision to accompany his abstract rhythm films of the Twenties with music has frequently been criticized. But that was what he did, and the talkies which he soon made did not limit themselves to spoken monologues/dialogues, but also incorporated sounds and noises in an extremely well-focused/deliberate way. What kind of music does a film artist who thinks and creates in musical terms turn to? This is the question we will examine on the following pages (and what our little essay will mainly focus on).

 

The music in a “musical” film

 

A subject which has been given little attention in the literature on Hans Richter‘s life and works to date is the intensive efforts he made to come to grips with contemporary music, both out of general interest and also deliberately on the lookout for suitable music for his films. In his book Begegnungen von Dada bis heute there is a short chapter which deals with this search and the difficulties involved in it: Paul Hindemith - we read there - wrote the music for Vormittagsspuk (1928); after the war, however, he declined to collaborate again on music for the film Dreams that money can buy (1944-47): “You see, this was no longer the Hindemith of the frivolous, dance-music opera Vor und Zurück from the Twenties”[16]. Then Richter speaks about Darius Milhaud, who wrote the music for five of his films and who, in contrast to Hindemith, represented “a freer, more laid-back type of modern music”[17]. On top of that there was his attempt to come to terms with an avant-garde which had moved far away from Hindemith or Milhaud in its exploration of sonorities: thus Richter met Edgar(d) Varèse in the USA - shortly after his emigration in 1941 -, whose music had remained opaque to him at first hearing. This was also true of the electronic music produced by younger composers in the post-war years, for instance Karlheinz Stockhausen: “Although I could see what he was trying to do, it left me cold. But I cannot refute the insight that there, just as in modern art (e.g. through the use of computers) endeavours are being made to expand the domain accessible to sight and hearing through the science and technology of the twentieth century”[18]. Like many artists who were at the forefront of the struggle for the avant-garde, Richter had his problems with the newest achievements of music (and makes no bones about it, even looking back on it in his later years).

Richter’s book Dada Profiles contains portraits of two of the composers we already mentioned above, and who would hardly be expected to appear in this context elsewhere. In the author’s view of art (as outlined above) they are part of a huge, dynamic polarity running through the world of Dada in its widest sense: one of them is Ferruccio Busoni, to whom he owes his theorem of counterpoint, and whose conservative compositional style does not worry him at all. He remembers a performance of the opera Arlecchino [19] at the Stadttheater in Zurich: “an illuminatingly happy memory in contrast to certain modern operas which I heard in the same place, but which I sat through for four hours feeling as if I was being scourged forward by the whips of the Furies”[20]. And then, as if a total contrast were needed, Varèse also receives his Dadaist profile. The quintessence of this is almost rhapsodic in tone: “The music of tomorrow? Perhaps? The music of today - with certainty! For it acquaints us with the sonorous world in which we live day by day. With sounds which were excluded from music for centuries, did not even exist”[21]. We leave it to the reader to decide to what extent these words actually capture the essence of Varèse’s sonorous world. It is his own sound imaginings which Richter is here first and foremost putting into words, or at least their innovative aspect: he wants to incorporate acoustic elements from our everyday world. This possibly points to musique concrète, to John Cage or other phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Richter would take issue with the self-satisfied, exclusive “new music movement” (Neutönertum): he does not, after all, exclude precisely that traditional music vice versa which, as he himself says, has excluded the sounds of the everyday world over centuries; quite the opposite: again and again he pays his respects to it (we will find this attitude confirmed in his late films). He remained attached to the sounds of an unbroken tradition all his life, but nonetheless postulates an opening into a new sphere, we might also say: what is being striven for is a dual ars acustica, the creation of a parallel sound world (as a continuation of the existing one). What music in general and, specifically, what filmic soundtrack, could do full justice to such a polar aesthetic? Is there any composer who would be capable of realizing such ideas, the hermaphrodite Busoni-Varèse, able to unify in a symbiosis what Richter imagined he saw in both of them?

The fact is that Richter had been searching for suitable film music, daunting though the task might be, from the outset. In a matinee in Berlin in 1925 (entitled Der Absolute Film), Film ist Rhythmus (which might have been Rhythmus 21 combined with Rhythmus 23) was accompanied by piano for four hands. A reviewer wrote of “noises on a piano” which were “thought up by Stefan Wolpe, evoked by two pianists and greeted with catcalls by the audience”[22]. Many a spectator may have found the music an annoying distraction. After this early experimental phase, music specially composed for the film followed (the first were by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt for Filmstudie[23] [1928] and, as mentioned above, by Hindemith for Vormittagsspuk [1928]), and this was still accompanying music for silent films. Richter himself mentions as his first “talkie”, i.e. a film with its own soundtrack, Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich (1929), in which music and dialogue are shown to advantage “in an abstract and rhythmic measure” with the help of the composer Walter Gronostay[24].

In his essay Filmgegner von heute - Filmfreunde von morgen, published for the first time in 1929, the “talkie” appears as a project which still awaits its crystallization into a defined artistic form: “Sound can either enhance the optical movements or weaken their effect, it can take them as reference points either in analogous or contrary motion, it can increase the range of possibilities for associations, make the rhythm more clearly perceptible by playing either along with it or against it. Sound may be noise, musical sounds or the spoken word - but it only becomes meaningful in the film by taking its allotted place an overall artistic plan”[25]. It is in this text that the two basic concepts rhythm and counterpoint are first established: the “richest form of stringent rhythmicization” is “contrapuntal treatment”, as we already quoted above. In the following years, Richter expanded on his idea of “contrapuntal treatment”[26] and developed it systematically further: out of two ideas, image and sound - as the filmmaker put it himself in 1958 - a third idea had been born: “the counterpoint of image and sound”[27].

A determinedly modern contrapuntal texture, namely one which is structural or even structuralist in its conception, is found in the 4^th dream sequence of Richter’s film Dreams that money can buy (1944-47, the title of the scene is: Discs, and nudes descending a staircase), which pays homage in its iconography to Marcel Duchamp. The music for prepared piano is by John Cage, who describes it as follows: “each 11 measures of 5/4 (and the whole which is 11 x 11 measures) is phrased (and the whole divided into parts) according to the following relationship: 3, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1. These numbers were derived from the time lengths given by the film itself as related to the pulse of 120 to the minute. By ‘derived’, I mean: arrived at from a desire to be with the film phrases at certain points and against or in ‘contrapuntal’ relationship with it at other points”. Cage inserts a footnote at this point: “‘Counterpoints’ not intended by me took place in the subsequent actual joining of film and soundtrack”[28]. We can safely assume - already from the words he uses - that Richter had acquainted the composer with his aesthetics of the sound film; and Cage - more than most others - was just the man to grasp what he wanted.

Without wanting to labour the point, it must be emphasized that a contrapuntal texture, as Richter understands it, is of course not only concerned to cultivate the play of opposites. Acoustic elements - as we have already quoted above - reference visual elements “through analogous or contrary motion”, “by playing either along with it or against it”. In an interesting essay on Die schlecht trainierte Seele, which deals with the necessity of appropriate psychological training, Richter postulates (quoting the works of his friend Viking Eggeling) a “synthesis of centripetal and centrifugal forces”[29], the cultivation of contrasts, opposites, distinguishing features on the one hand and analogies, similarities, affinities on the other. Only through such reciprocal interaction would a new perception/feeling come about, a new “psyche, which would be equipped through this with a certain ‘cognitive ability’”[30].

Richter himself describes musical examples from his Schachsonate in 8 Sätzen (A Chess Sonata in 8 movements), written in 1952-57, with the main title 8x8: in the 3rd episode (A new twist) Alexander Calder “blows his life’s breath” into “a whole forest of tiny mobiles”[31]. The highly imaginative visuals are associated with the sound recording of a traffic jam on Times Square in New York, a background of noise effects whose emotional ambience is transformed in this context of Calder’s from an original impression of confusion to “news of something eminently alive”[32]. In Richter‘s interpretation of his own work, the contrast is thus transformed into an analogy, the acoustic counterpoint loses its quality of being an opposite and begins to support the (visual) “first subject” in its associations. Another example quoted by the filmmaker is the 7th episode of 8x8: in this, Jean Cocteau plays a “pawn” who, following the rules of chess, is transformed in the end into a queen. Chess moves are rhythmically organized motions, and both authors, Richter and Cocteau, were searching for a “sonorous form” which would convey precisely this association. The result was a rhythmically organized text from a chess primer, spoken forwards and backwards, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, in whole sentences and parts of sentences, in different languages. The acoustic and visual design elements in this scene refer associatively in quite different ways to the “subject” (i.e., the chess moves which take the pawn to its final conversion into a queen). At first hearing, the linguistic music may be perceived as a contrast to the surrealistic visual sequence, on the other hand, it illustrates and demonstrates the principle of rhythmical structure in which - as Richter constantly emphasizes - the artistic quality of the film as a whole, including the optical elements, is verified; thus it is possible to assert that here, too, we have the combination of playing along with and playing against.

And so the counterpoint between the arts, the interaction between visual and aural images, could be seen as Richter realizing, in a nutshell, a typically modern idea of a symbiosis of the arts, but now our thinking leads back to our primary object of examination: the internal definition of the acoustic part, the question of what qualities an aural image needs to have to be coordinated with the visual image, but not subordinated to it. What, in Richter’s view, are the characteristics of a good film score, a suitable soundtrack?

The examples taken from the film 8x8 ­­- the “reinterpreted” street noises as well as a text processed into linguistic music - might lead us to assume that Richter prefers radically modern or avant-garde soundscapes. Yet here - and we are not really surprised - we should avoid jumping to conclusions. In his late films, we hear quite tonal orchestral scores reminiscent of the 19^th century; let us recapitulate once more what we learned about Richter’s idea of music in general: despite all his efforts to explore the new world of sonorities, the great traditions of European musical history never lost their fascination for him.

Richter’s all-inclusive idea of music leaves its mark in his using a plurality of styles in the soundtracks of his late films. In 8x8 he had tried “to use the sound elements in a different way in each of the 8 episodes”, in order to “impress the ear with the wealth of ideas in the aural elements”[33]. But the real raison d’être of a sound film is a conception in which “all the possibilities of words, music, realistic and unrealistic sound effects, distorted sound, noises sounding at the same time and the diversity of different languages [could be employed] on the tape”[34]. The film then becomes a place where the most multifarious musical and acoustic modes meet on equal terms, not from aesthetic faintness of nerve or indifference, but because it is a dramatic necessity.

At the same time we will not allow ourselves to be sidetracked from our question (because what we have said above still does not really answer it), as to what kind of soundtrack would be a paradigm in which Richter’s poetic and poetological ideas could be realized. Where is the film score in which Richter (naturally in collaboration with the sound artist in each case) creates an exemplary model?

We had diagnosed a musical aesthetic based on polarity, on the one hand anchored in tradition, on the other open to quite new acoustic worlds, incorporating the sounds and noises of the world we actually live in today (represented by Varèse). What music in general and what filmic soundtrack in particular - we have already formulated the question - could do justice to such a polar aesthetic? Does any musician or - since this art does not confine itself to musical sounds - any sound artist exist who would be capable of realizing such ideas, who - without realizing it - unites in himself something of Busoni and something of Varèse?

Richter created the last dream, called Narcissus, in Dreams that money can buy entirely by himself, without sharing the responsibility with another visual artist (Alexander Calder or Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Man Ray) or referencing their iconography as in the other dreams. For that reason we find it particularly interesting to see what soundtrack is put to this story (which can be seen, by the way, as having autobiographical elements). Louis Applebaum wrote a rather conventional, technically competent instrumental score (in parts very melodious, including passages with plangently expressive oboe parts), in his own words: “music perhaps a bit more orthodox in its materials than the others”[35]. But what is strikingly apparent are the noises or sounds edited into this dream sequence as inlays: it cannot be missed - like a leitmotiv - the recurring noise of a train, a steam train, e.g. in different variant forms, including some with an unusual montage quality, cut off multiple times; sometimes the sound seems to be modified, as if it had been electronically processed. Then we hear another feature: “metallic jangling”[36] or “the metallic clanging of rings”[37] (are these perhaps the large metal rings shown in the film, but in another place - a device which would underline the separation of visual and aural images?). The sounds of a piano playing jazz and the tick-tock of a metronome - i.e., acoustic inlays - also fall into the same category.

The noises should be understood symbolically, we read in an essay on this film.[38] Other authors interpret the sound of the train as a quotation from L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1895) by the Lumière brothers[39]; but what has the visual sensation of 1895 got to do with acoustic motif in Richter’s film? The text superimposed over the opening credits can tell us more here: “Everybody dreams. Everybody travels. Sometimes into countries where strange Beauty - Wisdom - Adventure - Love expects him. This is a story of dreams mixed with reality”. The Narcissus dream is the story of a journey through life, transposed into dream symbols, on the one hand referring to Hans Richter’s life and on the other transcending the individual dimension. Of course, this scene is not merely (like all the dream sequences in the film) embedded in a story which purports to be real, it is a story in itself, which - as the opening credits say - mingles dream and reality. And the acoustic setting reflects this dialectic by adding striking acoustic objects to the orchestral texture, which seem to belong to an aesthetic, fictional sphere, and turn out to be interlopers from real life, windows opening on aural reality (or rather on an aural reality), realistic components of a “dream” or a symbolic form termed a “dream” in which an artist attempts to find an appropriate expression of human inner life (strictly speaking, when we make the association with the spoken monologue, the acoustic objects are the echoes of a remembered reality). Richter has thus realized here something of that polarity which determines his approach to music: here are - in a nutshell - aesthetic signals pointing to our musical high culture as well as - on the other side - pragmatic signals of our acoustic ecology (at least hinting at a pragmatic function[40]), signals which are now symbolically charged and artistically integrated, which help to expand our aesthetic system, but whose origin can still be recognized.

The use of the metronome is an interesting point: we hear it as the protagonist speaks his final words, which dare to present a rather optimistic outlook after the successfully negotiated crisis. The metronome is already mentioned at the outset of his monologue (again a separation, here between word and sound!): “In an emergency there are a few things you can count on. The metronome in yourself. On mother’s piano”: the metronome stood on Richter’s mother’s piano, the place where his interest and love for “classical” music was awakened, and this selfsame metronome now becomes, in her son’s consciousness, a symbol in multiple senses: it represents a whole complex of emotions and associations (the mother-son relationship, seminal musical experiences), it represents a kind of exactly timed primeval rhythm (“the metronome in yourself”, remember Richter’s idea of the rhythmical impulse which creates art), it represents that spark of childlike energy which is still present in a person as they grow older, according to Ernst Bloch the light which shines into childhood from another, Utopian, world. Seen through such a symbolic prism, the metronome conjures up more “music” than any conventionally musical stringed or woodwind instrument could, but on the other hand it does not change in any material sense, it continues to click just as it did on mother’s piano, and remains what it is: a technical tool for the musical structuring of time.

According to Richter’s logic, polarity always takes a contrapuntal form. The real-life objects edited in (which have divergent functions in themselves) represent here a modern, contemporary form of counterpoint. At the end of the day the worlds of Busoni and Varèse do find a synthesis, but one in which they are not required to cancel each other out dialectically. Both worlds coexist without being mutually exclusive. Contrapuntal techniques also fulfil their task by upholding the electric tension between opposites.

A comparable polarity to that in the Narcissus dream in Dreams that money can buy is found in the film 8x8, which we already mentioned, the cineastic Chess Sonata in 8 movements. In the last scene of this, i.e. the 8^th “movement” (Title: The fatal move) Paul Bowles more or less plays himself in his role as composer[41] (whereby the music is actually not by Bowles, but by Douglas Townsend). We see a composer trying to write music, how he is lured by a flautist (played by Bowles’ friend the Moroccan Ahmed Ben Driss El Yacoubi[42]) out of a surrealistic room interior (a fully furnished swimming pool: the pieces of furniture emerge from the water) into the world outside, a sort of primeval fairytale forest, and how he, the artist who creates Culture, is “devoured” and smothered there by wild plants, by Nature. The flautist’s Neo-Baroque, classicist melodies are confronted with percussive sounds; “Busoni” already seems here to alternate with “Varèse”, but the polarity Richter is aiming at goes a step further: music which - however different it may be - at least has a certain stylistic level in common, is contrasted with a quite different sound, emanating from a telephone: this rings several times; the composer does not pick it up, even when his hand hovers over the receiver, yet voices can be heard from the handset, apparently trying to communicate with the addressee, to harass him until he cuts through the cable and finally follows the flautist into the forest ….

In the opening credits of the film, this key scene is interpreted as follows: “The telephone which the musician-poet does not want to answer is the demanding world of reality, he refuses to accept… he prefers to listen instead to the soothing flute of his inner voice …”. The visual realization in the film does not necessarily suggest the interpretation of the flute’s sounds as an inner voice, however. The flute, together with the composer getting lost in the forest which rampantly grows all around him, smothering him, both belong to a phantasy world, and the telephone, together with the scraps of sentences which come out of it, are part of a “reality”. This is a phantasy story[43] with doors which open onto everyday reality, but the protagonist does not want to go through them. Here, too, we find this polarity, this counterpoint which can only be fully realized with the help of acoustic means.

A film score which corresponds to Richter’s poetics must therefore realize a radical contrapuntal texture within itself, and not only in relation to the visual realization (there is perhaps an even higher degree of convergence there). The present-day realization of Bach’s contrapuntal techniques has consequently come a long way from classical compositional techniques. The result is not music with coherent stylistic characteristics, and even the idea of stylistic pluralism no longer seems completely accurate. In the end, no composer succeeded in realizing Richter’s ideas without the active collaboration of the filmmaker himself (who confronts the musical art with elements of what we might call sound art), without all the noises, speech sounds etc., which are not merely arbitrary accessoires, but round off the film in its status as (gesamt)kunstwerk. Through this, Richter creates enthralling states of suspense which draw the audience’s attention to the fact that there is music in the first place.

 

***

 

In conclusion, let us go back again to the level of meaning. Contrapuntal technique is not just l’art pour l’art. We already hinted at this in the first section of our essay (“On the idea of the musical film”). Formal constellations - as we said there - do not only exist for their own sake, but are the expression of human relationships. The contrapuntal structure of a fugue, in which contrasting energies are referred to each other in a dynamic antithesis, seems to Richter to be a model and a reflection of life; and this interpretation could now be transferred to filmic art as a standard to aspire to. The demand quoted there is that the artist should aspire to “totality”, in other words: he should realize the synergy (the play of cooperation and opposition) of all forces[44]. In his technique of filmic counterpoint (we have restricted ourselves to the musical relations), Richter is attempting to achieve the maximum possible breadth of suspenseful relations on all sorts of different levels, he is trying to stake out the entire terrain, that of the essential reality of life. At the end of the Narcissus dream in Dreams that money can buy, the protagonist (Richter’s alter ego) comes to the following insight: “And the world went to pieces and the pieces lived on separately. But the farther I came, the more all events lost their isolated meaning. Everything seemed to happen at once and in the same space. […] There is so much ahead of me. So much that I have to find out”. The world shatters into fragments, but the meanings fit together again. The fragments of the world are brought back into a meaningful connection. Something crystallizes out which is a whole and yet at the same time heterogeneous in itself, something which the artist falls back on musical models to represent. Richter’s contribution to mimetic re-orientation in the Twentieth century is quite remarkable.