The significance of Die Schachtel for the development of the multimedia arts regards first of all the score. Evangelisti drew eight horizontal bands on large oblong sheets of paper and labelled theme as follows: music, mimes, mimes’ voice, voice over, tape, general action, lighting, projections. The mu­sical part is the most detailed, while for the others he merely put in sporadic indications. This disparity may reflect the natural prevalence of his own sphere of competence, but it may also denote his intention to allow more liberty for the visual component. Clearly it detracts from the score’s norma­tive status, but it does not invalidate the fact that here the audiovisual event is conceived as a performing unit whose various features are integrated in the temporal dimension. A second significant aspect is that the multiple authorship – a salient feature of the multimedia arts, even if not a necessary condition (Balzola 2004) – was spread out over time. In fact we can identify at least three people who were responsible for the visual dimension: the painter and set designer Nonnis, who first outlined the subject (possibly with the title) and subsequently published a “guide for a production” (Nonnis 1964); the choreographer Tatiana Massine, who prepared the mimes for a short film made in the television studios of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Mu­nich, in May 1968; and Gregory Markopoulos, one of the leading figures of the New American Cinema, who did the shooting and editing (a copy of the film is in the Franco Evangelisti archive in Rome. My warmest thanks to Ir­mela Heimbächer Evangelisti for allowing me to view this source). The context in which this production came about is emblematic for the way in which several art forms overlapped. In the first place it dates from the same period as the recording of Die Schachtel, with the soloists of the Munich Kammeroper conducted by Eberhard Schoener (DGG Avantgarde 2561 106), which made the work known to an international audience. Markopoulos made his film as part of a project which also involved the staging (at the Haus der Kunst) and a film of (A)lter (A)ction by Egisto Macchi (Tortora 1998). In this work, which had a notable success with critics and was broad­cast several times on German television networks, Markopoulos used an editing technique that aimed at achieving a fusion of the spatial and tem­poral dimensions.

Franco Nonnis’s “guide for a production” provides an indication of the audiovisual texture, laying out the components in four columns: “speaking and sound effects”, “mimic action”, “lighting” and “projections”. If on one hand this can be viewed as a precursor of Evangelisti’s multi-layer score, on the other it gives a certain amount of additional information that is invalua­ble for grasping the sense of the visual components. Thus in attempting to put on the work it is advisable for both the conductor and director to consult each of these documents and coordinate the performance choices and ti­mings. From what I have been able to establish (e-mail exchanges with Robert Beavers and telephone conversation with Eberhard Schoener in De­cember 2009) it does not seem that Markopoulos studied these sources. Nonetheless the film’s organization, that can be evinced in spite of the frag­mentary form, does correspond in a significant way to the stages outlined by Nonnis and Evangelisti:

A: Presentation

B: Liberatory reactions
B1: The inter-subject reaction or moment of individual liberty
B2: Neurosis as acceptable way of escape
B3: Lyrical escape
B4: Reaction as response to collective psychology

C: Finale
Glorification of the system
Collapse of the box

Markopoulos’s film is not to be seen as the shooting of a staged production of Die Schachtel, but rather as an autonomous product arising more or less di­rectly out of the project of Nonnis and Evangelisti. As such, it confronts us with an ambiguity: on one hand it is one of the possible realizations of the sce­nic and musical composition, whose general framework is laid down but which remains open to a whole range of solutions for the details; on the other hand it represents a reduction of the potential of the original creation. In fact one sali­ent feature of Die Schachtel is the synchronic configuration of diverse visual events (the mimes’ movements, lighting, projections of photographs and writ­ten words), which is indeed matched by a multiplicity of acoustic phenomena (music, the mimes’ vocal utterances, voice over, a count down from a space station, city noises); to adapt a phrase of Boulez, one might refer to a ‘polyph­ony of polyphonies’. The compression of simultaneous events, which in the theatre can take place all over the scenic space, onto a television screen condi­tions the equilibrium of the audiovisual texture – irrespective of the fact that, given the score’s aleatory characteristics, the construction of the relationships between linearity and stratification is in part assigned to the performers, or more exactly the details emerge during the realization of the performance. In order not to make excessive use of long shots Markopoulos tends to reposition elements which in the score occur simultaneously in a horizontal perspective; in fact the passage from one artistic genre to the other brings about a change in the spatio-temporal relationships. The filmmaker seems to be aware of these limits and tries to get round them by using two techniques he had developed over the previous decade: dense editing and overlaid images. One of the aes­thetic premises for his work is the centrality of the single frame; in fact he pays the same attention to this feature as a composer pays to sound as the primary component of music. This treatment of primary elements can be seen to have a certain affinity with serial composition and, as in the latter, creates the condi­tions for a new conception of form:

I propose a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system. This system involves the use of short film phrases which evoke thought-images. Each film phrase is composed of certain select frames that are similar to the harmonic units found in musical composition. The film phrases establish ulterior relationships among them­selves; in classic montage technique there is a constant reference to the continuing shot: in my abstract system there is a complex of differing frames being repeated (Markopoulos 1971a: 7-8).

Markopoulos was particularly aware of the relationship between image, word and sound, as is seen in his use of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony in Twice a Man (1963), Bartók’s Cantata profana in The Illiac Passion (1964-1967) and Beethoven’s Overture to Fidelio in Sorrows (1969). He saw the lack of a “poetic unity” among the dimensions of audiovisual creativity as the chief reason for the regression of the language of cinema. The principles of discontinuity, parataxis, alliteration and reiteration he adopted in editing the sequences also have to hold good for verbal expression and music. In this way he can arrive at that “lyricism of the independent, silent spaces” (Markopoulos 1971b: 88) evoked by the writings of Arnold Schönberg.

There are elements of contiguity between the film of Die Schachtel and Evangelisti’s artistic credo which, while probably being due to the specific hi­storical moment, are none the less significant for that. I mean the practice of aleatory editing, which evokes the notion of “fields of possibility” (Evangelisti 1991: 28), and the use of the black screen, which may be read as the visual counterpart of silence. Here too we are confronted with a recurrent problem in the cinematic adaptation of music theatre: the establishment of the point of observation (Kühnel 2000). This element takes on a specific importance in Die Schachtel. Like its predecessors Intolleranza 1960 and Collage, the work ex­ploits the whole of the scenic space, i.e. frontality represents a particular moment, subordinated to certain functions. I would argue that the structural transformation that originated in the change of medium does not necessarily imply a departure from the conception of Evangelisti and Nonnis: at least in certain cases it can actually lead to a more appropriate treatment. This appar­ent contradiction vanishes once one recognises in Nonnis and Evangelisti’s project an immanent tendency towards a fully realised multimedia status, a “digital” approach; in such a perspective an electronic version of the work, which facilitates the integration of the different dimensions, would not be in the least out of place. As Philip Auslander has shown with plentiful examples, there is no ontological opposition between live performance and technological reproduction (Auslander 1999).