In order to focus on these convergences and discrepancies I am going to concentrate on the scene of the “car race”, one of the key moments in Die Schachtel in terms of both form and contents. The participation of the mimes in a competition which is apparently devoid of rules or any ultimate goal is one of the allegories that Evangelisti and Nonnis employ to represent a society in which the triumph of the exchange value increases the psychological isolation of its members and their sense of alienation. The scene in question is desig­nated IIA in Nonnis’s ‘guide’ and B1 in the score, which gives the additional indication “structure 3”. The latter refers to one of the types of musical style which Evangelisti had perfected in Random or not random, a composition for orchestra whose techniques are copiously adopted in Die Schachtel. “Structure 3” consists of 17 bars in 4/16 whose performing speed is not specified and which can be separated from each other by moments of silence. Thus here freedom of interpretation regards the temporal dimension: the tempo of the individual bars and the insertion and duration of silences. This type of compo­sition is well suited to audiovisual dramaturgy: the music is associated with a precarious situation, the excess of stimuli and neurotic states. We have to keep in mind that B1 features two other acoustic strata: a tape with traffic noises that plays throughout the scene and a voice over declaiming a “Speech on per­sonality” comprising brief utterances and slogans. The sense of this ‘speech’ can be interpreted in various ways; one immediate association is with George Or­well’s ‘Big Brother’ in 1984, which enjoyed considerable popularity during the protest movements in and around 1968. In the annotations to the score con­served in the archive of the Internationales Musikinstitut in Darmstadt, fragments of this speech are inserted into the zones of silence between bars. Whereas Markopoulos opted for a solution which is more economic but no less effective in terms of dramatic dynamics: essential fragments of the speech were communicated either by the voice over or as written text on a black back­ground or superimposed on the images.

Markopoulos adopted expedients that are not unusual in staging works of music theatre. He created a dramaturgy of images which, while being coherent with the approach of Evangelisti and Nonnis, has the properties of an autono­mous performing project. However, since this is a film rather than a production for theatre, the expedients take on a different connotation; they can be seen as components of an audiovisual structuring which considers the indications of the ‘guide’ and score as mere suggestions rather than objectives to be achieved. The situation at the beginning of Die Schachtel is described in the score in the following words: “Society as undifferentiated auditorium, the placid certainty of one’s own seat, standard stimuli, common reactions all equally controlled”. The ‘guide’ indicates two modalities for evoking the si­tuation: slides of a crowded auditorium projected onto the stage centre and wings, with the aim of mirroring the audio-spectators in the work itself; sud­den beams of light cast on the mimes who are seated, immobile, in the ‘chassis-box’ placed frontally on the stage. Evangelisti separated the two visual strata, collocating the former in “structure 2” which involves only the use of visual material (crowded auditorium, pages of a newspaper, advertisements, written text). Whereas Markopoulos chose to gradually visualise the mimes by means of frames which alternate or superimpose shots of the musicians in the act of playing and words on a black background: “Masse”, “kontrolliert”, “Reaktion”, “genormt” [mass, controlled, reaction, normalised]. The gradual revelation of the mimes in the box – the work’s fundamental ‘situation’ – thus takes on a precise semantic profile thanks to the insertion of words which are taken from the title of the scene or are associated with it. In addition the filmmaker anticipates the theme of the car race by repeatedly inserting frames of two mimes filmed in the act of driving (3’ 33” - 4’ 07” in correspondence with bars 13-15 of “structure 1”). At this stage such a modality is still neutral, and in a certain way extraneous to the context, devoid of any sense of dramatic direction. Its meaning becomes clearer at the beginning of “structure 3” (5’ 20”) through the combination of the gestures of the mimes, traffic noises and the phrase enounced by the voice over, “Grosse Revolution durch das Auto­mobil! [The automobile has brought about a revolution]”. We can note that Markopoulos maintained the idea of “structure 2” merely with images, collo­cating it at the end of a process in which the gap in the sound due to the pauses is systematically ‘filled up’ by the images; a complementary procedure is de­ployed in those moments in which he shifts the audio-spectators’ attention to the music, denying a visual dimension by means of a black screen.

In scene B1 the semiotic process becomes more dense and acquires a speci­fic direction. The voice over takes on the function of a television presenter, and at the same time that of a commentator in a Brechtian didactic drama. The ex­clamation “Grosse Revolution durch das Automobil!” is heard in a silence, just before the instrumental sounds of “structure 3” begin, together with the tape of the traffic noises. Synchronized with the start of the music, the mimes, lined up in the chassis and viewed front on, begin to perform driving gestures (accelera­tions, braking, gear changes, swerving). By means of the words spoken by the voice over and those written up on a black screen or superimposed, Markopou­los orients the semantic plane towards the theme of revolution. It is an indisputable fact that the spread of the motor car has represented a revolution in people’s habits and social relations; nonetheless in Die Schachtel the declaration is shrouded in an aura of falsity since it is inserted into a socio-political context in which freedom of movement and increased activity entail a stripping out of the existential contents, a standardization of behaviour and a stronger subjec­tion towards the power structures. To the director the automobile ‘revolution’ appears as the surrogate, if not indeed a mockery, of a revolution in social inter-relations which has not taken place, and indeed appears rather remote. In correspondence with the sharpening of the semantic perspective, the time re­quired to bring into focus the principal visual stratum (the mimes seen driving) increases and, in spite of the interpolation of elements of the other three groups of images (musicians playing, words written up and photographs), the repre­sentational technique becomes more linear and narrational.