Pierrot Lunaire; Dichterliebe.

* Schafer; Ensemble Intercontemporain, Boulez (Pierrot). Osterkorn, piano (Dichterliebe). Arthaus Musik DVD 100331, 126 mins. (dist. Naxos)

Two postmodernist films by Oliver Herrmann, starring Christine Schafer, and a lengthy interview with the soprano present her as a fascinating singing actress and a no-nonsense artist. The absurdist nightmare of Schoenberg's 1912 Pierrot Lunaire inspires the first film, One Night. One Life. Herrmann provides a parallel visual experience to the ironic, grotesque verses by Albert Giraud, as translated by Otto Erich Hartleben.

Schafer is Pierrot, clad in black sweat-shirt and bell-bottoms, eyes smeared with clown makeup, clip-clopping down deserted, steamy corridors. He discovers, for each of the twenty-one songs, bizarre rooms and situations--a cockroach-infested bathroom, a meat locker with humans hung up next to sides of beef, a senior prom--unfolding with the nonsense-logic of a dream. The visual line is often as clean and forceful as the musical, especially in the videogame look of New York City at night, with skyscrapers, neon and lighted windows offering tempting scenes of strangers' lives. In the texts, Pierrot often stands outside himself, observing, doppelganger-like, and Herrmann provides visual representations, such as Schafer fascinated while watching herself mouthing the words on Times Square Trinitrons (pictured below). The bizarre, disconnected images of dream life exert their own fascination, especially in the falling scene of "Heimfahrt," occasionally demoting the excellent soundtrack (with Pierre Boulez and members of his Ensemble Intercontemporain) to mere background noise.

Schafer delivers ...