Gould versus Rosen

About three weeks ago as of this writing, I learned, via a Google search to see what he had been up to lately, of the death of Charles Rosen some four months earlier, on December 8 of last year.  The fact that I had to wait so long to hear such news, and had to come upon them in such a fashion—that I did not have them bumptiously thrust into my ears after the manner of, say, the news of the death of that guy from the Beastie Boys (which I recall forming the immediate post-jingle contents of a certain 2010 or 2011 afternoon’s All Things Considered)—constitutes the principal impetus of the present essay.  Whether that fact has a right to constitute that impetus is, to say the least, debatable.  For I certainly cannot aver in good faith that the news of the death of Glenn Gould were bumptiously thrust into my ears at any point at all, and certainly not on Gould’s death date of October 4, 1982.  No: I learned of Gould’s death at the earliest in spring of 1983, with the arrival in my family’s mailbox of that year’s Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia yearbook, in whose obituary section it (the death) was announced.  Before that day I had never heard of Glenn Gould (or, let it be said, Charles Rosen), although I most certainly had heard of the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, and even Gould’s (and Rosen’s) fellow pianist-cum-near exact contemporary, Gary Graffman.  I apologize for all the name-dropping, and for starting off on such a flamboyantly autobiographical note, which are both really just by way of by way of calibrating the scales as precisely as possible in advance, of taking as little as possible for granted vis-à-vis the duo or diptych upon which I am about to expound.  You see, DGR, when all is dead and son, at the day of the end, when the downs are chips, when shove is come at by push, fame is a front-bottomishly difficult quality to gauge or maysure.   Yes, as I learned some years ago via You-Tube, Glenn Gould’s death may have made nationwide television news on October 4, 1982, but the nation whose width was and is in question was (and is) Canada, a country of (then) no more than twenty million souls; one imagines that the death of any Canadian musician of any international stature would have secured him or her such a posthumous mention.  And while one assumes Glenn Gould’s recording sales figures handily outstripped Charles Rosen’s, one likewise assumes that the Beastie Boys’ sales figures were something in the neighborhood of Gould’s to the power of Rosen’s.  Such that to assert as I would like to do, and to devote several thousand words in defense of such an assertion, that Rosen deserves to be regarded in the same light as Gould, that the amount and kind of attention devoted to him looks like outright neglect when juxtaposed with the amount and kind of attention devoted to Gould, cannot but in the so-called grand scheme of things smack of petulance (or, perhaps, given that the person whose reputation I would thus boost is deceased and neither a friend nor a relation, something much more perverse and less laudable than petulance).

In a way I now find myself in the much the same sort of anomalous position I found myself in four years ago when trying to drum up enthusiasm for Haydn on the back of a complaint about the to-my-mind excessive praise lavished on Mozart, with the difference that I admire the lavishee every bit as much as I do the neglectee.  (“Still on that old Mozart-bashing kick of yours, eh?  How very Gouldian of you.”  Indeed, but more on that in its proper place.)  But in a way my position is very different, because whereas in taking up the cudgels in defense of Papa Haitch I was aligning myself with an established (albeit minority) faction, in that Haydn and Mozart had (and have) always gone together like peanut butter and jelly or Abbot and Costello, such that no matter how little you admired one of them, you could not say word one about the other without mentioning him (if only and as if, indeed, by way of scraping a P&J sandwich clean of the offending half of the filling, or splicing all the Abbotian or Costellan bits out of A&C Meet Frankenstein); whereas Rosen and Gould have never been mentioned together in any of the scores if not hundreds of essays I have read on one or the other of them.  To be sure, it would surprise me very much if I turned out to be the only person who had ever thought it worthwhile to juxtapose Gould and Rosen, but it would surprise me even more if I suddenly discovered a massive trove of Plutarchian literature on Gould versus Rosen dating back to the early 1950s.  So perhaps what is really peeving me and impelling me to write is not so much that Charles Rosen’s death was not covered by the meejia in a fashion that I could not manage to overlook as that this death did not release the torrent of comparisons to Gould that I had always regarded as Rosen’s due but whose absence I had always (at least so it now seems) attributed to the sort of reticence that keeps (or should keep) a municipality from renaming a street or a building after its most illustrious athlete before his retirement.  According to that NPR TV critic with an Italian last name whose proper spelling I cannot be bothered to look up, Patrick Stewart, one of the half-dozen greatest male interpreters of Shakespeare since Olivier, is resigned to being called “second captain of the Enterprise” in the headlines of all his obituaries.  Whether Charles Rosen, one of the half-dozen greatest male North American pianists since the invention of the Hammerklavier, was while alive resigned to being hailed with parallel necrological monotony as “the author of The Classical Style,” I do not know.  But if he wasn’t—well, SITS, at least one coffin in a certain presumptively Manhattanite presumptively (orthodox?) Jewish cemetery will be stuck in spin cycle for some time to come.  Immediate posterity has seen fit to remember Rosen first and foremost as a writer and a scholar, and more specifically as a writer about and scholar of the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.  But is that such a bad thing?  Did I not myself first encounter Rosen as a scholar, and, indeed, as the author of that selfsame obituary-superscribing book?  Ought I not, as a man of the pen, to consider scholar or writer a nobler honorific than pianist, a designation that by default seems to designate a verbally illiterate Musikant, a figure whose self-absorbed intellectual incuriosity is second in proverbiality only to that of the OED-enshrined (or, rather, -stigmatized) prima donna?  Would Glenn Gould himself not perhaps have given this or that unmentionable organ to have been memorialized principally as the mere author of Arnold Schoenberg: A Perspective rather than as “a brilliant but wildly eccentric pianist”?  Well, perhaps.  But in a way, these demurrals simply add fuel to my (f)ire, the actual site and nature of which I am only now beginning to descry.  I think my main beef with the as-yet-slender dossier of Rosen career retrospectives considered in juxtaposition with their by-now voluminous Gouldian counterparts, is that by default they have allowed a handful of trivial biographical divergences to continue to trump a far greater number of biographical convergences, and thereby to continue to obscure and in fact completely obliterate all recognition of these two men’s shared and perhaps singular (“singular”=“unique” in churlspeak, by the way) achievement.  It is difficult to specify this achievement without immediately conjuring up a string of names apparently falsifying its singularity, but here goes: both Gould and Rosen managed to impart to non-musicians an understanding of music from the point of view of a performer-cum-listener of penetrating technical insight who was also a man of the world—a musician whose insight was no less penetratively actuated by history, literature, philosophy, cinema, geography, pure unfettered flaneurie, and gosh knows what else; an understanding that was accordingly from soup to nuts impervious to all charges of being prey to such boffinish-cum-monkish vices as “sterility,” “aridity,” and “hermeticism.”  “But what about Leonard Bernstein?” you ask, conveniently sparing me a great deal of work by adducing as your first counterexample the counterexample that subsumes and excels all other counterexamples.  Well, in the first place (I answer), Leonard Bernstein, although trained as a pianist, practiced mainly as a conductor; accordingly, his favored medium of impartment was the moving audio-visual image, and his favorite way of illustrating a point with a musical example was to lower his baton and thereby set the butcher’s eight-dozen or so instrumentalists of the New York Philharmonic playing a butcher’s two-dozen or so un-scaled-down measures from the symphonic repertoire.  Consequently, he seldom gave one a sense of music as something that needed to be perceived first albeit not foremost visually, as notes on paper, or that needed to be played in the most direct, tactile, so-called hands-on sense.  Both Gould and Rosen, by contrast, were by calling and lifelong practice (Gould’s single late-life foray into conducting notwithstanding) pianists—masters and intimates of an instrument via which most of the elements of music, and, indeed, most music tout court, could be intelligibly presented from all points of view, hearing, and touch.  Accordingly, they had no need of videos to get their so-called messages across; indeed, for this purpose they did not even really need audio recordings.  For being prejudiced as they were towards the literature written or transcribed for their own instrument, when they needed to illustrate a point with an example they could simply quote—in print—a few Photostated measures of a piano score, confident that a substantial proportion of their readers would be able to bash out the quoted measures however clumsily on some sort of well-tempered (if not necessarily well-tuned) keyboard instrument. 

In the second place (I continue), Bernstein mainly viewed his public extra-official role as that of a teacher in the narrowest and humblest sense of the word: he thought he should be devoting the bulk of his public extra-official energies to bringing the good word about great music to the same demographic as was serviced by the Pre K-to-Grade 5  schoolmarm—viz. prepubescent children; accordingly he spent an awful lot of time explaining the very basics of music in very basic terms.  Now don’t get me wrong, DGR: I have no wish to impugn or call into question the worthwhileness of old LB’s pedagogic mission, to which I certainly owe a good chunk of my own germinative enthusiasm for so-called classical or serious music; indeed, I have no wish even to aver that a semi-saber toothed oldster steeped for three decades or more in the classical repertoire and the secondary literature thereon has little to learn from LB the male schoolmarm—for indeed, not more than six months ago, I picked up from one of LB’s Young People’s Concerts a definition of so-called classical or serious music that superseded and put paid to every other such definition I had ever heard: “Classical music,” LB intoned, to a fifteen-hundred strong Carnegie Hall-swelling mob of restless, nose-picking, seat-watering tots, in that inimitable baritone of his (richly burnished and popcorn-stucco’d by a 500-a day [insert most carcinogenic brand and make of 1950s cigarette here] habit), “in contrast to jazz, pop, and folk, is music that has to be played exactly as it is written.”  But to reach this epiphanic formula I had to sit through many an hour of instruction that I had effectively already sat through in my own tot-dom, couched in a showroom stock of allusions and anecdotage better attuned to my parents’ childhood selves than to my own.     

A Translation of Die Serapionsbrüder by E. T. A. Hoffmann

The Serapion Brothers

Volume I

Preface

This book and its present form were occasioned by the publisher’s invitation to the author to gather together all his tales and novellas—hitherto dispersed among numerous newspapers and pocket-books—and present them anew in a single collection on the grounds that they shared a single factual origin in a certain Serapion-Day reunion of a handful of bosom friends thitherto separated by a long stretch of time and united in their liking for his fictions.  The aforementioned form will inevitably recall that of Ludwig Tieck’s Phantasus. –But how drastically the author stands to lose from any comparison of the two works!  Quite apart from the fact that he would hardly dare to dream of juxtaposing that consummate master’s soul-embracing fictions with his own, the dialogues with which the Phantasus is interwoven are composed of incredibly profound and penetrating observations on art and literature; whereas here the convivial conversations that tie the various fictions together are intended to present a candid image of a gathering of kindred spirits sharing with each other the creations of their minds and frankly expressing their opinions of them.  Only the conditions afforded by such a merry, unfettered conversation, a conversation in which one word quite genuinely does lead to another, can serve as the measuring stick here.    Moreover, the membership of my society is signally devoid of those lovely women who in the Phantasus are so expert at setting in motion a kaleidoscopic play of charming colors.  And so the author ardently beseeches the reader of acute sensibility not to entertain that invidious comparison that is so detrimental to him, but rather to accept good-naturedly and without further exactions that which is unexactingly proffered to him in a spirit of good-natured sincerity.

Part One

“Try as hard as one might, there is no denying or dismissing the bitter conviction that what used to be can never return—never.  Vain are all efforts to take a stand against the inexorable force of time, which marches ever-implacably forward, consigning everything in its path to eternal destruction.  Of our past life, now submerged in deepest night, nothing remains behind but its tenebrous afterimages, which wanton within our souls and habitually fleer and gibe at us like ghosts in a nightmare.  And yet—fools that we are!—we continue to harbor the delusion that someday we shall discover these phantoms that have become part and parcel of our mind—of our very ego—in the external world, flourishing with all the imperishable freshness of youth.  Lost for ever to us are such figures as the mistress whose heart we unconscionably forsake, the friend with whom we are senselessly compelled to sever all ties—figures who when we see them next after an absence of perhaps years or even decades will no longer be what they once were, and who in their turn will of course be disappointed to find us equally changed!”

Thus spoke Lothar as he vehemently leapt from his chair, strode directly to the very threshold of the fireplace, crossed his arms over his chest, and gazed with a gloomy mien into the merrily crackling flames.

“My dear friend Lothar,” Theodor now began, “my dear friend Lothar, you must at least concede that you are a living case in counterproof of your own postulate—for it has been a full twelve years since I last saw you, and you retain every painful degree of your dozen-year-old bent for recklessly succumbing to the sulks on the most trivial pretexts.  It is true—and all the rest of us, Ottmar, Cyprian, and I, feel this every bit as keenly as you do--that this our first gathering after a long separation has so far not proved nearly as gratifying as we may have flattered ourselves that it would be.  Blame it on me for having run the length and breadth of each and every one of this town’s endless number of streets tracking you down, for having refused to stop running until I had committed each and every one of you to appearing here at my fireside this evening.  Perhaps it would have been wiser of me to let fortune determine the circumstances of our reunion, but in my worst imaginings I would never have dreamt that we who for so many years had lived united to one another by heartfelt affection, by a single noble passion for achievement in the arts and sciences, we whom only the savage hurricane of political strife that rages relentlessly through these disaster-ridden times of ours could ever have flung asunder; I would never have dreamt, I say, that we would have been capable of spending even a single day anchored in the same port without once regarding one another in the flesh as sympathetically as we always had done in spirit.  And yet in the mere handful of hours we have been sitting here together we have been tormenting each other with all the murderous enthusiasm of our friendship’s salad days.  And up to this point not one of us has brought up anything remotely intelligent for discussion; rather, all the while we have all been retailing nothing but the most astonishing quantities of tiresome, tedious bilge.  And what else may we conclude from all this, but that we are all children in the very truest and worst sense, that we really are so credulous as to believe that we can simply take up the melody where we left off singing it twelve years ago?  Perhaps we really are now expecting Lothar again to read us Tieck’s ‘Zerbino’ for the first time, and rack our frames with paroxysms of jubilantly exuberant merriment.  Or perhaps we assume that Cyrprian has brought along with him some manner of fantastic poem, or even the complete draft of some over-the-top opera libretto, which you will oblige me to set to music on the spot, and then I shall have to pound out the entire newly composed opus on the same knackered old piano I made use of twelve years ago, and thereby goad the poor, world-weary instrument into producing precisely the same sequence of cacophonous pings and dings I elicited from it then.  Or we are hoping that Ottmar will tell us of some rarity of a fine wine, of an eldritch hare’s foot, and set us all aflame and ablaze with eagerness to strike all manner of outrageous bets to partake of the wine and the hare’s foot at one go.  And because none of this has happened, we have all been stealing scowls at one another, and thinking of each of the others in turn, ‘Hey, why is the old fellow so different from heart to skin?  I never would have thought that he of all people could change so much!’  And to be sure, none of us is the same as he used to be!  That we have aged twelve years, that each of these years has deposited on us yet another layer of the earth that is weighing us ever farther downward of the ethereal region and ever closer to our final resting place inside the earth—neither of these will I deny.  But who among us has meanwhile avoided being swept into the savage whirlwind of our age, which hurries us along willy-nilly from one event—nay one crime—to the next?  Could all the horrors, the terrors, the atrocities of our time conceivably pass over us without forcibly taking hold of us and leaving their bloody traces deeply engraved in our innermost selves?  It is these horrors that have deprived our earlier memories of their original brilliance of color, and in vain will we ever strive to restore that brilliance to them!   Even so, it is still quite possible that though the corruption of our eyesight by stronger light has appreciably dimmed the dazzling luster of many of the things in the world and indeed in ourselves that we found so noble and majestic back then, the original, basic cast of thought that begot our mutual love has survived all these changes unaltered and undiminished.  What I am trying to say is that each of us still truly believes that each of the others is a person of considerable merit, and a person worthy of genuine, intimate friendship.  Therefore, let us forget about the old days and their expectations of us and, using the aforementioned cast of mind as our starting point, make a sincere attempt at renewing the charter of our friendship as if drawing it up afresh.”

“Thank heaven,” said Ottmar, interrupting his friend, “thank heaven that Lothar got fed up with our silly and muddle-headed arguing, and that you, Theodor, have nabbed the spiteful little devil who has been pestering and torturing us all this time.  I was on the point of suffocating from all that tiresome compulsive merrymaking, and beginning to grow fearfully cross even with myself, when Lothar flew off the handle.  But now that Theodor has bluntly indicated the cause of this outburst, I feel that I have been drawn even closer to all of you, and as if the old chumminess of our former reunions were banishing all fruitless doubts and striving to regain the upper hand.  Theodor is right: although time may well have wrought many transformations, at bottom our belief in one another has stood firm.   And I hereby declare the preliminaries of our new charter most solemnly concluded, and peremptorily decree that from now on, on a given day of each week we shall attempt to reconvene, for otherwise we shall disperse hither and thither into various precincts of this great city, and in our centrifugally increasing isolation from one another be more miserable than ever before."

“A splendid idea!” cried Lothar, “but dear Ottmar, you really must immediately add to the charter certain statutes that we shall be required to conform to at our weekly-scheduled gatherings--for example, a statute allowing or forbidding us to talk about such and such a thing, or compelling us to say three witty things apiece, or enjoining us to do our absolute level best to eat anchovy salad every time.  By this means we shall preemptively banish from our society that awful philistinism that sprouts and blooms by default in your common garden-variety club.   Can you really not see, Ottmar, that every fixed stipulation regarding our meetings will immediately impart to them an onerous spirit of compulsoriness, which will certainly spoil my fun if nobody else’s?  I beg you only to recall the deep antipathy we used to harbor against every entity with even the faintest aspirations to styling itself a club, a network, or any other name befitting one of those preposterous exercises in systematically administered tedium and superfluity; and now you yourself are attempting to confine within the narrow bounds of that maleficent genre the wondrous four-leaf clover that can germinate only naturally, absent the gardener’s constrictive attentions!"

“Our friend Lothar,” began Theodor, “can be rather slow to shake himself free of a bad mood; indeed, we all know well enough that he sees ill humors as dreadful phantoms with which he is locked in a valiant and tumultuous struggle to the death…of his patience, after which even he is obliged to acknowledge that they were after only phantoms conjured up by his own beloved ego.  Nothing but this quirk of yours, Lothar, can account for the fact that Ottmar’s harmless and even eminently reasonable proposal has immediately caused you to think of clubs and networks, and to regard everything necessarily connected to it as a species of philistinism.  But talking of this has suddenly put me in mind of a scene from our earlier life together.  Do you not recall the first time we first left the capital and moved to the tiny burglet of P***?  Decorum and propriety required that we should allow ourselves to be admitted to the club comprised by the so-called notables of the town.  Via a scroll solemnly filled with the most punctiliously composed commercialese, we received the news that we had been accepted as members of the club by an overwhelming preponderance of voices; and beside this scroll lay a neatly bound and fifteen-to-twenty bow-festooned book containing the club’s statutes.  These statutes had been drawn up by an old town councilor quite in the manner of the Prussian law code, with divisions into titles and paragraphs.   They were the most hilarious things ever put in writing.   One title bore the superscription 'Of Women and Children, and the Powers and Privileges Thereof,' under which nothing less trivial was sanctioned than the members’ wives’ right to drink tea every Thursday and Sunday in the dining room of the club’s host tavern, and even to hold some four or six dances there every winter.  On the subject of children the regulations were more complicated and more critical; here the jurist handled his material with uncommon sagacity and had meticulously discriminated among persons in their minority, persons in their majority, and persons in patria potestate.  The minors were very prettily subdivided according to their moral constitutions into well-bred and ill-bred children, and those in the second category were categorically forbidden admittance to the club for being anathemic to its fundamental principle: first and foremost the club was to be an association exclusively composed of well-bred persons.   This section was immediately followed by the remarkable title on dogs, cats, and other creatures lacking the faculty of reason."

Translation ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

A Translation of Der Italiener, a Screenplay by Thomas Bernhard

The Italian * A Film

THE LAND-SURVEYOR, fat, fifty, in a Hubertuscoat, stands completely motionless, as land-surveyors always do when looking through a scope,  while he gazes up at and observes the progress of the Wolfsegg-bound hearse, the hearse that with ever increasing speed is traveling through woodlands, open countryside, woodlands, open countryside, then woodlands again, then open countryside again, suddenly at a distance of two-hundred meters from the hearse the land-surveyor’s telescope focuses on the two UNDERTAKERS (driver, passenger), their profiles, the backs of their heads, cut to the stretch of road in front of the hearse, with the camera on the land-surveyor at a distance of two-hundred meters, then cut back to the point-of-view of the land-surveyor watching the hearse snake up the winding road, only ambient natural sound up to this point, as in general throughout this film, only ambient natural sound, derived from nature, unless some other kind is expressly specified, otherwise nothing.  The hearse reaches the village square, camera on the statueof the Virgin Mary opposite the warmemorial, [the hearse] enters the square, turns on to the side leading to the castle, and parks in front of the bakery.  The passenger gets out and goes into the bakery.  Shot of the driver as he sleepily yawns and gazes at the patch of street visible through the windshield.  The driver emerges from the bakery with a large loaf of brown bread and gets into the hearse, the car door is slammed shut with conspicuous force and therefore with conspicuous loudness.  The hearse heads towards the Fairview Inn[1], just in front of the inn it turns on to the road leading to the castle, the camera [is] now stationed at the top of the gate of the castle grounds, the hearse approaches the camera, heading upwards at a steady clip, the hearse enters the castle grounds, proceeds to the front door of the castle.  The passenger gets out and rings the doorbell.[2]    The driver gets out.  The driver and the passenger are both wearing calf-length black coats, black visor caps with no insignias but with braided silver piping.  The passenger and the driver in turn glance up at the windows.  The driver pulls a soft cloth out of his valise and polishes his shoes.  Both men glance up at the windows.  Nothing.  The passenger rings a second time.  Now the passenger opens the rear door of the car, both flaps of the door, as wide as they can open.  A gunshot is fired at the rear of the house, as if by way of putting to flight a flock of birds perched there, the undertakers react.  The driver glances at his shoes while the passenger glances up at the windows.  Now the door of the castle opens.  In the gloom of the doorway nothing is visible.  The undertakers lift [several] enormous paper pillows out of the hearse, they make three trips with these pillows to the doorway and hand the rolls over and then make two trips with tall stacks of funereal linen and hand over the stacks without the viewer’s seeing who is relieving them of the funereal linen-stacks.   The two of them then station themselves in front of the doorway and remove their caps and remain motionlessly standing for a moment until the door is shut from within, [then] they get into the hearse  and drive first slowly, then increasingly faster past the greenhouse through the gate of the grounds; from the center of the grounds and starting [when the hearse is level with] the greenhouse the land-surveyor suddenly begins tracking the hearse with his telescope for four or five seconds, after four or five seconds it is clear that the land-surveyor can no longer see the hearse, although he [continues] tracking it through his telescope.  Shot[,] from the land-surveyor’s point of view[,] of the surface of the grounds [and beyond them] the full front of the castle.  The front door [and] all [the] windows are shut.  Reverse shot from the front of the castle looking down on to the surface of the grounds.  Now from above, from the entrance to the grounds, the completely empty area just in front of the Fairview Inn is shown out of focus.  Gradually the area in front of the inn comes more into focus.  There may be some sounds characteristic of this time of day (8 AM), [but] one pretty much hears nothing.  The camera remains fixed on the area in front of the inn for ten or fifteen seconds, but beginning at the eighth second one hears the sound of a stuck steam locomotive near Manning[3].  The sound intensifies, the wheels of the locomotive are spinning [in place], et cetera.  The square in front of the inn recedes, slips back out of focus, becomes indistinct, the sound of the locomotive becomes indistinct, the locomotive’s whistle sounding from a much greater distance than its [other] noises previously [did].  Now from the left of the area in front of the inn enter two ALTAR BOYS.  Altar Boy No. 1, fat, short, aged eleven, Altar Boy No. 2, thin, tall, aged twelve, in black, ankle-length church-gowns, bareheaded, as one can now see, [they] are hurrying uphill along the road leading to the castle, each of them is lugging a baroque wooden candlestick from the [village] church, the candlesticks are as tall as Altar Boy No. 2, [and] heavy.  Abreast, but keeping their distance from each other, they lug the candlesticks up the hill, their  persistent attempt[s] to carry on a conversation being preempted by the strain of hurrying along with the candlesticks.  Suddenly they realize that it is impossible for them to converse with each other, and they continue up the road in silence.  When they have covered exactly half the distance to their destination, there is another gunshot, the altar boys take fright, look up while putting down the candlesticks.  Again: it is as if a flock of birds has been put to flight behind the castle.  The take registering the altar boys’ fright, hence the interval between the gunshot and the moment when the altar boys continue on their way with the candles, lasts eight to ten seconds.  Now the altar boys are walking very quickly, now one all of a sudden hears the sounds attending their upward progress with especial distinctness, soon nothing but these sounds can be heard, so that it becomes clear that the altar boys are on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion.  Now one notices: Altar Boy No. 2’s hair is blond, Altar Boy No. 1’s, black.  Mouths wide open.  The sound of the stuck locomotive in the distance.  As the altar boys approach the castle, the camera is stationed at the gate of the castle grounds, filming them from behind, three blasts of the locomotive’s whistle.  In the final stretch the two altar boys run up to the front door as quickly as possible.  They put down the candlesticks without letting go of them.  Altar Boy No. 2 rings the doorbell.   Both boys glance up at the windows, then at their shoes, then again up at the windows, then again at their shoes, then again up at the windows, then suddenly, as if another shot has been fired, [they glance] up and to the right, above the woods, but no shot, none whatsoever, has been fired, while the two of them behave as though another shot has been fired.  Their reaction to the non-fired shot is the same as their reaction to the shot that actually was fired previously.  Altar Boy No. 1 gives a tug to the gown of Altar Boy No. 2 as if trying to smooth the wrinkles in the taller boy’s gown.  Whistle-blasts from the locomotive.  Release of steam from the locomotive.  The altar boys [behave] as though they were cold, as though they felt chilly.  Altar Boy No. 2 tries to pull a handkerchief out of [the breast pocket of] the suit he is wearing under the gown and fails to do so.  Meanwhile they both glance up at the windows.  For the skinny boy’s benefit, Altar Boy No. 1 produces the handkerchief from the suit he is wearing under his gown, gives [the handkerchief] to him, Altar Boy No. 2 blows his nose.  Both of them glance up at the windows.  Altar Boy No. 2 re-pockets the handkerchief.[4]  Both of them look up at the windows.  Now once again Altar Boy No. 2 rings the doorbell, several times this time, quite violently.  Then both of them glance at their shoes again.  Then, as if something has happened there, at the gate of the grounds.  Both of them are growing uneasy.  Now the door opens.  They hand over the candlesticks, as during the [delivery of] the funereal linen, nobody [inside] is visible.  The door is closed and bolted from within.  By the time the door is closing, the altar boys have assumed the same stiff, erect, military posture as that of the undertakers [earlier].  The altar boys are still holding this posture when from inside the castle one hears a burst of loud, hysterical laughter from the SISTER of the late master [of the estate].  No sooner has the laughter erupted than the altar boys are walking away from the door, after about four or five steps they are running away from it, in a right-to-left direction, through the gate of the grounds, all the while the sister’s laughter remains audible.  One sees the altar boys running through the gate of the grounds, then a bit farther, perhaps a third of the way to the Fairview Inn down the road.  Shot of the door.  Of the front of the castle.  The upper-left window of the second storey is opened.  Four seconds after the window opens, as if behind the window, hence in the ITALIAN’s room, several china dishes fall to the floor.  Three seconds later: the beginning of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1, from a record-player sitting on the floor of the room.  Again the front door [of the castle].  The door is opened from within, the sister is standing in the doorway, she appears to be under the influence of the sudden [burst of] music from the window overhead, she loathes this music and, as becomes evident at this moment, she loathes the ITALIAN, who she knows has listened to no other music in years, has for years been playing to himself [records of] the Bartók string quartets one after the other and endlessly and who for all twenty-four hours that he has been in the house has incessantly been playing [these quartets] on the record-player that he brought with him from Florence.  For several seconds the sister stands fully erect, motionless, in the doorway, then she retreats back into the gloom of the doorway and reemerges with one of the candlesticks.  She places the candlestick against the wall next to the door and goes back inside and brings out the second candlestick and places it next to the first candlestick; glances up at the Italian’s window, picks up a candlestick, sets it back down, she has just found herself thinking I must lock the door and she locks the door after producing a large bunch of keys from her coarsely knitted black cardigan.  Glances up again at the Italian’s window, re-pockets the keys and grabs both candlesticks and carries the candlesticks to the greenhouse.  While she is en route to the greenhouse, the music emanating from the Italian’s window grows louder, very loud, suddenly stops when the sister reaches the greenhouse.  From the village church the altar boys emerge with a black CANOPY[5] and proceed along the street.  We are shown the BAKER lowering the right blind[6] of his shop, which action produces a [tremendous] racket that frightens the altar boys as they pass by, they begin running with the canopy, but no sooner have they run ten or fifteen paces, than through the doorway of the butcher’s shop they glimpse a cow collapsing under the impact of a gunshot administered by the slaughtering apparatus. We are shown the c0llapse of the cow, the appalled, transfixed altar boys gazing at the slumped cow, the CANOPY, which they are holding on tightly to, sinks to the ground, they lift the CANOPY back up, the BUTCHER notices the altar boys, who, more and more appalled, are fascinated by the collapsed cow, the fabric of the CANOPY is lying in the street, the altar boys lift the CANOPY without taking their eyes off the cow, the butcher immediately proceeds to dismember the cow, first he fastens it to the chain by which he hoists the carcass against the wall, one sees him hoist the cow on zinc hooks higher and higher against the wall, now, as he cuts the cow open from top to bottom, its innards gush out, the altar boys hold on more tightly to the [support] poles of the canopy, the intestines burst apart, everything [happens] very quickly, one is not merely aware of the possibility of [doing such a thing], one now sees [that] in a brief half-hour a cow can be killed and hung up and taken to pieces and prepared, [that] we are watching a butcher of great expertise [at work], even though the altar boys see this every day on their way to school, they are now fascinated anew by the butcher’s technique, they are captivated by his skill.  The camera alternates between showing the interior of the butcher’s shop and showing the altar boys peering into the butcher’s shop.  Now from the background area of the butcher’s shop emerges the BUTCHER’S HELPER, who sets down [on the floor] a vat for the collection of innards, then kicks the vat over to the butcher’s feet.  Now the helper notices the altar boys and exclaims, Gitthehaillawnouttahere, [7] while the butcher takes no notice of the altar boys.  Once again the helper cries, Gitthehaillawnouttahere!, whereupon the altar boys (filmed from within the shop) run away.  Now we are shown the windows of several houses in the village, and behind the windows villagers watching the altar boys running with the CANOPY, after ten or twelve windows with their appertaining faces have been shown, [there is a view] from above, [and moving] left to right, of the front of the old people’s home, first one window after another, behind which one cannot make out any faces, even though of course there are faces behind them, then, in a repeat take beginning midway through, the same windows with the appertaining faces: a gunshot is fired, then the sound of the locomotive, then: the VILLAGE PRIEST is walking across the village square, the camera is stationed at the statue of the Virgin Mary, the priest approaches the camera from the war memorial, with a prayer-book under his arm, the entire village square is empty, at the filling station is standing the female FILLING STATION ATTENDANT who says, mornin‘[8] as the priest passes by her at a distance of ten meters, then as the priest continues on his way she stops paying attention to him and goes into her house.  The priest has reached the statue of the Virgin Mary, [there is] a sudden clamor of hundreds of [squealing] pigs to the right in the background, a clamor that [gradually], , in waves, swells to a hideous porcine roar like that of thousands of pigs, all the while that the camera continues motionlessly to stare at the empty village square, and to [film] ever more urgently, albeit ever more motionlessly, the empty village square, the porcine roar acquires an intensity that is attainable only in huge fattening farms (or in St. Marx), where thousands if not tens of thousands of pigs are kept [in one place] at the same time, it sounds as if all of a sudden tens of thousands of pigs are being fed at the same time.  After twenty seconds during which the absolutely empty village square has been [filmed] to the accompaniment of the ever-strengthening porcine roar, an even more intense porcine roar begins at the [very] instant at which the priest, as though he [has] just paid a brief visit to a house behind the statue of the Virgin Mary, is walking back across the village square, this time without a prayer-book, the priest walks across the entire square very calmly, very equably and one gets the feeling that although the porcine roar is unbearab[ly loud], the priest does not hear it at all, he hears absolutely nothing, despite the fact that the roar of the ten thousand pigs is [a] real [sound].  The priest, [having] finish[ed] crossing the entire village square in the direction of the church, vanishes behind the war memorial, but the camera continues [filming] the village square a further six or seven seconds, the porcine roar abruptly ceases.  Three seconds of absolute silence, followed by the sudden outpouring of an entire large schoolroom-load of schoolchildren of both sexes from the school behind the war memorial on to the square, at which the camera remains pointed, accompanied by a clamor of shouting and screaming that, like the porcine roar earlier, swells in waves, the schoolroom-load of schoolchildren inundates the square, girls with long pigtails, boys with sailcloth caps on their heads, one sees almost nothing but pigtails and sailcloth caps, which inundate the square, the camera is initially stationed at the statue of the Virgin Mary and filming the class of schoolchildren from the front, then at the war memorial and filming the class of schoolchildren from behind, until the schoolroom-load of schoolchildren has traversed the entire village square and is heading downhill towards Gaspoltshofen[9], through the narrow ravine on the right side of the statue of the Virgin Mary, the roar of the class of schoolchildren reaches its pinnacle of intensity at the moment when the very closely packed crowd of schoolchildren has reached the middle of the village square, and subsides as the class of school children moves farther away [and] downhill towards Gaspoltshofen.  After the last of the schoolchildren streaming downhill towards Gaspoltshofen [is gone], the empty, village square, now strewn with a couple of sailcloth caps [and] two bookbags dropped by the schoolchildren, is shown (from the perspective of the statue of the Virgin Mary) without sound for a further five seconds, then the camera [cuts to] the front of the old people’s home, shows the old people’s home in such a way that one gets the impression that it is a completely airtight stone cage.  For five or six seconds the old people’s home is shown, the faces of its inmates, crowded against the windows, are [clearly] visible, suddenly the locomotive in the distance, then the camera [cuts to] the bakery, whose second, left blind is being lowered, very noisily, like the first [one earlier].  From the butcher’s shop a bucket of bloody water[10] is emptied on to the street, the camera shows the water coursing [along the street] in rivulets to the accompaniment of a [series of] noise[s] that suggest that the butcher’s shop [is] being rinsed out.  That it is being swept, then rinsed out again.  Now (all the while that the camera continues filming the course of the bloody water) footsteps, [the] ever-louder footsteps of the POSTMAN, of whom one initially sees only his rubber boots, [followed by his] trousers, coat, [shoulders], his colossal load of sympathy mail, which he is without a doubt carrying up to the castle, one realizes immediately that the load is made up entirely of messages of condolence addressed to the castle, a hello[11] [is called out] from the butcher’s shop the moment the postman is passing by it, whereupon the camera [begins] following the postman, who from the butcher’s shop proceeds to the bakery, while the postman is walking up [the street] to the bakery, the locomotive [is heard] over and over again, the locomotive is not making any headway, its wheels spin [in place], it lets off steam, etc.  A gunshot is fired, the postman turns aside, on to the uphill [road] leading to the castle.  The camera shows the altar boys, who are halfway along this road to the gate of the grounds, moving more slowly, suddenly [and] surreally, they [begin] running up the hill, they lose their [grip] on the CANOPY[, which] falls to the ground, they lift the CANOPY back up, they reach the gate of the grounds.  The camera is filming them from behind.   Now the String Quartet No. 1 [is heard] from the Italian’s open window as the altar boys approach the front door.  Having reached the door, Altar Boy No. 2 rings the bell, pulling forcefully on the rope.  The two of them glance up at the Italian’s open window.  The door is [unlocked and] opened, [there are deferential] nods from the altar boys, the sister appears in the doorway.  As previously, she is dressed completely in black, but now she is also wearing a black kerchief on her head, [tucked] under her arm are an enamel[ed] washbasin and a pressed and folded handkerchief.   She makes a sign to the altar boys to wait, vanishes back into the doorway, but immediately reemerges and walks past the altar boys towards the greenhouse, the altar boys follow her.  After ten steps she turns around, the altar boys draw to a halt, she walks back to the front door and locks it, pockets the bunch of keys in her cardigan, again walks past the altar boys, the altar boys follow her to the greenhouse.  The camera cuts to the open window, the string-quartet music increases in volume.  The camera cuts to the gate of the grounds from which the butcher’s helper is approaching the front door with a rack[12] full of meat slung over his shoulder.  He glances up at the Italian’s window, his rubber boots are sturdy [and] have red soles, [his] trousers, tucked into the rubber boots, [are] black, [he is wearing] a black butcher’s waistcoat with white mother-of-pearl buttons.  Halfway [to the door] he [infers] that the sister is not in the castle, draws to a halt, glances over at the greenhouse.  Continues to the front door, rings the bell.  The door is opened, he is relieved of the rack, the empty rack is returned to him, he slings the rack over his shoulder and walks back through the entire grounds to the gate of the grounds, disappears.  Suddenly the sound of a window, the SPANIARD’s window, being opened on the upper part of the right side of the castle.  Whereupon the camera cuts to a view looking up across the surface of the park at the front of the castle, where a window on the upper part of the right side, on the second storey, is indeed open, hence [there are] two open windows, the Italian’s window and the Spaniard’s window.   Through his window the Spaniard [is heard] coughing a violent, prolonged succession of coughs, one imagines that the Spaniard has a cold, has just now stood up, is now coughing, now the Spaniard opens the window wider.  The camera continues to film the Spaniard’s window for five, perhaps six, seconds, suddenly the string-quartet music stops, eight seconds of complete soundlessness, during which one sees the Spaniard’s hands, [together with] his sleeved forearms, busying themselves with [various] toiletries, a hairbrush, a comb, clippers, files, a shaving-brush, razor et cetera on the windowsill.  A sudden burst of laughter from the altar boys wafts over from the greenhouse.  Complete silence.  More loud laughter from the altar boys.  Complete silence.  The camera now focuses on the Spaniard’s hands busying themselves with [his] toiletries on the windowsill.   Nervousness.  Now the camera with tremendous speed follows a downward path along the surface of the grounds until [it comes to be centered] on the altar boys, who are now standing without the CANOPY in front of the greenhouse, at a meter’s distance, [and] staring at the sister, who is standing [opposite] them, [and] whose face is at first motionless, fixed in a stare, [and who] then suddenly shakes her head and says: don’t laugh.  There’s nothing to laugh at.  The altar boys turn around and run away from [her], the camera focuses on them, then again on the sister, who remains motionlessly standing in place and gazing after the altar boys.  Once the altar boys are gone, she breathes a sigh of relief and walks back to the castle, along the way, a withered tree-branch falls on her, she draws to a halt, on the ground under the branch is a dirty sailcloth cap, she picks up the cap and pockets it in her cardigan, looks to see whether anybody noticed her do this, thinks[, “]nobody noticed me do that[”] and resumes walking.  Now the string[-]quartet [music is] very soft, the sister passes under and by the Italian’s window.  Without stopping the sister glances up at the Spaniard’s window, draws to a halt, notices his hands, which are visible from down below, [and] are still unrelentingly busying themselves with the toiletries.  At the same time [she] pulls the bunch of keys[.] along with the sailcloth cap[,] out of her cardigan, sniffs at the sailcloth cap and re-pockets the sailcloth cap and unlocks the front door and takes a step back and looks up at the Italian’s window, from which louder quartet-music is now emanating, suddenly a discharged gunshot behind the castle, the sister looks to the right towards the sky above the woods, as if her gaze [is] following a flock of birds that [has] taken flight from behind the castle, but nothing is visible [in the sky].  She stands in the doorway and loudly calls across to the greenhouse: Fanny! Fanny!  Whereupon, from her point of view looking outward [from the doorway], Fanny emerges from the greenhouse with a laundry basket full of well-worn menswear--garments and shoes—that has obviously been removed from the [body of the] late master[, and begins walking] over from the greenhouse towards the front door [of the castle].   Once Fanny has reached the front door, the sister sticks her hand into the laundry basket and lifts the pair of trousers at the top of the pile into the air, looks contemplatively at the trousers, drops them back [into the basket] and says, calmly but for all that peremptorily: this has all got to be got rid of!  Get rid of it! , whereupon Fanny steps through the doorway into the castle, the sister following her.  From within [the door] is shut, locked.  The quartet music now grows clearer, louder, violent coughing from the Spaniard’s window.  The camera makes a right-hand turn around the corner [of the building] and [moves] along the entire lateral[/south] side of the castle until it reaches the kitchen window, [then]  penetrates the kitchen.  In the kitchen, the female COOK, aged about fifty, with a white cook’s head-kerchief, [is] instantly recognizable as a cook, the three GIRLS (Nos. 1, 2, and 3) in the kitchen [and sitting] at the table next to the door [giving] on to the passageway, as soon as they are captured by the camera they rise and exit into the passageway, the cook glances at the door, through which the HOUSEBOY is [just] entering, [he] takes a seat at the table, the cook clears away the remains of the girls’ meal and sets sausage and bread and a large glass of cider on the table.  The houseboy is wearing rubber boots, black, [visibly] dirty work trousers, a workman’s jacket, [which is] covered in patches, over a frayed wool sweater, on his head [he has] the sailcloth cap that the sister pocketed in her cardigan earlier.  He drains the glass of cider in single gulp, the cook pours him a second glass.  She sweeps up [the room], the whole [operation] is very noisy, [and involves] much footwork, the houseboy studies her fat calves, varicose veins, et cetera.  Against the wall behind the houseboy, [various] workmen’s garments [hanging] in piles on a hook board.  The cook steps into the adjacent [larder] and reenters with a large bowl full of cooked potatoes, sits down next the houseboy and begins peeling potatoes.  She looks over at the clock and says: happast nahhn, whereupon the houseboy also looks at the clock and says: happast nahhn.  The houseboy is short, thin, aged seventeen to nineteen.  He suddenly leaps to his feet and drains the glass of cider and slips on a thoroughly tattered Hubertus coat that he has just taken down from the [hook board] with lightning speed, like an animal.  Suddenly he sticks his [right] hand into the bowl of potatoes and pulls out a potato and crushes it so that the mashed potato gushes out between his fingers[,] and drops the pulverized potato on to floor, all the while looking the simultaneously pretty much unfazed cook steadily in the eye.  The cook calmly [exclaims]: Filthy pig!  The houseboy is about to step out into the passageway when Fanny enters with the laundry basket [full] of well-worn menswear, the houseboy is blocking her path, but she makes her way into the room despite this, straight-away Fanny looks at the clock and says: half-past nahhn and the houseboy steps out into the passageway and Fanny [says]: steelonly bout happast nahhninhere.  The camera [cuts to] the gate of the grounds, the postman is approaching with the sympathy mail.  He is carrying not only a valise and a rucksack full of messages of condolence but also a stack of letters [cradled] in his arms.  He is trying as he walks to get a good look up at the two open windows in the front [of the castle], but he fails to do so, he can see [neither] above nor [beyond] the stack of letters, during the last few steps of his approach to the front door the quartet music coming from the Italian’s window vehemently intensifies and [suddenly] stops.  Silence as the postman now, at the front door, looks point-blank up at the Italian’s window after setting the stack of letters down beside the door.  He empties the rucksack, turns the valise upside-down, everything [ends up] in a [big] heap to the left side of the front door.  He rings the doorbell and walks back through the grounds to the gate of the grounds, the camera [,] now stationed at the gate[, first centers] on the postman, [then] moves past the postman to the pile of mail beside the front door, the camera distinctly shows [the pile to consist of] hundreds of unusually large, black-bordered [envelopes containing] messages of condolence, hundreds of messages of condolence from all over the world.   Once the camera has [lingered over] this condolence mail to [sufficiently] impressive [effect, we hear] the first few measures of the St. Lucia Funeral March being played by the Wolfsegg wind band down in front of the Fairview Inn.  From this point onwards, the sole thing of interest is the march music, all the while the [viewer’s attention] is to be centered on the first ten or twenty measures of the Santa Lucia Funeral March.  The camera [films] the pile of condolence mail for about four seconds, [the band] strikes up down in the village, the music sounds as though it is coming from the open windows of the Fairview Inn, after the first three measures, during which the camera cuts away from the pile of mail and successively to a leftward-moving sweep of the castle wall and a [downward-moving] sweep [from the castle] across the village, showing everything up to and including the [complex of] building[s] comprising the inn, twice so far the [band has] struck up and left off, the march music is rhythmically disorganized, sluggish, [the band] leaves off again, strikes up again, as the camera shows the horizon between the greenhouse and the castle, then makes a leftward-moving circular sweep beginning at the inn-building and concluding at the greenhouse, [at which moment] complete silence [ensues].  The string-quartet music, once again the String Quartet No. 1, begins playing through the Italian’s open window, which is now shown, now in the window [one sees] the Italian, tall, [with] suspenders stretched over [over the shoulders of] his white shirt, the [camera is centered] on the window, in which the Italian is standing, suddenly he sticks his hands into the suspenders,[13] stretches them as far as they can be stretched, and suddenly withdraws his hands.  [Now] the camera [is] in the kitchen, where the cook at the stove is bursting into loud laughter while in the midst of divvying up the portions of a breakfast for at least twelve or fifteen people, everything is on trays [, on] little trays for one person and oversize trays for eight or ten little trays, at the edge of the table the houseboy with the sailcloth cap on his head is now standing, in his right hand he is holding a white hen, which he has presumably just strangled, he lifts the dead hen high above his head and tears the hen’s head off with lightning speed, the cook, with [a] tray [cradled] in her arms, [a tray bearing] several steaming pots of coffee, [is] not [in the least bit] shocked, unyieldingly [exclaims]: Filthy pig!  The houseboy opens the door halfway for her, with her right foot she kicks the door [the rest of] the way open and exits.  The boy tosses the dead headless hen into a bowl on the stove, crouches with lightning speed into the chair at the table, pulls off his rubber boots, spits on the kitchen floor.  Now the camera [cuts to] the upper hallway, [on the] second storey, and simultaneously to the door of the Italian’s room ([on the] right) and the door of the Spaniard’s room ([on the] left).  Then to all the doors to the left [of these], then back [to the first two doors], then to all the doors to the right [of them, and finally] to the staircase [leading downstairs].  From [this staircase] the cook emerges with the large tray and sets the tray on a side table on the landing on the left.  She takes one of the small trays from the large one and walks up to the door opposite the landing, knocks, enters, and comes back out without the tray, takes a second small tray from the large one and carries it to the door next to the first one and knocks and hands over the tray and comes back and takes up a third tray and walks with it up to the third door and knocks and waits and [the door] is opened and she is relieved of the tray, she walks back to the large tray and takes up a fourth small tray and walks up to the fourth door on the right, knocks, hands over the breakfast, comes back again, takes up a fifth tray and walks with it now to the left to the fifth door, knocks, the door is opened, she hands over the tray, [walks] back again, [walks] to the sixth door with a tray, [makes] two more [trips], each time with one small tray to a single door.  The empty large tray is shown, Fanny takes [away] the large empty tray after setting a second full large tray from downstairs on the little table, and goes downstairs with the empty tray.  The cook takes from the new full tray a [small] tray and walks with it up to the door of the Italian, she knocks, one hears the Italian in his room saying: si, si, the door opens (loud quartet music from within [the room]), the cook hands over the tray, [returns] to the large tray and takes up a second tray and walks with it up to the Spaniard’s room, she knocks, it is opened without a word, she is relieved of the tray, she returns, she has reached the landing, from below the sister’s voice: Anna, Anna!  The cook stops, listens, from below once again: Anna, Anna!  While the cook in the hallway is listening [out for sounds from] downstairs, the Italian’s door opens, the Italian stands, in the background, in the doorway and listens, shuts the door again.  [Cut to a shot] of the front door [of the castle] from the grounds.   The sister steps outside, shouts back into the doorway: Fanny!  Fanny emerges with an incredibly huge roll of adhesive plaster and several folded ironed bed sheets, once she is outside, the sister shuts and locks the door.  Followed by Fanny, the sister walks to the greenhouse, the quartet music [is first] soft, [then] suddenly ceases, beginning of the funeral march, now suddenly resonant, as if [conveyed by a blast of] Föhn air.  A gunshot is fired in the woods behind the castle.  The funeral march [is] very loud, the sister looks towards where the sound of the funeral march is coming from, Fanny also looks over there.  The camera [soars] over the treetops, [on the] side [of the castle facing the] village, below the grounds, towards the Fairview Inn, [moves] through the high windows of the inn into the assembly-room and [zooms in on] the wind band.  The front of the building [bears] the inscription THE FAIRVIEW INN in capital letters.  The WOLFSEGG WIND BAND in [a] corner of the room [facing the] village, in the middle of a rehearsal, all of them, even the conductor, in their [regular] weekday clothes, they are sitting in softwood chairs, [other] softwood chairs of the same type [are unoccupied except by] beer glasses, the room is dirty, the decorations from a dance that was held here in the assembly-room about two days ago have still not been cleared away, [the room] has not been aired out once since, on the floor [are scattered] heaps of paper scraps, worn-out placemats, rags, shoes, et cetera, boxes [that have been] trampled [flat], the camera [allows one to see] quite distinctly a placemat bearing the inscription EGGENBERGER BEER.   Chinese lanterns, paper streamers, most of them in tatters, [hang] from the ceiling.   Along the walls pictures of curling championship [teams], cup [trophies], et cetera, in the corner of the room [cattycornered] to the musicians a pile of curling-sticks.  Next to them a stack of  broad, old, mostly wooden benches for use in the inn’s courtyard.  On the coat-racks along the wall hang the musician’s coats, on the coat-rack [at] the bar on the left side of the door, workmen’s outfits, a broom, et cetera, several so-called stain-shields, boiler suits, hats, et cetera.  On the right side of the door a large death-notice, [it has a] broad black border and a large cross over an illegible [block of] text.  The death-notice has been affixed to the wall with a thumbtack, it is unquestionably the master[’s death-notice], it is bigger than any [other] death-notice ever printed, on the other hand [it is] practically indecipherable, one [can] see [that] the text is printed in large, clear characters, but one cannot decipher it.  The camera [affords] a distinct[, in-focus view of the] death-notice.  The camera penetrates the assembly-room, the conductor is standing in rolled-up shirtsleeves [and] beating time, the band [are all] seated, this is a [completely] ordinary rehearsal for tomorrow’s funeral.  Profile [view] of the conductor, [of] the nape of [his] neck, [his] face, [his] nose.  Three times the march abruptly commences: the conductor raises his baton, the band plays, three times in succession the conductor signals [the musicians] to stop by tapping his baton very loudly [against the podium].   During this rehearsal the camera first shows the landlady standing in the doorframe, the landlady gazes apathetically at the band.  Suddenly the landlady notices an empty glass, she picks up the glass from one of the chairs near the musicians, walks with it over to the bar, fills the glass and carries it back to the chair, once again leans against the doorframe.  The camera singles out [a few] individual musicians [in succession].  After three false starts, a [full] third of the march is very calmly played [through], all the while [the camera] is focused on the [figure of] the landlady standing in the doorframe.  The camera is now the epitome of thoughtless [intrusiveness].  The conductor’s back is shown, the camera slowly [moves along] the conductor’s entire back from the waistband upwards.  The musicians have unbuttoned their [jackets].  They are sweating.   One of them has not unbuttoned his jacket and his neighbor says to him: unbunn your jaacket and the addressee unbuttons his jacket.  Even before the first third of the march has been played through, Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2 begins softly [playing], the march music grows softer, the quartet music increases in intensity, the image of the band blurs, becomes completely indistinct, the front of the castle is unrecognizable, crescendoing of the Bartók music, the image is suddenly, all at once, clear.  In front of the front door is parked the hearse, the undertakers, [the] driver, [the] front-seat passenger, have [already] gotten out of the car, rung the bell, the rear door of the hearse is wide open, the driver has a large black catafalque-cloth with a large embroidered silver cross at its center [draped over] his arms, the passenger is carrying a black velvet cushion [of the kind used] for displaying medals, [but] with no medals [on it], the two of them stand and wait, twice glancing up at the windows, for ten seconds, the door is opened, they are relieved of the catafalque-cloth and the cushion, by whom we do not see, with their caps doffed they nod in salutation, get into the car without having shut the rear door beforehand, drive off.  The sister emerges with comb and hairbrush, locks up, walks over to the greenhouse.  As she walks away from the front door, a sudden cessation of the quartet music.  The sister turns around, because the quartet music irritates her, and looks up at the Italian’s window.  One can tell that she loathes this music and loathes this person who incessantly regales himself with this music.  En route to the greenhouse, she meticulously examines the brush and comb for marks of uncleanliness, [when she is] halfway to the greenhouse a fragment of the march music [is heard], the march music breaks off as the sister disappears into the greenhouse.  The camera [is] behind her the whole time.  The camera now cuts to a tracking shot of the master’s completely naked corpse lying on the not completely assembled, the not even half-assembled, softwood catafalque, hence to a shot beginning at head of the catafalque and [approaching] the sister as she enters [from outside].  The corpse’s head is bandaged from top to eye[brows], the camera first shows the bandaged head, then moves along the rest of the corpse, which really is completely naked, towards its splayed feet, between the feet [one] views the sister as she enters, then draws to a halt in the doorway of the greenhouse, where she stands for two seconds, [after which] she suddenly runs up to the corpse.  Stands fully erect for three seconds before the corpse of her brother.  She observes him closely, as if wondering whether there is actually no trace whatsoever of movement in him.  In her now large, hyper-distinct face one sees: there is no longer any trace whatsoever of movement in her dead brother.  Now to the right of the catafalque [are] shown the washbasin filled with water, the handkerchief hanging over the rim of the washbasin, next to the washbasin an open box, out of which steel pins for the construction of the catafalque are hanging.  A hammer, pincers, a monkey wrench, a piece of thick black velvet attached to the barely half-built catafalque almost by way of a sample, [the piece] terminates in a large bale on the surface of the wooden platform, by means of this shot it first becomes clear that the catafalque is resting on a theatrical platform made of wood, [a platform] that takes up half the greenhouse and now one can see that the platform is surmounted by [a] piece of décor for a stage play, everything looks as though a rehearsal for a stage play [has] been suddenly interrupted, [as if] in the middle of the rehearsal the players [have] been obliged to break off, to leave everything standing and lying about.  The play in question [would be] one [dating from] the era of Commedia dell’Arte, like one of Goldoni’s plays, in the middle background a tall window affording a view of a large park with a thematic water fountain of lustrous colors, one gazes upon a pond on whose banks [there are] water-spewing figures amateurishly painted on paper or cheap plastic.  To the right a door as tall as the window, next to it a sofa [upholstered in] English linen.  On the sofa are costumes for a ball, the entire stage, especially the floor, is strewn with ball costumes, a fan on the sofa, a hat with ostrich feathers.  A silk cloak such as would be used in a comedy of errors.  The lot [is] Venetian.  In contrast to the castle, here everything is flamboyant, penetrating, not a trace of restraint, everything seems to be saying about [the castle], here we put on plays, that [place has nothing to do with] us.  To the left of the door an unfolded [folding] gaming table, underneath it costumes, to the left of the gaming-table a folding screen, underneath it lies a riding-saddle.  A horsewhip on the floor, on the gaming-table a teddy bear.  All the while the camera is showing all this as calmly as possible, [is showing] the horrified, forlorn image of an amateur playhouse at a great estate, [scrolls/ledgers] on the gaming-table, a trumpet on the floor, individual costumes and objects [that are] immediately perceivable, imposing in a certain respect, in another like playing cards exfoliated from the deck in successive dozens, [is showing all this] very quickly, to the incessant accompaniment of the funeral march [wafting] up from the Fairview Inn.  One gets the impression that this is an amateur playhouse at a great estate, [a playhouse] in which a play has been in rehearsal for weeks on end, [a playhouse] in which all of a sudden, completely unexpectedly, a dead man [has been laid out], the dead man, the master [of the estate].   The sister has been leaning on the foot of the catafalque, apart from the (very faint) [strains of] the funeral march [wafting] up from the inn, nothing can be heard.  She is thinking: there lies my brother, for the first time in my life I have him in my power.  One perceives her sudden greatness at the catafalque.  She takes the handkerchief and dips it in the washbasin and wrings it out and wipes away a piece of encrusted blood [on] the dead man’s temple.  The location of the piece of encrusted blood, which has evidently seeped out of the bandage-swathed head, indicates the suicide’s entry-wound.  She slowly wipes away the piece of blood, then lifts first the left arm, which is lying right against the dead man’s upper-body, and sets it down some distance away, on the surface of the catafalque, so that she can accomplish her aim of more thoroughly wiping down the corpse, then [does the same with] the right one.  Then she moves apart the legs of the corpse so that its penis is completely exposed.  Using the moistened handkerchief, very painstakingly, her face motionless, she wipes down the corpse from head to toe, [wipes down] the dead man’s penis.  Once she has completely wiped down the corpse, pushed its arms and legs back together, she takes up the brush and makes as if to brush the dead man[’s hair], suddenly she realizes: his head is swathed in bandages, obviously I cannot brush [a single hair of it], horrified by her own [absent-mindedness], she flings the brush into the washbasin, the brush soaks in the water.  Then she flings the comb into the basin.  Suddenly behind her Fanny appears with a large white enameled pitcher full of hot water.   Fanny has bumped into the doorframe, the sister turns but not all the way round, she says: he is clean enough.  Fanny sets the jug of hot water down on the platform and takes up the washbasin with the brush and comb soaking in it.  Fanny says inquiringly: emptyiddout?  The sister does not answer.  Fanny takes the brush and comb out of the washbasin and sets the brush and the comb down on the platform and walks out of the greenhouse with the basin and empties the washbasin and comes back in with the empty washbasin, fills the washbasin with hot water from the jug, dips the handkerchief in the washbasin and gives [the handkerchief] to the sister, who meanwhile has lifted up the dead man’s head and [now] says: hold his head! and Fanny holds the dead man’s head and the sister wipes it down with the handkerchief, [she devotes] especially [through attention to] the neck.  From the rooms in the second storey [of the castle] the small [breakfast] trays[, now bearing] dirty dishes,] are being expelled one by one on to small tables beside the doors, one cannot see who is putting out the trays and setting them on the tables, one sees doors opening and closing and hands setting down the trays and hears the noise occasioned by these proceedings.  Carrying a giant tray [full] of these small trays, the cook enters the kitchen, the camera [is filming] from the window, [the cook] sets everything down on the table next to the stove, meanwhile on the stove lunch is already steaming in large pots, on the sideboard heaps of silver plates for lunch, sets of cutlery et cetera all for at least thirty or thirty-five people.  The cook [goes] to the window, looks out at the arriving people, who arouse her interest.  Next to the heap of dirty dishes from breakfast she mixes a salad in large bowls.  The houseboy enters, he [is carrying] twelve dead white hens hanging on short [lengths of] string from a broomstick, the cook looks at him standing in the doorway with the twelve dead hens on the broomstick and, pointing to a large enameled bowl on the windowsill, says: put ’em over thar! The houseboy walks over to the window and slides the twelve dead hens off the broomstick [and] into the enameled bowl.  The boy says to the cook: survey[ors out thaar], surveyin’  Stinkin’ surveyors!  The cook echoes: Stinkin’ surveyors!   After five or six seconds, the houseboy, [having] seated himself at the table, stretched out his feet, [made himself comfortable], says: the Eyetalian’s already up!  To which the cook, glancing at the clock [replies]: ’bout time.  Suddenly an electric bell above the kitchen door loudly rings.  The cook tightens the knot on her head-kerchief and exits the room, the camera shows her walking the entire length of the hallway to the front door.  She opens the front door.  On the doorstep is standing the POSTMASTER with a telegram, he says: Isthra Mr Selvani here?  [Gott]a telegram [frim].  The cook nods, takes the telegram [from him], walks back the entire length of the hallway to the landing of the staircase[, which she] begins to ascend, after [she has cleared] a couple of stairs the camera [cuts] away from her.  The postmaster hurries away from the front door [and] across the grounds, then the camera from [its station] at the gate of the grounds swivels upward and zooms in on the Italian’s window, then [past the window] through the room and on the door, which opens, the cook is standing in the doorway.  [Next] the camera is [looking in] from the passageway, the quartet music [is] very loud, as before [it is Quartet] No. 2.  The cook hands over the telegram, the Italian is not seen.  She shuts the door.  Coughing from the Spaniard’s room, the cook glances at the Spaniard’s door, goes to the landing, runs downstairs, until only the back of her head is still visible, the camera [cuts to a view] from the lower landing, the cook is running towards the camera [and] down the stairs.  Silence.  A brief [burst] of quartet music, [which immediately] breaks off.  The Italian’s window, open.  Diminuendo of the quartet music, which has just now [started playing] again very loudly, the march [wafting] up from the Fairview Inn as the camera [tracks] leftward from the Italian’s window, shows everything up to and including the greenhouse, the greenhouse wall, finally [to its] left, the entire inn-complex, through the gate of the inn-complex three, four cows are being driven by the houseboy, [driven] through the gate into the stable to [its] left.  The houseboy alone in the courtyard with spread legs, which he suddenly crosses without falling over, the camera [focuses on] his face, then suddenly on his right hand, with which he is grabbing his penis, tightly squeezing his penis.  From the greenhouse the siste[r’s voice calling]:  Fanny!  Fanny!  The camera [is centered] on the front door, Fanny emerges from the front door carrying a laundry basket with a stack of linen handkerchiefs, pillowcases, moves to the greenhouse, run[ning] as fast as she can.  Halfway [to the greenhouse] she sets the basket down and runs back, pounds on the front door so loudly that [her blows] echo.  At the Italian’s window the Italian appears, looks down, the Spaniard’s window, the Spaniard at the window, looks down, the camera shows the entire front [of the castle], the Italian and the Spaniard are looking through their windows down at the grounds.  For ten seconds we have been hearing the sound of a tractor, which is now driving through the gate of the grounds, and carrying hooks lying on [long] beams of softwood, evidently posts for the construction of the catafalque.  The tractor proceeds into the grounds and travels, as the Italian and the Spaniard now look through their windows at it, all the way to the front door and stops in front of the front door.  Fanny has lifted the laundry basket [and is] now looking over at the tractor.  The TRACTOR-DRIVER is wearing a brown motorcyclist’s cap that is pulled down over his ears [and] a brown leather jacket, the camera [cuts to] Fanny, [then to the] driver, [to] Fanny, [to] the driver, [to] Fanny [who says]:  Why[’d] the tractor go to the front door instead of to the greenhouse?  Now, one at a time, beginning at its upper-left corner, all the windows on the front of the castle are opened, not [in an] orderly [fashion but rather a] disorderly [one], people look down at the tractor, in conformity with the [guests’] varying [reaction speeds], the windows are opened, semi-simultaneously but not exactly simultaneously, the third window from the left on the second storey is more or less the first one to open, [at more or less] the same time as the second window to the right on the ground floor, the third window from the right on the second storey, et cetera, all the windows on the front side are suddenly opened as if in a sudden pathological attack of panic, but the camera [films] the whole [to-do] calmly, in three or four windows, in addition to the Italian’s and the Spaniard’s, faces are visible, all these faces are looking down at the tractor, all the while Fanny has been holding the laundry basket [in a raised position] and gazing steadily at the tractor.  The driver has alighted.  Now the Italian suddenly shuts his window, the quartet music is silenced, the tractor-driver rings the doorbell, glances up.  He is shown in profile.  As if he expect[s] the door to open now that the tractor is parked, completely motionless, in front of the front door, [now that] its engine has been switched off, its parking brake engaged.  But the door does not open.  For twelve seconds the driver sits in the tractor and the door does not open.  The driver alights and rings [the bell].  Only now does Fanny set the laundry basket down and run to the tractor and tell the driver he should drive from the front door to the greenhouse, she says something unintelligible, its upshot is: to the greenhouse!  The driver climbs on to the tractor, starts [the engine], once again sits in the tractor completely motionless and with head held high, Fanny sits down beside him in the passenger’s seat, the tractor travels to the greenhouse, but now as the tractor travels to the greenhouse the camera shows the front of the castle, on which one at a time, and indeed in the same order as they were opened before, all the windows are being shut.  Now the tractor has reached the greenhouse, the driver switches off the engine, the quartet music [is] suddenly [heard again,] very loud.  Four or five laborers unload beams and posts from the tractor.  Fanny comes into [view] from the right, [the] camera [is] stationed at the entrance of the greenhouse, and [she] enters the greenhouse.  From the interior of the greenhouse [one hears] the sounds occasioned by the completion of the construction of the catafalque, [by] the hanging of drapery, et cetera, as the camera shows the laborers who are working slowly on account of the master’s death.  They are imbued with an awareness of the occurrence of the master’s death, [one hears] only the sound of the unloading of the planks and posts, along with those of the extraction of nails by a pair of pincers et cetera from inside the greenhouse, but these sounds slowly die away and are supplanted by the sound of an old man chopping wood, whom the camera now shows, the old man is chopping wood behind the old people’s home, the [image of] the old man gradually becomes more distinct, the pile of [chopped] wood is at least twice as tall as the old man, one gets the impression that the wood-chopping is growing ridiculous as the woodpile grows, the scene gives the impression that the woodpile is going to end up being at least ten times as tall as it now is, so that the wood-chopping [will be] ten times as ridiculous, [as] pitiful, an old woman, who is at least a third taller than the old man, enters, bringing the old man an afternoon snack, bread, a piece of stangen cheese on a stoneware plate, [she] sets the plate on the chopping-block.  Suddenly [one sees] the butcher chopping meat through the door of the butcher’s shop.  The baker through the door of the bakery.  The village square.  The war memorial.  The statue of the Virgin Mary.  The filling station attendant at the filling station.  The baker rais[ing] the right blind [of his shop].  The village priest at the window[14] of the parsonage.  In front of the Fairview Inn a car parks, TWO GENTLEMEN get out, carry bags of luggage into the inn, gentlemen with bags of luggage enter the bed-and-breakfast on the village square, on the road leading uphill from Ottnang to Wolfsegg several cars [are] traveling past in succession [and being] observed by the land-surveyor, the camera first shows the land-surveyor and the cars, then shows the cars as seen through the land-surveyor’s scope, then SEVERAL land-surveyors at the churchyard.  A lengthy sequence, [in which] they peer up at the castle, into the village, into the mountains, through their scopes, [in which] they observe one another [standing] opposite [one another], [there are] four or five tripods in the churchyard, a tripod at the wall of the churchyard, a land-surveyor in one[15] of the windows of the parsonage.  The locomotive’s whistle, [its] sound [suggests] the locomotive [has] remained stuck all this time.  The village square is shown, it is already half full of the cars owned by people who have evidently come to attend the master’s funeral.  The camera [is] in the window of the parsonage, and [centered] on the hourglass [inside], which indicates [that the time is] half-past eleven.  At this moment the uproar of several schoolroom-loads of school children, of all of Wolfsegg’s schoolroom-loads of schoolchildren, as the camera remains [centered] on the dial of the hourglass, the uproar and ultimately the roar of the schoolroom-loads lasts until the schoolroom-loads have traversed the entire village square from the war memorial to the statue of the Virgin Mary, but this traversal of the village square is not shown, the camera remains centered on the dial, the roar reaches its pinnacle [of volume] when the children have reached the middle of the square, slowly diminishes as the children run past the war memorial, dies away completely once the last child has passed the statue of the Virgin Mary [and] is headed downhill towards Gaspoltshofen.  Immediately after the roar has died away,  the camera [cuts to] the village square, which is devoid of children as during the preceding shot [of it], one sees that the roar has been here, now the roar is gone, everything is empty, one’s impression [is that it is] not only the village square [that] is empty, [that] everything is empty, an emptiness that is only accentuated by the large number of cars, the position of the camera is in front of the bakery [and] behind the war memorial.   And from [the path running alongside the war memorial, the path] that the schoolchildren have presumably just followed in their downhill [stampede], the altar boys (Nos. 1 and 2) now emerge with two black flagpoles with black flags [on them], they carry the two flags across the entire village square towards the camera, this shot, in its [depiction of] the breadth of the village square, is reminiscent of de Chirico.  As the altar boys approach the camera, various blinds are lowered and curtains are drawn, first on the left side of the square, then on the right, the lowering of the blinds occasions a tremendous din, additionally, in defiance of natural law, one hears the curtains being drawn, the atmosphere, as the altar boys approach the camera, is an absolutely artificial one.  But the altar boys are completely oblivious of the lowering of the blinds and the drawing of the curtains, they fail to register them.  The altar boys are still eight, nine paces away from the camera, when the church-clock begins to strike mutedly, festively, the camera remains pointed at the village square, the altar boys have passed the camera , the hearse approaches from behind the statue of the Virgin Mary, as though it is heading up from Gaspoltshofen, on [the roof of] the hearse lie three large wreaths, the hearse travels slowly across the entire village square past the camera, behind the hearse the filling station attendant crosses the village square, goes into the house opposite the filling station, once she is in the house, a man aged about forty, in rubber boots and a boiler suit and with a sailcloth cap on his  head, emerges from the house and walks over to the filling station and there sits down in [the saddle of a] motorcycle that has hitherto not been seen, starts [the engine], and drives the motorcycle past the statue of the Virgin Mary downhill towards Gaspoltshofen.  From the Gaspotshofen side comes a large pig-transporter [full of] squealing pigs[, it] travels across the village square past the war memorial.  [The] camera [is stationed] at the gate of the grounds.  The altar boys, coming up from the village square, draw level with the Fairview Inn, they are running[,] and running uphill with the flagpoles causes them no difficulties whatsoever, they wave the flagpoles like children running for fun.  Three-quarters of the[ir] way up [the hill] they suddenly [stumble and fall, then] stand back up and [begin] run[ning] again, even faster than [before].   The camera [cuts to the] interior of the greenhouse, the altar boys enter with the flags, the camera [is stationed] behind the corpse, one now realizes that the corpse is already lying in state at a high elevation, [the bier with the corpse] lying in state [on it] is already has a [distinct] relief, additionally more candles are burning next to the dead man, all of them are as tall as the candlesticks that the altar boys brought up here from the church, now [there are] eight candles on eight candlesticks.  The atmosphere in the greenhouse no longer has an improvised quality, the theatrical atmosphere [has been] repressed, this is no longer a playhouse, [but] rather a hall for the lying in state [of a corpse].  But the décor of the greenhouse is completely unchanged, the theatrical décor is merely wrapped in gloom, in shadows.  In contrast, the scarcely still recognizable [bier with the corpse] lying in state [on it], is clear, distinct, well to the foreground, and yet the observer never loses sight of the stage décor, but it has become unimportant.  One sees that the corpse is now already completely dressed for the funeral ceremony, its hands are folded over its abdomen et cetera, clearly visible are the ceremonial stripes on the legs of the trousers, the stag-horn buttons [on the coat], et cetera, only [the] necktie and shoes are still missing.   Cut to an overhead view of the corpse in its heavy Styrian loden suit, one sees that it still has no shoes on, [that] its necktie is missing, the naked[ness of] its feet contrasts starkly with the fully clothed [remainder of the body].  The altar boys approach the corpse, [they are] holding tightly on to the flagpoles, the dead man’s feet are slanted away from each other, the camera [cuts to] the altar boys’ faces, [then] back to the dead man’s feet, [then] to the abdomen of the dead man, [then] to the back of the dead man’s head.  One now notices the sister at the extreme right side [of the frame], at the dead man’s [feet], [she] has approached the corpse with a pair of black shoes, she places the (patent-leather) shoes between the dead man’s feet, takes the flagpoles from the altar boys, gives the flagpoles back to them, the altar boys insert the flagpoles into the iron rings mounted on the sides of the catafalque.  The altar boys exit the greenhouse.  The sister says Fanny! Fanny!, she speaks [rather than shouts] Fanny!  Fanny!, on the one hand this means [she is] summon[ing] Fanny, on the other hand it sounds as if she is saying Fanny!  Fanny! to herself.  Starting out from the same place as the sister [a moment earlier], Fanny approaches [the corpse], the two women now [try to] slip the corpse’s shoes on to [its feet].  [They work] hastily, impatiently, they do not manage to get [even] one shoe on, for the first time one gets the impression that the sister is imbued with an awareness of her brother as a dead person, she silently cedes her share of the task of putting on the shoes to Fanny.  In the background all of a sudden the houseboy [appears], the outline of his body, of his head with the workman’s sailcloth cap, [is quite] distinct, the houseboy walks up to the corpse, the two women fall back, the boy brutally [and] extremely quickly slips the shoes on to the corpse[’s feet].  The corpse’s feet [are now spread] far apart.  This irritates the sister, she pushes the houseboy aside and tries to bring the dead man’s feet closer together, but she does not succeed.  The camera [is centered] on the corpse [as seen] from the front.  Now Fanny gives the sister a rubber band that she has taken from a box on the platform, the sister slips the rubber band over the dead man’s feet, which now cleave to each other, the tips of their toes are pointed directly at [the ceiling].  The sister pulls the [hems of the] trouser legs down [far enough] to conceal the rubber band.  She steps back, the houseboy and Fanny step back.  The entire corpse [is] framed [in isolation] for four seconds, five seconds.  Suddenly the sister says: The necktie!  The necktie!  From the same [pocket of] her cardigan in which she formerly [kept] the bunch of keys, she extracts a black necktie and ties it around the corpse[’s neck].  The houseboy is obliged to hold up the corpse’s head, Fanny [unfolds] the collar [all the way up], the sister ties [the tie] around the collar, quickly.  Once the tie has been tied, the collar folded back down, the corpse [fully and] properly attired, the sister takes a step back from the catafalque [to eye it over] critically.  Fanny and the houseboy also [take a step] back.  The camera shows the three of them from behind, one sees only the candles, not the corpse.  This shot lasts four, five seconds, [then] the sister takes another step back, suddenly she tries to shove the entire catafalque about a half-meter back, [closer to the center] of the platform, which she naturally does not manage to do on her own, but the three of them together manage to shove the catafalque about a half-meter back [into] the platform, the attempt occasions a terrible [amount of] noise.  Now all three of them move the candles next to the catafalque about as far back as they have shoved the catafalque.  The sister stands up straight, remains standing[,] transfixed, the girl and the houseboy [are standing] beside her, equally transfixed.  The sister says: dead! [and again,] after two seconds[,] in the same cadence: dead!  Then, suddenly, galvanizing Fanny: the pillows!  The pillows!  Fanny [is] appalled by her [own] absent-mindedness, as one suddenly [and] clearly sees that the corpse’s head is lying [directly] on the velvet [covering of the catafalque, with] not a single pillow in between, one sees that Fanny was long ago assigned the task of bringing pillows but has not brought any pillows, Fanny turns around and runs out of the greenhouse, the boy and the sister remain standing, the sister says: pillows!  Pillows! and then says: the blocks of wood!  The blocks of wood! and orders the houseboy [thus]: the blocks of wood must be placed underneath, the blocks of wood must be placed underneath! and the boy picks up two blocks of wood from the platform and first places one of them under the right side of the head of the catafalque, so that the right side of the head of the catafalque is at least fifteen centimeters higher than the left and then places the other block under the left side so that the right and left sides of the head of the catafalque are [level with each other].  The boy stations himself behind the sister.  The sister [says]: the pillows!  The pillows!  Enter Fanny with an enormous paper pillow, the paper pillow is so huge that it juts out beyond the edge of the catafalque, the sister has still not noticed Fanny’s entrance, once again, two times in immediate succession, she says: pillows!  Pillows!, just as she is thinking: the corpse must lie higher and she says: higher! higher!  Fanny bumps into the sister from behind the with the pillow, the sister steps aside, the boy steps aside, the sister and the boy raise the corpse’s head high so that Fanny will be able to thrust the pillow under [the head], the sister indicates to Fanny that she should thrust the pillow all the way under the corpse’s head, one observes that she detests asymmetry.  Once the corpse’s head is precisely [positioned] on the pillow, everybody takes a step back, even the boy [takes a step] back, they station themselves at the foot [of the catafalque] and remain in this position [for] two, three seconds, after which they stand at their full heights gazing at the corpse, the boy with his mouth agape, suddenly from below [the] march music from the Fairview Inn [can be heard] strik[ing] up [and continuing] for four seconds, then the march music ceases.  Now one can clearly see that the corpse is lying on a black velvet cloth, to insure that the corpse does not slide off, at the foot of [the catafalque] the sister shoves a piece of wooden molding under the dead man’s feet, but the dead man does not touch[{?} the piece of molding], the boy gave the sister the piece of molding, which was [lying] on the platform.  Suddenly the march music strikes up again, [continues for] three seconds, very loudly.  The march music ceases.   [Next a view of] the grounds[, along] with the front of the house[,] from the greenhouse.  Three tripods on the grounds, without land-surveyors, delineate an isosceles triangle, under one of the tripods (near the greenhouse) [are seen] maps, papers, books, et cetera, strong onset of the sound of a jet airliner headed towards Wolfsegg from the east.  The Spaniard’s open window is [pulled] shut.  At the fence of the grounds to the right of the greenhouse, roughly halfway between the greenhouse and the right [side of the] castle wall the land-surveyor [sits] on a three-legged land-surveyor’s chair, tracking the sound of the airliner, the land-surveyor looks up at the sky, the camera shows the land-surveyor, the sound of the airliner breaks off, the land-surveyor stands up and goes to the tripod with the maps and papers, selects a map, [briefly studies] it, tosses it aside and then peers through the scope in the direction in which the airliner seemingly has flown, finally he centers his scope on the front of the castle.  The Spaniard personally re-opens his window.  A brief outburst of the quartet music behind the Italian’s window, cessation of the quartet music.  Silence.  The camera shows the front of the house without [the] land-surveyor, suddenly [cuts to a view] of the greenhouse from the front of the house, from the [greenhouse] the sister and Fanny are emerging with the houseboy, upon drawing level with the land-surveyor, the sister salutes the land-surveyor with a bow, but the three of them [keep] walk[ing] and enter the [castle through] the front door, without the land-surveyor’s taking any notice of them, the land-surveyor looks through his scope at the now-closed and locked front door, the sister emerges from the front door with a second paper pillow that is exactly as big as the first one, [the one] that she has already placed under the dead man’s head, and walks with it to the greenhouse, the land-surveyor watches [her] until [she] has passed him, then the land-surveyor looks through his scope at the Italian until the quartet music ([String Quartet No.] 2) breaks off and the Italian, who [has] been standing at his window, steps away from his window in order, as the camera now shows, to start playing a new record.  The Third Quartet begins playing, the Italian goes to the window, the camera shows him from behind, standing at the window.  The land-surveyor, who is being observed by the Italian, pivots his scope on to the Spaniard’s window, the Spaniard is stocky, brawny, pedantic, black-haired, well groomed, he is cleaning his teeth with a toothpick at the window, he is not wearing a jacket, [his] suspenders [are] drawn tight [over his shoulders], it is evident that lunch has already taken place.  He gazes into a pocket-mirror, [he] has not noticed the land-surveyor, in contrast to the Italian, who has noticed the land-surveyor on the grounds, the Spaniard has pretty much not yet noticed the land-surveyor.  The land-surveyor’s scope has taken over the camera’s function.  [Leaning out] the window, the Spaniard inspects his teeth in the mirror.  Suddenly the quartet music stops, the Spaniard looks [over] in alarm at the Italian’s window.  The quartet music recommences, the Spaniard resumes inspecting his teeth.  He unbuttons his shirt, gropes with his right hand under the shirt towards [the spot beneath which the liver lies], withdraws his hand and rebuttons his shirt.  Now a view[,] through the land-surveyor’s scope[,] of the roof of the castle, on which is standing a tripod that is pointed at the scope on the grounds.  Three seconds [pass].  Suddenly from the interior of the house [one hears somebody calling] loudly: Gianni!  A second time: Gianni!  Whereupon the Italian (the camera [is] in his room) [calls out]: all right!  I’m coming!  I’m coming, Max!  The camera [is] back on the grounds and [centered] on the Italian’s window.  The Italian shuts his window, the quartet music ceases.  The Spaniard at his window paus[es] in his inspection of his teeth, as though listening out [for something].  The front door [of the castle] opens, in [the doorway] is standing the SON (Max), the camera now shows the land-surveyor on the grounds, he bows towards the front door as the son appears.  The son is wearing an English suit of Harris tweed (with plus-fours), [and is] bareheaded, [he] steps outside, turns around, and shouts back into the open doorway: Gianni!  Gianni!  Then [he] takes about four or five steps towards the land-surveyor, turns around and looks up at the roof of the castle, at the tripod [stationed] there, turns back around and walks a bit farther towards the land-surveyor, [he is] slim, his deportment [is] elegant, [he] looks at the door, the Italian emerges in a very elegant, fashionable Italian suit, [one that is] appropriate for this time of year, [he is] likewise bareheaded.  Dress-handkerchief [in his breast pocket], cuffless trousers, et cetera, the Italian [says] to the son: Have you been waiting long?  The son: no, not long.  The Italian begins making towards the greenhouse, but the son signals to him to approach the land-surveyor, the son speaks impeccable standard German with a slight Austrian accent, the Italian is a Florentine, [as one senses] from the incredible effortlessness of his deportment, [he is] more intellectual than the son, the epitome of the modern Italian intellectual hailing from a moneyed family, both of them are educated men [and] conscious of being so, they are well-bred, well-read, well-traveled, and fluent in the most important foreign languages.  The son introduces the Italian to the land-surveyor, he says: Gianni Selvani, the Italian.  The land-surveyor (in a long Hubertus coat) pronounces his [own] name unintelligibly.  The son to the Italian: the whole [place] has been being surveyed for years.  Tripods everywhere, wherever you look, [there are] tripods.  But it doesn’t bother me.  Not me, but it did bother my father.  He detested the land-surveyors.  I’m not bothered by any of it.  Where are we going?  Into the woods?   Si, si, into the woods, says the Italian.  The two of them move away from the land-surveyor [and] towards the gate of the grounds, the land-surveyor resumes working, [centers] his scope on the tripod on the roof, then on the two [men], the Italian, the son, who are walking through the gateway of the grounds.  The scope pivots over to the inn-complex, from [whose] central gate an OLD LADY [leaning] on a walking-stick emerges, slowly, laboriously, but [for all that with] a lady[like gait], she walks from the inn-complex to the grounds, [her dress] is dark, [she is] white-haired, fat, [with a black] cape [hanging] from her shoulders, a lorgnette on a long string, et cetera.  [She is] slowly approaching the land-surveyor, who is observing the tripod on the roof.  The camera [then centers on] the Spaniard’s window, the old lady draws to a halt and raises her stick and calls up to the Spaniard’s window: Señor Legoya!  A second time, loudly: Señor Legoya!  Her voice is [affected], very loud, so that the Spaniard cannot help hearing her, whereas in reality he cannot hear her at all.  The Spaniard opens his window, looks out.  The old lady: Señor Legoya!  Are you ready?  The Spaniard bows only perfunctorily [from] the window: at the same time his bow signifies: I’ll be there immediately, in just a moment, he already has his jacket on, he hastily closes the window, and as he does so the old lady turns around and observes the land-surveyor, who is observing the inn-complex.  This scene [is one of] extreme calm and lasts until the Spaniard emerges from the front door, secures the front door and approaches the lady and arm in arm with the lady passes by the land-surveyor without being taken notice of by the land-surveyor, who is intensely observing the inn-complex.  The camera [remains centered] on the two of them until it is clear that they are entering the inn-complex and continuing on into the landscape behind the inn-complex, [but none of] this is shown.  The two of them walk so naturally slowly that it is impossible to continue following them, [and so there is a montage sequence] of stationary images that very quickly show how slowly the two of them, the Spaniard and the lady, are walking to the inn.  During this scene[, which is filmed looking down {?}] from the Fairview Inn, [we hear] the march music, twice it breaks off, [then] strikes up again, then breaks off [again].  The kitchen: the cook and Fanny, in the background the girls (Nos. 1, 2, and 3) busy washing and drying dishes, the cook is brewing coffee, the boy is sitting at the table [and] draining a glass of cider, he stands up, puts on his cap, which he has laid on the table, and suddenly sticks his tongue out at the cook, he sticks his tongue out as far as possible, while thrusting his trunk forward as lewdly as possible towards the cook.  The cook reacts by not moving a muscle, the girls by laughing in the background, at first they do not dare to laugh, but [then] they suddenly [burst into] laugh[ter].  The boy leaves the kitchen, the cook looks at the clock.  One gets the impression that several dozen lunches were cooked, there are hundreds of dirty plates et cetera lying about, [they] look as though  they have come straight back from the dining room.  One gets the impression, although none of this is made explicit, from the frequent opening and shutting of doors that is shown, that on both the first and second stories there are people entering and exiting, doors opening and shutting, people walking through the passageway[s], that there are already quite a number of guests for the funeral in the house, such that there is more and more work [to do] in the kitchen, [and] quite a lot more now, after lunch, than after breakfast, the increase in the number of people in the castle may be inferred from the increase in the amount of crockery in the kitchen.  Suddenly the door of the kitchen opens and a MAN IN BLACK is standing in the door[way], tall, thin, almost as tall as the door[way itself], without saying a word the cook gives him a cup of coffee and the man disappears, immediately after which a SECOND MAN in a dark gray suit [appears], the cook gives him a cup of coffee and the man disappears, the cups [in question are] demitasses on small saucers and with a coffee-spoon, a third man enters [the kitchen], the cook gives him a small plate with a banana [and] a small [paring-]knife on it, the man disappears, whereupon a seventeen-year-old GIRL enters, [she is] elegant, [has] long, shoulder-length hair, the cook gives her a glass of sherry, each time the cook acts as though she [knows] what to give the person, whether coffee or fruit or sherry et cetera, there is a knock at the door, an OLD MAN WHO LOOKS LIKE TOSCANINI is standing in the doorway, the cook says something to the girls, one of them goes to the sideboard and cuts off two slices of white bread with a white-bread knife, sets the white bread on a plate with a knife and gives the plate to the old man, who bows, [he] now looks even more like Toscanini, [he] vanishes, suddenly TWO LITTLE (four-to-six-year-old) GIRLS in sailors’ outfits are in the kitchen, the cook gives them a tray with a large first-aid kit box on it, next to the box [is] a broad, sturdy bottle with a label reading NEOTIZIDE, [then the cook] says: be careful! to the children while raising her index finger and bowing low to them, the girls are standing shoulder to shoulder, they are standing shoulder to shoulder, then shoulder to shoulder like two dolls they exit the kitchen with the tray, In the background at the window Girls 1, 2, and 3 laugh at the two little girls leaving the room with the tray, the cook looks at the clock and says: happast two!  and pours the coffee from a large metal pot into a small white porcelain pot on a tray for a single person, on the tray is a large cloth napkin with the name VERA embroidered on it.  A girl (No. 1) picks up the tray, the cook looks at the clock and says: happast two!, Girl No. 1 exits the kitchen with the tray, the door closes with a crash, the cook stares furiously at the clock, Girls 2 and 3 are laughing in the background.  Now the door opens and the old man who looks like Toscanini enters, he draws to a halt in the doorway and says: a spoon please! and the cook hands him a small [espresso] spoon.  Thank you! says the man who looks like Toscanini, as he is saying thank you [the viewer realizes] that he is Italian.  He disappears.  The camera now shows the drawing-room, [a] long table from which the remains of lunch have not been entirely cleared away, at its head sits the sister, transfixed, fully erect, alone.  Behind her the door opens, Girl No. 1 enters with the tray without [causing] the sister to turn around, she takes absolutely no notice of the girl, the girl sets the tray down in front of the sister, the sister pours herself some coffee, the girl remains standing behind the sister, the sister stirs the coffee with a small silver [espresso] spoon [while saying] as if to herself but at the same as if giving an order to the girl standing behind her: he must lie higher!  Much higher!  Turns around to face the girl [and says]: one more pillow!  One more pillow!  Immediately!  The girl exits [the room], the sister stirs her coffee and says to herself, once the girl has left: higher!  He must lie higher!  He must lie extremely high!  Then she drains the coffee in a single gulp, leaves everything on the table as it is, the whole lunch-dirtied table with [its] dozens of crumpled napkins et cetera, is shown, and exits [the room].  The camera [is centered] for four or five seconds on the closed door.  The door opens, the houseboy enters.  [From] his dirty work clothes, completely grime-bespattered boots, smudge-stained face, one can plainly see that he pretty much has no business being here in the dining room, [he] walks up to the table, and after making sure that nobody is watching him and that hence he is alone, [he] pours himself a cup of coffee, drains the cup in one gulp and disappears through the door.  The boy’s reactions are lighting-fast, jerky, furtive.  The camera [lingers] for two seconds on the securely shut door.  Next the camera [is stationed] at the gate of the grounds.  The MAYOR enters the grounds, walks towards the front door, at the greenhouse several gentlemen in black can be seen standing [together and] conversing, [they] pay no attention to the mayor, who before continuing to the front door walks up to the land-surveyor ([who is standing] at his tripod[, at the right side of the frame]).  Now [there are] only two tripods on the grounds, the tripod on the roof is visible.  The mayor walks up to the land-surveyor and greets him with a handshake and [the two of them cast] their eyes around the surrounding land, and also at the tripod on the roof, all the while they are nodding at each other in a tacitly conspiratorial manner.  The nod that accompanies their viewing of the tripod on the roof signifies: it’s good that there is even a tripod on the roof.  The mayor and the land-surveyor have known each other for many years, one sees how they greet each other like [old] school friends, [talk like people glad to] see each other again.  The mayor is dressed in black and has in his hand a black hat, a kind of [low-rise] top hat.  The land-surveyor says to the mayor, [while] emphasizing [his words] with hand gestures, that the sister, whom the mayor obviously is looking for, is in the greenhouse, not in the castle, but [the viewer] cannot make out a word of what the land-surveyor is saying, one can hear pretty much nothing, or rather only something that is completely unintelligible, but very loud, artificially loud.  The land-surveyor points at the tripod on the roof.  The land-surveyor and the mayor nod conspiratorially [at the tripod].  All the windows on the front of the castle are shut, but the door of the drawing-room (the door of the dining room on the first floor) is open.  In this doorway the sister appears, the mayor looks up, salutes [her] with a bow, the sister raises her hand as if she is planning to come down [to him] immediately, she turns around goes into the drawing-room, the mayor is nonplussed, because the land-surveyor just gave him to understand that the sister was in the greenhouse, not the castle, the two men laugh very briefly, but immediately stifle their laughter, the mayor goes to the front door, no sooner [has] he [arrived] there, than the sister (having stepped out from within) is also at the front door.  The two of them walk to the greenhouse.  The camera [is stationed] at the head of the catafalque.  The mayor and the sister enter the greenhouse.  The corpse is now lying fully in state in the manner stipulated by the dead man’s sister.  The [mayor and the sister walk] all the way up to the corpse and remain standing before the corpse.  They stand beside the corpse [only very briefly], the mayor with his head bowed, his hat held in front with both hands, et cetera, posed in mourning, the sister seemingly in enormous satisfaction at the perfect [correspondence of the lying-in-state with her idea of it], her head held high.  The funeral march [can be heard] striking up down at the Fairview Inn.  The music breaks off after four seconds.  The camera [is stationed] at the front door.  The mayor is at the greenhouse, being taken leave of [by the sister], beside [the greenhouse is] a large group of gentlemen who are deep in conversation, the mayor walks up to the gate of the grounds, the sister [walks] back to the front door, [each of] the gentlemen [in] the group turns around to face first the departing sister then the departing mayor[,] then they all turn back around [at the same time].  The land-surveyor picks up the only tripod on the grounds, folds it up and [carries] it into the woods at the right [side of the frame], vanishes.   The tripod on the roof of the castle with the land-surveyor, who is looking at the group of gentlemen at the greenhouse through his scope, [the group] has increased in size, between the greenhouse and the inn-complex [there are] now about a dozen cars.  Enter a chauffeur-driven Bentley through the gate to the grounds, an Englishman [is] in the back seat, the Bentley moves very slowly towards the front door [of the castle],[arrives] at the front door.  In the front doorway the sister has drawn to a halt, she has turned around, is watching the approaching Bentley, makes a motion suggesting that she is trying to examine her clothing with her hands, stands up straight [and] tall, as if she has actually been waiting in the doorway for the Englishman for some time.  The card has an English [license plate].  The chauffeur gets out of the car, opens the back door, a thin, dark-haired fifty-year-old man of average stature gets out and immediately walks up to the sister, the two of them embrace briefly [but] meaningfully, tarry for a moment [in this attitude] and step inside.  The chauffeur follows them with two fairly large but fairly light pieces of luggage, immediately steps back out through the front door without the luggage, takes his seat inside the car, drives the car [just] past the greenhouse and the group of gentlemen, who take no notice of him, [towards] the inn-complex, and parks alongside [the] at least fifteen other cars that are already parked there (at the greenhouse).   From the large number of cars that are now suddenly visible between the greenhouse and the inn-complex one gets the impression that a great many guests for the funeral have already arrived.  That the scene that has just now taken place, the arrival of a car, the arrival of some guests for the funeral, has been repeated dozens of times over the course of the past two hours.  Now the butcher’s helper walks with a rack filled to capacity through the gate of the grounds, the group of gentlemen briefly observes him, reassembles, [the butcher’s helper] walks up to the front door [of the castle], the front door is open, the butcher’s helper enters [the castle].  The camera, which has been showing the butcher’s helper from behind, [cuts] immediately to the baker’s helper, who is walking with a white bread-bag [slung over] his back to the front door, again the group of gentlemen at the greenhouse turns round to face the baker’s helper, turns back around, immediately afterwards the postman with a new [batch of] sympathy mail, again a rucksack, valise, stack [of letters], walks into the grounds and up to the front door and enters the castle.  Four or five seconds of the [open] front door[way] as a black hole, then [the following people] emerge: the butcher’s helper, the baker’s helper, the postman, finally six or seven laborers in boiler suits with work tool-bags [slung] over their shoulders, the group of gentlemen gazes after them as they walk through the gate of the grounds.  Immediately afterwards the camera [is] again [centered] on the front door[way of the castle], from which the altar boys, laughing [all the while], rush out and [continue rushing] through the park, the group of men gazes disapprovingly at them, the altar boys [pass] through the gate of the grounds, the two altar boys had run out of the door[way] with unpeeled and half-eaten bananas in their hands, [all the while] half screaming, half laughing.  The camera now follows the two of them from behind, as they run down the street leading to the Fairview Inn.  The assembly-room at the Fairview Inn.  All instruments [are] on the floor, [half-]empty beer-glasses the chairs, a single wind-player plays a section of the march, [he] starts playing, stops playing, starts playing, stops playing.  A second [wind-player] enters, sits down, takes a deep gulp from a beer-glass.  Then the two of them play together for five seconds, each of them is [practicing] his own part on his own, [they] stop playing.  The conductor enters.  The entire wind band enters behind the conductor.  The camera shows the door of the greenhouse from [the point of view] of the head of the catafalque, meanwhile the band has begun playing the march, more calmly and accurately than ever before, eight candles on eight [sticks] are now burning.  The camera from [the point of view of] the entrance of the greenhouse [is centered] directly on the corpse, [and,] in the background, on the décor, [which] is hazy, almost completely obscured, now the camera [is] again at the head of the catafalque [and centered] on the sister, to her right [is] the gentleman from the Bentley, behind them both [are] the gentlemen who earlier were conferring in front of the greenhouse, everyone is motionless, from the Fairview Inn the march [is heard playing] quite calmly, suddenly a gunshot [is fired], [it elicits] absolutely no reaction [from anyone].  For eight seconds the camera [is centered] on the mourning party, the march stops playing.  The camera is [centered] on the front door [of the castle], in front of the front door is parked a Jaguar [of the] latest make, TWO GENTLEMEN, in long-waisted jackets of beige sailcloth, have gotten out [of the car], a chauffeur gets immediately back into the car, starts [the engine], drives the car past the greenhouse to the inn-complex and parks it next to the Bentley.  The gentlemen from the Jaguar stand in the front door[way of the castle] and gaze towards the greenhouse [and] at the group of gentlemen.  The camera shows the entire [foyer] leading up to outside, the gentlemen in the doorway, in the distance the grounds, all the way up to the greenhouse and what is more, clearly recognizable, the sister and the gentleman from the Bentley, the gentlemen from the Jaguar walk in as far as the staircase (the camera [is stationed] behind the staircase and pointed at the doorway) and ascend the stairs, suddenly from upstairs [one hears]  a murmur of dozens of people,  basically like an unintelligible conversation among hundreds of people, like at a cocktail party, this murmur vehemently commences just as soon as the two gentlemen from the Jaguar have vanished [upstairs], but the camera remains pointed at the doorway, with its focal point being the group of gentlemen outside, who all of a sudden move very quickly towards the doorway, everyone standing on the grounds [does so], and one now gets the impression that there are hundreds [of people] in dark clothes approaching the doorway, [they are] now more clearly visible than ever before: there are no other sounds, apart, on the one hand, from the murmur from the second storey, [and ,] on the other, from the suddenly crescendoing conversation of the people from outside coming closer to the doorway, the ever faster-moving, and eventually hasty, approachers of the doorway, the sister head[ing] them up, are the first, the sister is the first of these, at the doorway, [it sounds] as if someone is tumbling headlong down the stairs, and in fact one does suddenly see the man who looks like Toscanini tumbling down the stairs and falling flat in front of the camera, the sister, followed by the group of people, [makes] straight for the figure lying on the floor, the sister lifts the head of the man who looks like Toscanini, peers into the surrounding crowd of inquisitive [faces] (the camera is shooting from [the floor]), she shouts: Fanny! Fanny!  Girl No. 1 comes, the group lets her through, the sister says: For God’s sake!  into the silence that sudden[ly follows] she suddenly says: For God’s sake! and then, after about three seconds of silence [adds]: his room, he must [be taken] to his room!  The crowd steps back, the sister and Girl No. 1 carry the man who looks like Toscanini up the stairs, from upstairs a very loud murmur suddenly [descends] like a wall, [the] camera [is centered] on the crowd of people at the foot of the staircase, who are looking up, seeing what there is to see: a dying old man.  But the camera does not show this.  The camera remains [centered] on the foot of the staircase, the crowd of people steps back and now surges suddenly as before [it did] into [the house], through the front doorway out into the grounds and there disperses, the people scatter very quickly towards the greenhouse and towards the inn-complex and towards the gate of the grounds, [walking] across the lawn as though there were no gravel path [to walk on].  The camera [cuts] back to the spot where the old man who looks like Toscanini was lying, one fancies that one can see a pool of blood, or at least the outline of a pool of blood, on the spot, but in reality one sees nothing.  The camera [is then stationed] at the doorway, everything outside is completely devoid [of people], [the] grounds [are] devoid [of people], from the left side to the right side [of the frame] the land-surveyor is very quickly carrying a tripod, he runs past as he carries it.  TWO GENTLEMEN in the doorway, who have arrived from the left [side of the frame], are looking up towards the Italian’s window, [the] camera [is] stationed at the foot of the staircase.  One of the men says, while looking up at the Italian’s window: [It’s] good that he’s gone away.  The other: [It’s] scandalous!  All night long and all morning long he played that unbearable music!  For years this man has been playing those records.  Wherever he goes he brings that unbearable music with him and drives everybody around him crazy.  Whereupon his interlocutor [says]: A fool!  Filthy rich and a fool.  The one [gentleman]: What is the Italian’s actual age?  The other [gentleman]: forty.  The one: He owns half of Tuscany.  The other: And he’s actually an electrical engineer.  [You heard me], an electrical engineer.  His mother died in a burning theater in Padua during a performance of Aida.  He’s a huge fan of Goethe, of German literature in general.  And then suddenly [there was] nothing more but Béla Bartók.  Béla Bartók.  Nothing but Béla Bartók. Does that [make any sense] to you?  [Next] the camera is [looking] up from the foot of the staircase, on the fourth or fifth step the two gentlemen are standing, the [scene] suggests that they cannot go upstairs, from which one hears the murmur [of the crowd], [and] so they are conversing at the foot of the stairs.  The one [gentleman]: These people.  All these people at the funeral.  Somebody dies and all of a sudden you see all these people…this horrible music.  You know that the Italian owns the three largest farms in Tuscany, to say nothing of the quarries at Carrara.  To say absolutely nothing of the quarries at Carrara.  Breweries.  Cement[works].  Rubber [factories], he says.  He hates flying.  It’s unbelievable, fourteen hours on the train.  You know [what that’s like], of course, you’re tired and you can’t get to sleep, you hear everything, [nothing escapes] you, at every station you hear everything.  Mestre, Tarvisio, Böckstein, Badgastein, Salzburg, Attnang-Puchheim.  Horrible.  He also hates long car trips…That kind of music gets on my nerves.  When you [hear] it constantly, when you aren’t forced to hear it and have to hear that music constantly.  But thank God the funeral is tomorrow and then it’ll all be over.  The scene is quite thick with smoke, the smoke is so thick that is [pouring] down from upstairs.  This smoke, says the one [gentleman].  The other [gentleman] coughs, then says: the Spaniard is a [gun] freak.  The one [guy] is a music freak, the other[’s] a [gun] freak.  The one [gentleman] says: Crazy.  Then: You can consider yourself lucky that you haven’t got a room next to that madman’s room.  But there’s no sense in complaining [about it].  The best you [can do is to] air out the room only briefly and keep the window shut.  Are you staying here in the house or are you staying down in the village?  Answer: I’m staying at the Fairview Inn.  The other [gentleman]: I’m staying there too.  The one: The first category are staying here, the second are staying at the Fairview Inn.  I belong absolutely to the second category.  The other: In any case, there is also a third category: they’re staying in the other inns.  The one: Is your room warm?  I’m freezing.  I constantly have to pace up and down [the room] to keep from freezing [to death].  The other: [it’s] badly heated, too badly heated.  A very cold region.  It’s always wind[y] here.  It’s always cold here.  When you suddenly [pitch up] in this cold, windy region, you freeze.  People go to funerals, which causes them to catch colds and fall ill and die and so forth.   The camera [then centers] on the doorway, the two of them in the doorway.  The one [gentleman]:  Do you believe [it was] suicide?  That he deliberately shot himself?  That’s what they’re saying, that he deliberately shot himself.  [That] it was no accident.  The other [gentleman] shrugs his shoulders.  The one: That’s what they’re saying, that he deliberately shot himself.  TWO LADIES (about forty years old [each]) enter [the house], passing by the two gentlemen, who look on after them, and proceeding on to and no farther than the foot of the staircase.  The one [lady]: I don’t like it one bit, I absolutely don’t like it one bit.  The other [lady]: Then we [went/’ll go] to Rome via Toulon and from Rome back to Avignon.  The two of them briefly laugh.  The one: There [was supposed] to be a premiere today.  A comedy.  As always, a comedy.  A light entertainment.  Allegedly [there wasn’t] a single sign [that anything would happen].  All of a sudden the shot [came].  They say he watched the whole play and stepped out of the greenhouse and shot himself on the grounds.  The other: No, in his room.  In the greenhouse they only heard the shot.  They say he died immediately.  And he asked to be laid out in the greenhouse.  Looks [towards the greenhouse?], but nobody sees [her?], then: And no will.  No will, [mind you], no will.  Natural succession by inheritance, [mind you].  [They] ascend the staircase.  The camera [then centers] on the gentlemen in the doorway.  The one [gentleman]: Frankly speaking, I find funerals disgusting, sure, [I understand] the fascination, but I find funerals disgusting.  [The two gentlemen] suddenly approach the camera, ascend the staircase.  [The camera is] installed [in the] front doorway [of the castle].  [View of] a Lancia, a young Italian MARRIED COUPLE get out, walk through the doorway while the car remains parked outside, the two of them ascend the staircase without saying a word.  Two TALL MEN IN BLACK enter [the castle], [they are wearing] long coats [gathered in] at the waist, walk in as far as the staircase, stop.  The one [man]: Obviously.  The other [man]: What’s the name of the inn?  The one: The Fairview.  The two of them briefly laugh, ascend the staircase.  The camera [is centered] on and [looking] through the doorway, the Lancia is gone.  Fanny enters [the castle] through the doorway with a full laundry basket and passes by the camera en route to the kitchen, the houseboy, [with the] sailcloth cap on his head, follows her, he has three dead hens on a string in his hand.  Then the two undertakers enter [the castle] through the front door.  [Each of them is] carrying [something], the one, circumspectly, a large white box, the other, a large bouquet of flowers with a top to bottom-spanning silk bow whose inscription is illegible, they glance towards the kitchen and then ascend the staircase.  Emerging from the kitchen, the houseboy [walks] past the camera and out the front doorway, [once] he is [outside], he [starts] running.   The camera [is filming] the front doorway [of the castle] from the grounds.  The undertakers with box and bouquet [are standing] at the left side of the doorway.  The sister takes the lid off the box and looks inside, the camera does not show what is in the box, the box is shut back up by the undertaker who is carrying it, the sister shakes her head, as if by way of saying, no, I won’t have that in the box, she takes the bouquet from the two undertakers, the undertakers bow and walk towards the gate of the grounds, the camera, [centered on] them, with the majority of the funeral guests on the far right side [of the frame], [follows] the two undertakers.  The camera [is centered] on the front doorway [of the castle], the sister goes inside with the bouquet.  Two gentlemen [are standing] at the foot of the staircase.  The one [gentleman says]:  It’s incredible.  The other [gentleman]: You can hardly breathe.  [They] step outside through the front doorway.  From outside TWO OTHER GENTLEMEN enter, stop at the staircase.  The one [gentleman says]: [Such a] colossal loss.  The other [gentleman]: You’ve got to be on your guard.  [Mind you], you’ve got to be on your guard.  [They ascend] the stairs.  The camera [is looking] through the doorway out into the grounds, which is now, from the greenhouse to [the point] halfway [between the greenhouse and the camera], suddenly crammed with cars, the people [are standing] in front of the cars.  The locomotive whistles as the camera [looking] through the [front] doorway [of the castle] directly shows the people gathered in front of the cars.  Through the gate of the grounds at least five HUNTSMEN come and walk, [amidst] the cars, [while being] observed by those standing on the grounds, to the greenhouse.  A voice says: the huntsmen!  But one does not see who has said this, it sounds as though somebody [standing] right next to the camera [has] said the hunstmen.  The camera is stationed at the head of the catafalque.  The huntsmen enter the greenhouse.  As these huntsmen are entering the greenhouse and taking up their positions, [one hears] the sound of the jet airliner flying over Wolfsegg from west to east.  Otherwise not a single sound is heard.  Absolute silence otherwise.  The huntsmen doff their hats, position themselves in front of the catafalque, remain [in position] until the sound of the airliner has [fallen] silent[,] and walk back outside the greenhouse.  The camera shows the huntsmen [as they] emerge from the greenhouse, their faces [are] in close-up.  The camera [is centered on] the gate of the grounds.  The Italian and the son are coming back into [the grounds and] towards [the camera after] their walk, one can hear [them] convers[ing], but one cannot understand a word [of their conversation], finally one hears the sentence: The land-surveyors are surveying everything, everything [is being] survey[ed] by the land-surveyors, spoken by the son.  Then in [the course of] the conversation all of a sudden the [names] Mazzini, Serrati, Campanella, then the [name] Modigliani, as the name Modigliani is spoken (by the Italian), the people standing on the grounds turn towards the two [men who have just entered them].  The son quite loudly says the word: opportunism.  The Italian [says] the words incalculable and catastrophe amid a stream of other words [that are] unintelligible, then he says the word catastrophe very slowly, [pronouncing] each syllable [independently], the two [men] draw to a halt and look at the ground and the Italian says pensively: ca-tas-tro-phe.  The people on the grounds turn away from the two [men].  The two men are now standing at the edge of the [mass of] cars that already fill[s] more than half the grounds.  Now the huntsmen emerging from the greenhouse are shown as they observe the son and new gentlemen thus in conversation with the Italian, they salute them, curtly bow, doff their hats, re-don their hats, the son returns their salutation, very curtly, the son and the Italian on the right, the huntsmen on the left, have [exchanged] salutations while walking from the greenhouse [and] without stopping.  The Italian and son walk towards the front door, the huntsmen, approaching the camera, exit through the gate of the grounds.  From the inn-complex comes the old lady [leaning] on the walking stick with the Spaniard on her arm.  One hears the Spaniard [uttering] a phrase in Spanish, basically just sin novedad en el frente, but [the sentence] is unintelligible.  The lady draws to a halt and [bursts into a] loud [peal of] laughter, but [then] immediately stops laughing.  The two remain standing [amid] the [mass of] cars, the cars now fill the entire area between the inn-complex [and the greenhouse], half the grounds.  The Spaniard kisses the old lady’s hand.  One hears [her say]: Señor!, then the lady returns to the inn-complex, [and] the Spaniard [joins the crowd of] people on the grounds.  The camera [presents an exterior view of] the front doorway [of the castle], through which the Italian and son are walking.  The Spaniard follows them in, but only when one can no longer see the figures who preceded him.  The camera remains [centered on] the front doorway, [as] the march [from down at] the Fairview Inn strik[es] up, the houseboy is standing in the doorway, continues standing in the doorway and picks his nose.  Now [one hears] a Bartók quartet (No. 3) playing very quietly [through] the Italian’s window, the window is opened, the music suddenly [becomes] loud, [the] march music and quartet music [are playing] at the same time very loud[ly], the camera [centers] on the people on the grounds, who are looking up at the Italian’s window.  The houseboy vanishes back into the castle.  The camera is stationed at the war memorial.  Almost the whole village square is filled with cars, [amid] the cars, from the statue of the Virgin Mary (up the [hill sloping down] towards Gaspoltshofen) a wooden cart with high wheels is being drawn by TWO MEN in work clothes (boiler suit[s], sailcloth caps on [their] head[s]), on [the cart] lies a stack of wreaths, lots of wreath-bows with inscriptions that are illegible, discernably [so].  The cart is being pushed by the two [men] into the center of the village square.  The men lean against the cart by way of [stopping it and] tak[ing] a break.  Out of the buildings [on the square] come [several] very old SENILE WOMEN and MEN, as if from the old people’s home, [they] walk up to the cart and run their fingers over the wreaths and bows as one would over objects of inestimable value.  The men observe the old people.  This scene [lasts] at least twenty-five seconds.  The men resume pushing the cart, towards the war memorial, past the war memorial, at this moment a large truck that is laden with wreaths, laden with hundreds of wreaths, comes up the [hill sloping down] towards Gaspholtshofen, [from] behind the statue of the Virgin Mary [and] towards the war memorial, the truck traverses the entire village square, [approaches and passes] the camera, [all] at a fairly quick pace.  The camera [is stationed] at the top of the gate of the grounds[, filming] a deputation from the VETERANS’ ASSOCIATION [who are carrying] black flags and are on their way up to the castle, the deputation are in mufti, [in their] ordinary weekday clothes.  The camera [centers] on the land-surveyor on the roof, who then looks down through his scope at the grounds, which are now well over halfway filled with cars, [with] a large number, [at any rate] at least eighty[,] men and women in black [standing among] them.  Through the land-surveyor’s scope, which is horizontally [oriented so as to take in] several tripods in the landscape, [tripods] through whose scopes [other] land-surveyors are looking at the castle, the camera shows the land-surveyor at the castle as he describes a complete horizontal circle [with the scope].  One gets the impression that the landscape [is permeated by] land-surveyors at work.  From the woods behind the inn-complex emerge the altar boys with a black CANOPY on which is embroidered a nine-pointed silver crown, they walk with the CANOPY as if in a procession, as if in a Corpus Christi procession, the camera [is looking out from the woods] at the two [boys] in front of the inn-complex (the back-side [of the inn-complex]).  A gunshot is fired, but the two altar boys do not react to it.  As if they [have] not heard the shot.  Fifteen or twenty paces in front of the inn-complex they encounter the old lady [leaning] on the walking-stick, just after the altar boys have passed her, the old lady turns towards them and then goes into the woods.  The camera [is stationed] at the head of the catafalque.  The sister [is] alone with her dead brother.  Standing fully erect, she is observing the corpse.  At the catafalque there are now stationed fourteen candles, seven on the right side, seven on the left, all of them [are] lit.  The sister has propped her hands up on the foot of the catafalque.  Fanny enters the greenhouse with the cushion for displaying medals, the sister places in front of the catafalque a small table that [has] been standing next to the platform and lays the cushion on it.  Now the sister pulls from her cardigan a white embroidered pocket handkerchief and sticks it into the breast pocket of the dead man’s Styrian suit.  She immediately sees that the pocket handkerchief does not look right [thrust] into the breast pocket of the Styrian suit [like that,] and she pulls the pocket handkerchief back out.  Suddenly she turns around and exits [the greenhouse], Fanny [follows] her.  The camera [is now looking] out from the front doorway [of the castle and] showing the sister approach[ing] the front doorway, behind her an immense crowd of people, [now much] closer [to the castle than before], the sister passes quickly through the doorway.  The camera [is looking] out from the front doorway at an approaching chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, an ENGLISH MARRIED COUPLE, elegantly but casually dressed, get out, from [within] the doorway the sister [approaches] the new arrivals, she embraces them, the lady has brought with her a large bouquet, which the chauffeur has been holding, now the chauffeur gives the lady the bouquet, the lady gives the bouquet to the sister, [there is a] second [round of] embracing, one cannot understand what is being said, [one knows that it consists of] a couple of words in English, but [one does not know] what [these] words [are], now the camera [is looking] from the grounds at the front doorway [of the castle], [which is now] suddenly [brushed against] by a broad [swath of] black velvet.  From the balcony a swath of black velvet at least a meter wide [now] hangs down over the front doorway.  The new arrivals are standing in the doorway as the Rolls Royce drives away, it circles back past the greenhouse, past the inn-complex, [and] through the gate of the grounds, on the other side of which are parked a good two-dozen cars, the chauffeur parks the car at the edge of this [group of] cars in front of the woods.  [Some YOUNG] BOYS are gaping in astonishment at the Rolls Royce, but they do not dare to approach [it].  The chauffeur gets out.  The camera [is centered] on the black velvet-swathed front doorway.  The English married couple [and] the sister enter the castle.  The camera [is centered] on the boys behind the inn-complex, who now venture to approach the Rolls Royce; from the sty next to the Rolls Royce the grunting of pigs [can be heard], [it is an] upsurge of noise [produced] by several pigs.  [The] camera is [stationed] between the kitchen and the foot of the staircase [and] pointed at the front doorway.  The English married couple [enter] the [foyer] with the sister.  The houseboy emerges from the kitchen, [passes] by them with an empty meat rack.[16]  The sister and the English married couple converse at the foot of the staircase, but one [can]not understand a word [of their conversation], but suddenly [one can make out] a single phrase [uttered] by the young wife: Poor Georg!  The sister leads the two of them up the stairs.  Now the camera [is looking] from the ground floor up at the [landing between the first and second floors], at which the sister and the married couple have halted [and] are conversing, the wife says: Poor Georg!  Then the camera [is centered] on the guests for the funeral [who are standing] on the grounds, who are collectively gazing at the castle.  Then the camera [cuts] from the guests for the funeral standing on the grounds to the front [of the castle and the] Italian’s open window out of which the quartet music suddenly [begins playing] very loudly.  The camera [is then stationed] behind the guests for the funeral and [pointed] at the front [of the castle], the guests for the funeral are like an impenetrable wall in front of the front [of the castle].  

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[1] =Wirtshaus Zur schönen Aussicht, literally, “Inn to the Fair Prospect”

[2] More literally, he “pulls” (zieht an) it: the mechanism is evidently rope-activated.

[3] About two miles south of Wolfsegg

[4] If in his own pocket, why “re-[=wieder] pocket”?  If in Altar Boy No. 1’s, yuck!

[5] =HIMMEL, literally “sky” or “heaven,” whence, I suppose, the reiterated uppercase characters

[6] perhaps a corrugated metal barricade, whence the noise

[7] =schautsweidakommts, evidently a rather over-the-top upper-Austrian dialectal modification-cum-contraction of standard German’s schau, dass du weiterkommt (see to it that you move farther off)

[8] =griasgood, evidently an upper-Austrian sub-dialectal modification of the already exclusively Austrian greeting, grüss‘ Gott  [“(May) God greet” {cf. (American-only?) English “God bless”}]

[9] About four miles southwest of Wolfsegg

[10] Or, possibly, “serum,” the usual translation in medical contexts.

[11] =servas, like grüss‘ Gott, an Austrian dialectal greeting 

[12] “rack...slung…over his shoulder”=Zöger, “a container for a bottle that one slings over one’s shoulder” according to one ElfriedeWondrusch  (who, to judge by certain orthographical liberties taken in her essay, is probably—though non certainly—an Austrian).  No, I don’t know if the conveyance of a heap of presumably unbottled meat in a Zöger constitutes a violation of its purpose, as Ms. Wondrusch’s is the only common-noun use of Zöger that I have yet managed to find. 

[13] i.e., presumably, inserts one hand palm-downwards into each of the two gaps between shoulder and suspender.

[14] But which window?  Presumably it has more than one.

[15] Indeed it has!

[16] “Meat rack”=Fleischzöger

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

Source: Der Italiener (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989)