Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness transforms a piece of music into a visual and examines the role of humans in this performance of sound and light. After a prologue in which composer and conductor Beat Furrer is shown obtaining and arranging a score by Schumann, its performance is the film's actual theme: As the notes pass through the picture, the musicians of the Klangforum Wien ensemble appear and disappear according to their acoustic contribution. The result is choreography of sound, and the music's transience and vastness is turned into a ballet of bodies which, somewhere between presence and absence, commemorates the instability of being as a dialectic micro-spectacle.