Sound And Vision: Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: Alphaville's Middle of the Riddle, directed by Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein.
The case of Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein's music video for Alphaville's Middle of the Riddle is a curious one. As it is, to my knowledge, the only time a director's cut of a music video won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. The short proper is quite a bit longer and set to different music, but still, the premise and story is mostly the same.
For those who are unfamiliar with the twin directing duo Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein, they have had a kind of interesting career, going from artful shorts and a guest-directing stint on Tarsem's The Fall to commercial animated family fare like Luis and the Aliens, and Marnie's World a.k.a Spy Cat. Those latter two movies might not have set the world on fire, but there is some ambition to making CGI-animated movies on a relatively low budget out of their native Germany. Still, the Lauensteins on their own website seem to make a big distinction between their commercial work and their art films, the most famous of which is the aforementioned Balance.
The interesting thing about Balance versus Middle of the Riddle is that I couldn't quite verify which version came before. There are some sources that cite Middle of the Riddle as the original piece, while others call the music video a recut of Balance. I lean towards thinking Balance came first, cause the strict rules of the Academy would surely not have been kind to recuts of earlier material.
However you cut it, tho, the fact is that Middle of the Riddle and Balance were released in the same year. Alphaville, one of the biggest bands of the eighties, commissioned a group of diverse directors to make a music video for their album The Breathtaking Blue. The video album was called Songlines. Video albums had been made before, and would've been made after, but Alphaville brought a scope and ambition to the project that the world hadn't really seen before. Among the filmmakers were people from all around the world, including Alex Proyas, Susanne Bier (of After the Wedding and Bird Box-fame), Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi) and actor Alexander Kaidanovsky who most famously starred in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. The Lauenstein brothers, like Bier, were up-and-comers, showing that Alphaville certainly had a nose for talent.
In both Balance and Middle of the Riddle we follow a group of people, numbers on their clothes, on a platform floating mid-air in a white void. Every time one of them moves, another one has to counterbalance the others weights to keep the platform upright. Eventually they start fighting each other for a music box, essentially killing each other off one by one by throwing each other off the platform. The last person standing has to counterbalance the music box, forever out of its reach, if he wants to survive.
It is easy to see both Balance and Middle of the Riddle as metaphors for the power struggles in Europe and the rest of the world at the time. The Lauenstein brothers made this film in a still divided Germany during a cold war. It's hard not to see the film as a worst case scenario, a warning for a possible world ending war. Middle of the Riddle's lyrics fit quite well with the short, but the almost silent Balance has more staying power. Actually hearing the music box in Balance makes a huge difference in how much impact it has. While the truncated running time of Middle of the Riddle and the faster pace also has its upsides, the almost glacial pace of Balance makes it more haunting. It is not hard to see why the Academy flocked towards this one and chose it as a winner for the Oscar. Still, to see Middle of the Riddle almost being erased from collective memory in favor of Balance is a bit disappointing. Both versions have their own tone and pace, and without the push by Alphaville Balance might not have ever been as big. One cannot exist without the other, not unlike the people in the short.
