The process of watching Moses and Aaron (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1975) can be a frustrating one. Adapting an opera by Arnold Schönberg, this movie refuses, for half of its runtime, to move. The narrative is one of the most dramatic (and most often-adapted) in the Bible—the story of the Exodus and the golden calf. The story-beats are recognizable: Moses, with Aaron acting as his mouthpiece, goes to Egypt and demands the release of the Children of Israel. After signs and plagues, they leave Egypt and head to Mount Sinai, where Moses ascends to receive the Law of God. While Moses is absent, Aaron makes a golden calf so that the people can have something to see. Moses returns, destroys the calf, and rebukes Aaron. And fin.
It’s an undeniably dramatic story, much of which is given appropriately epic scope in Prince of Egypt—another film on this list. But Moses and Aaron stubbornly refuses to give its audience drama. Instead, we are presented with a group of singers standing in a desolated open-air theater, singing at each other (well, chanting for Moses and singing for Aaron). It is not until Moses ascends Mount Sinai and Aaron creates the golden calf that any real motion enters this motion picture. And then, suddenly, there is motion—dancing, running, some violence, some sex. The children of Israel exhibit life in a way they never have before. And then Moses returns, and all this motion comes to a stop once more.
Moses and Aaron is not a crowd-pleaser, but it rewards patience. The conflict here is between the ideal and the image, and the resolution is not as neat as other adaptations (or, perhaps, the Biblical narrative itself) would suggest. Though the film follows the basic outlines of the Exodus, in practice it is startlingly subversive. Moses insists that the people believe only in the unseen God—a belief in a Deity who is abstract and distant. The first half of the film is Moses’s half: there is no drama, there is no action. There is only pure belief in the ideal. Aaron, on the other hand, believes that people need image. They need something like art to approach the transcendent. It is telling, then, that life only really enters the film once Moses, with his stark abstract faith, vanishes and Aaron is able to introduce the image to Israelite worship. True, not all of the results are positive, but it feels at any rate like real humanity rather than stark belief.
In a way, Aaron becomes the true hero of the film. Though the story ends—as it must, given its Biblical origins—with Moses once more triumphant, the film does not allow Aaron to repent. Instead, it presents viewers with a dilemma, a tension between Moses’ pure insistence on an idea that transcends the image (and his belief that the image can only enslave) and Aaron’s belief that the image must exist to convey the transcendent. The point here is less the answer than the question. By engaging in the struggle of making it through an epic story that refuses to speak in an epic register, viewers are forced to confront their own attitudes toward faith and life. Moses gets the last word, but viewers are left to ask—is the anti-aesthetic of Moses, as it is presented in the first half of the film, really preferable to the alternative offered by his brother? Could it be that there is something off-putting and lifeless about committing to a pure Idea? Or does the Idea offer its on elevated pleasures?
Do we even want to take the time to find out? — Nathanael T. Booth (2026)
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