ABSTRACT
Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 1982 film La Guerre d’un seul homme is based on Ernst Jünger’s Journaux Parisiens and imagines, through original video footage, the scenarios recounted by Jünger. The film negotiates a series of moral binaries, in which we are invited to question both the extent to which Jünger is attempting to side step the moral dilemmas of the period whilst also recurrently drawing attention to them. Similarly, the music deployed in the film invites the same kind of dual questioning. Cozarinsky uses only pre-existing music by composers whom he feels are linked to the war. Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner he labels as ‘Aryan’ composers whereas the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schreker is categorised as ‘degenerate’, loosely parodying the notion of ‘Entartete Kunst’ proposed by the Nazis. This chapter will examine the ways in which this music is used cinematically as two juxtaposing aesthetic forces. Its use here as film music rather than concert music and also carrying an ideological weight emphasised by Cozarinsky’s two category types, builds on a reception of this music that has endured throughout much of the twentieth century.
