Between Sound and Image Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jeline

Wien Modern [ENA] Olga Neuwirth’s musical imagination extends beyond the concert hall. On 4 November 2026, Vienna’s Österreichisches Filmmuseum presents three short films revealing her engagement with moving images and her longstanding artistic dialogue with Elfriede Jelinek. Beginning at 18:00, this Wien Modern event offers a welcome opportunity to encounter a less familiar dimension of the composer’s work.

“Das Fallen. Die Falle.” (2012) brings together Neuwirth’s photographs, film material and music with Jelinek’s text, spoken by the author and Sophie Rois. The photographs originated during Neuwirth’s daily composing in a Broadway apartment in New York; Lillevan supplies the film montage. This conjunction of domestic observation, literary voice and musical construction suggests an intimate exploration of how creative work inhabits everyday space. From a contemporary-music perspective, the fascination lies in the relationship between media. Rather than assuming that sound merely accompanies an image, the programme invites audiences to consider how listening and looking shape one another.

“Die Schöpfung” (2010) approaches artistic authorship through an ironic feminist question: can women create art within a male creation? Drawing on Jelinek and the Old Testament, its animation, textual fragments and image collage also examine the nature of time-based art. The ten-minute film promises intellectual sharpness without surrendering theatrical playfulness. A contrasting atmosphere emerges in “… durch Luft und Meer …” (2007), a 33-minute musical video essay documenting Neuwirth’s exploration of Arctic waters. Its contemplative audiovisual space presents the sea’s beauty, wildness and fragility. Together, these films propose listening as a way of seeing.