16mm silent, which meant three-minute camera rolls, a laboratory, an editing table, some way of adding sound—everything that you have now right inside a little case that fits in your hand. A little lesson in modesty for the spoiled children of today, just like the spoiled children of 1970 got their lesson in modesty by putting themselves under the patronage of Alexander Ivanovitch Medvedkin and his ciné-train. For the benefit of the younger generation, Medvedkin was a Russian filmmaker who, in 1936 and with the means that were proper to his time (35mm film, editing table, and film lab installed in the train), essentially invented television: shoot during the day, print and edit at night, show it the next day to the people you filmed (and who oftenreleased a new recording by Viktor Ullman. Under his name alone, this time. Previously, he and Gideon Klein had been recorded as “Theresienstadt composers” (for younger readers: Theresienstadt was the model concentration camp designed to be visited by the Red Cross; the Nazis made a film about it called The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.) With the best intentions in the world, [calling them] that was a way of putting them both back in the camp. If Messiaen had died after he composed the “Quartet for the End of Time,” would he be the “prison camp composer”?

This record is astounding: it contains lieder based on texts by Holerlin and Rilke, and one is struck by the vertiginous thought that, at that particular time, no one was