| Summary: | Alban Berg's opera Lulu, dating from the early part of the twentieth century, and Tom Tykwer's film from the end of the century, Lola rennt, (known to English-speaking audiences as Run Lola Run), have one striking feature in common: both culminate in an ear-splitting scream. At first glance, these two works appear poles apart in time, genre and cultural context, although both are Teutonic in origin. Berg's "high-art" opera, based on the serial techniques of the Schoenberg school of composition, derives from Frank Wedekind's fin-de-siècle Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. By contrast, Tykwer's film is an end-of-millennium "art-house" film that, on its release, quickly became a cult movie in Germany and beyond; fast-paced, visually and technically innovative, and backed by a driving techno soundtrack, its resonances with many aspects of video games and hypermedia position it as a text that heralds the twenty-first century. This article will explore how the screams (marking points of transformation at the denouement of each of these early and late twentieth-century works) are very different.
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