Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub

What is distinctive about Straub-Huillet’s film as a matter-form compound is that it is a political film – not as a genre, but in a peculiar understanding that amounts to Straub-Huillet’s conception and operation of cinema. “There is no political film without morality, there is no political film without theology, there is no political film without mysticism.”

All we can do is try to do our job as well as we can – but that too is so stupid, to have to fight for a film not to be ruined, considering how many other (more important?) things – people – we ought to be fighting for. And yet you must fight for a film “pour ne pas céder”. Godard claims that you don’t last long on your own, but maybe that’s all you can do: hold out as long as you can…

From the time you are born, your eyes are open, and you see everything for the first time. The older you get, the less you are surprised by things. But things have not changed, it is just you who have changed, things can still be very surprising. It is such a pity that we are losing the perception of how surprising things are. I believe that in Huillet and Straub’s films, you are given back the feeling of a surprising world. To see the things that are in front of you becomes completely incredible.

Shots like this may not commonly be considered as examples of the plan straubien, but the numbers shown on screen possess the same incontestable reality to them, the same évidence. Like the monuments, streets and fields elsewhere in the film, they are there. Behind these figures – as much as the Zionist movement may try to deny it, and as much as anybody expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause may be harassed, politically ostracised and baselessly slandered as antisemitic – lies the trauma suffered by an entire people.

Indeed, what is called new music today has become decontextualized from tradition and history, endlessly grasping at fashionable trends, and is ultimately marching off a cliff. “Once you’ve hammered into people the idea that only what is contemporary and modern exists, be it economic fashions or the supposed political or moral coercions, then it gets to the point where the human being believes he lives better than anyone has ever lived before or ever could live. No movement occurs anymore.” For Huillet and Straub, Von heute auf morgen is “a declaration of war” against modernization to reaffirm the possibility for something truly new, indeed a new music of which Schoenberg would have been proud.

Gilles Deleuze remarked that your image is a “stone” and your take is a “tomb”. The earth is abandoned and yet, as it were, it is filled with generations of corpses. When, for example, towards the end of Operai, contadini, you make a long sweeping pan across the hillside, the physical space comes across as being strangely humanised in the light of what was said beforehand. The hillside seems to be populated by people. Hence history becomes the humanization of nature. What is “human” in this panning shot, and what is “nature”?

Where, during this “visit to the Louvre,” fifteen years after Cézanne (1989), is the painter whom Gilles Deleuze called “the Straubs’ master”? He is neither in the museum nor the series of paintings that make up this particular visit. Yet he occupies a central place through the text that a voice-over reads aloud; a material that could not be more impure, composed of memories, perforated with borrowed quotations, invented expressions, and passages of pure fiction in indirect style.

It would be foolish to call this picture minimalist, for even if its rich sound (a baby cries on the line “…the collective hate” in version A) were turned off, one could be fascinated by the violent changes of color in wardrobe and sunlight, here effected by jump cuts – yet another cinematographic vein Straub has tapped for both sudden and gradual excitation. Fascination, magic, and belief are part of Huillet/Straub’s cinema, too, occurring amid their total opposite – analysis, critical faculty, errant thought – and back again. One may feel upon leaving the theater a sharpening of the senses.

Straub, who devoted his life to the voicing of German, French, Italian, and English words (and their relationship to place), must be a fellow traveller. One cannot induce divine or communist photosynthesis, but one can put words into motion. Modestly and with maximum attention, this is what Passerone and Straub do with these verses. For a few minutes they dwell on the supreme moment of illumination, asking us to match the concentration of the poet and of the speaker.

In its sudden and raw appearance in 2011, Schakale und Araber felt both a “weapon of criticism” (of humanity) and a “criticism of the weapon” (video). Straub deliberately shot against the light. The sun is not sweet here but burning, the air not full but suffocating. White phosphorus, video voltage. For maybe the first time in Huillet/Straub the hoarseness of the medium passed into the material, even if to serve the subject.

Jean-Marie Straub, a fighter of images and sounds, chose a paragraph corresponding to the beginning of Bernanos’ pamphlet. He did not change a word. He used two versions of the same shot, each with full credits. At the start of the first version, twilight, a swan accompanies actor Christophe Clavert as he walks along the lake reciting Bernanos’ text, and then it disappears. At the end of the second version, brighter, a swan appears, passes the motionless actor, and drifts off to the left. The swans are among us, Nature will prevail, and the film offers this final gesture of unprecedented optimism – perhaps so that we can carry on, that is to say, fight, just a little longer.

That encounters bring forth art is not exceptional, but a moral law being extracted from chance is: contingency brings forth an ethical imperative from which the artist cannot escape, “because this tree was also Antigone”. Straub and Huillet took this imperative seriously, an imperative that may seem absurd (why not plant a tree yourself wherever necessary?) but is at the same time perfectly logical: if the main character (not the actor!) dies before the filming starts, then the film can no longer be realised.