21/6/2019 Excerpt: Straub and Huillet Go to the Museum - Film Comment

Excerpt: Straub and Huillet Go to the

Museum
By Film Comment (/author/film-comment/) on May 17, 2016

e below text appears in a forthcoming volume of writings by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, edited by
Sally Sha o and available from Sequence Press later this month. It was rst published as “Témoignage d’une
artiste: Pas mal de colères accumulées…” in Nuances: bulletin d’information de l’Association pour le Respect de
l’Intégrité du Patrimoine Artistique (Issy-les-Moulineaux), no. 3-4 (April 1994). Translation by Ted Fendt and
Sally Sha o. Reprinted with permission.

(http://fgmxi4acxur9qbg31y9s3a15-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/05/Moses-
und-Aron.png)

Moses and Aaron

QUITE A LOT OF PENT-UP ANGER…

January 3, 1994

Returning from a rather long journey, we found the rst issue of Nuances, for which we thank you. Nowadays
it is rare to read concrete, precise, documented—and impassioned—things. ank you. But how depressing at
the same time!

In 1975 we did a tour of the USA, where we were invited because our lm Moses and Aaron was playing at the
New York Film Festival and some universities asked us to come with some lms. We chose these universities
based on museums where Cézannes were to be found, and that’s how we saw for the rst time those of the
Barnes Foundation that we have just seen again, in part, at the [Musée d’] Orsay. We had to hitchhike to get
back into the city because it’s true that there is very little public transportation that services the area around
the foundation, but we were happy to have nally found a museum where it was considered normal for
people to come to the paintings—which can always be achieved, if you really want to, even with hardly any
money (we’re the proof!)—and not the paintings to the people. at’s something that’s all over with; as well as

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the refusal of reproductions, which certainly makes sense, since it’s a tru e (“a fraud”), as the Italians say, to
make people think they have “seen” (and thus taken possession of) a painting, when without the matter, they
have only a shadow, a piece of information.

At the Orsay, when we were preparing our lm Cézanne, on August 15, 1989, we saw a piece of gum stuck to a
Cézanne. I looked for half an hour for a watchman (excuse me, a security guard!) to let him know, my heart
pounding because I was afraid of starting an avalanche: “protective” glass on the paintings… Once he was
found, he told us he couldn’t do anything, only a conservator could take the thing o …. Eight days later, the
gum was still there.

Back in 1975, the rst thing we did upon arriving in New York was to go to the Museum of Modern Art to
see… Cézanne: a dazzling experience, and an exhausting one, too, because you can’t sit, and several hours
standing, in deep concentration, to look, is tiring. Coming back from our tour all over the country, we had a
day before our return ight, so we went back to MoMA, where we didn’t recognize our Cézanne. It was
horrible: each painting was now under armored glass, and o en damaged in the process (new little cracks,
etc.).When we protested this madness, saying that it’s better to risk a—rare—act of madness than to make the
paintings invisible—re ections, etc.—and surely damage them, we were told, grudgingly: It was a
requirement of the insurance…

You also know, I suppose, that the paintings in the Tate Gallery, in London, travel almost nonstop between
there and the “branch” in… Liverpool! Facilitated by privatization. All the paintings are therefore under glass,
completely invisible because the Tate doesn’t have enough money to pay for antire ective glass. e Basel
Museum is the only “public” museum among those that we visited and where we lmed for Cézanne, where
the protective glass is (almost) invisible, where the light is correct (as with the Tuileries, thanks to the light
from the windows and the Seine), and where the paintings are hung straight, horizontally, and not tilting to
the le or tilting to the right… […]

In 1959, when we were preparing Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, we saw, at the Staatsbibliothek in East
Berlin, Bach’s manuscripts and scores, in particular the huge score decoratively handwritten by him, with the
Cantus rmus in red, of the St. Matthew Passion. When we nally managed to get the money together to make
the lm, in 1966-67, we went back to see the scores again. ere, too, we didn’t recognize them—what had
happened? We were told that in order to protect the scores, they had been glued to canvas, forgetting that in
the glue there was an acid that “ate” the paper. “But,” they added, “it’s not too serious; we have the micro lm…”

Only, when the narrow-mindedness and the arrogance of a class and a century that believes itself to be
“scienti c” and more intelligent than prior centuries, and that is incapable of foreseeing the consequences and
calculating the risks of its ventures in every domain is combined with the greed (or power) that leads
Monsieur, for example, to consider the works of art brought together by Barnes as capital that must, by
de nition, return a greater value (and this goes for all the directors of state museums pushed by privatization,
which is the equivalent of vandalizing common goods by the same bourgeoisie and by so-called promotional
necessity); well, this is unrestrained pillaging and vandalizing. We cut the banana trees to eat the bananas and,
a er us, the Deluge.

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And I’m not even talking about what is happening in our eld, still so young, the famous “restorations” of
lms—the refusal of any patina, because of the idiotic and arrogant idea that you can act as if time has not
passed!

Danièle Straub-Huillet, lmmaker

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