University of Iowa

Iowa Research Online

Theses and Dissertations

Fall 2011

Elective affinities: the films of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie

Straub
Claudia Alexandra Pummer
University of Iowa

Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd

Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons

Copyright © 2011 Claudia Pummer

This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2761

Recommended Citation
Pummer, Claudia Alexandra. "Elective affinities: the films of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub." PhD
(Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2011.
https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.8j5oobaz

Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd

Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons
 ELECTIVE AFFINITIES:

THE FILMS OF DANIÈLE HUILLET AND JEAN-MARIE STRAUB

by
Claudia Alexandra Pummer

An Abstract

Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Film Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

December 2011

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Lauren Rabinovitz

 1

ABSTRACT

This study examines the collaborative work of the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and

Jean-Marie Straub (1962-2006) in respect to current and future formations of political

avant-garde filmmaking. Throughout their joint career the Marxist filmmakers

understood their work as part of an ongoing effort to participate in the class struggle,

despite of an overall decline in faith regarding revolutionary politics. Straub-Huillet

pursued social and political change not simply on the level of filmic content, but rather by

employing specific formal techniques on the basis of a distinct practice of creative labor.

In order to delineate this practice, I am engaging in poststructuralist discourses

that will be discussed alongside traditional forms of Marxist-oriented critical theories in

an attempt to replace metaphysical paradigms with an aporetic structure that is

affirmative of difference, rather than identity.

For instance, based on the notion of an elective affinity, Straub-Huillet's film

adaptations challenge traditional forms of cinematic authorship and collaboration. Instead

of simply referencing other authors, Straub-Huillet allow the author to enter and

intervene in the film-text. This creative relationship is characterized by an act of

resistance that is established by an adaptation practice based on direct quotations. The

quotation and recital of other works introduces a principle of repetition and reproduction

into the films that defines the couple's filmmaking process as a practice of creative labor.

The textual figure of the border draws out further how this practice gives rise to new

understandings of cinema in regard to nation, culture, and history. Figurations of ruins

outline, in addition, how these issues pertain at once to the necessity and to the limits of

representation.

This points, in conclusion, to the difficulty of reinventing images that have not

already been incorporated into the mainstream; a central dilemma affecting all political

filmmaking practices. Straub-Huillet's work addresses this problem in a specific way. The
 2

couple works toward the production of cinematic images by envisioning a (future)

revolutionary event on the basis of a deliberate return to a classical genealogy.

Abstract Approved: ____________________________________

Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________
Title and Department

____________________________________
Date
 ELECTIVE AFFINITIES:

THE FILMS OF DANIÈLE HUILLET AND JEAN-MARIE STRAUB

by
Claudia Alexandra Pummer

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Film Studies
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

December 2011

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Lauren Rabinovitz

 Copyright by

Claudia Alexandra Pummer

2011

All Rights Reserved

 Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

_______________________

PH.D. THESIS

_______________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Claudia Alexandra Pummer

has been approved by the Examining Committee

for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Film Studies at the December 2011 graduation.

Thesis Committee: __________________________________

Lauren Rabinovitz, Thesis Supervisor

__________________________________
Rosalind Galt

__________________________________
Nataša Durovicová

__________________________________
Astrid Oesmann

__________________________________
Tom Lewis
 ABSTRACT

This study examines the collaborative work of the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and

Jean-Marie Straub (1962-2006) in respect to current and future formations of political

avant-garde filmmaking. Throughout their joint career the Marxist filmmakers

understood their work as part of an ongoing effort to participate in the class struggle,

despite of an overall decline in faith regarding revolutionary politics. Straub-Huillet

pursued social and political change not simply on the level of filmic content, but rather by

employing specific formal techniques on the basis of a distinct practice of creative labor.

In order to delineate this practice, I am engaging in poststructuralist discourses

that will be discussed alongside traditional forms of Marxist-oriented critical theories in

an attempt to replace metaphysical paradigms with an aporetic structure that is

affirmative of difference, rather than identity.

For instance, based on the notion of an elective affinity, Straub-Huillet's film

adaptations challenge traditional forms of cinematic authorship and collaboration. Instead

of simply referencing other authors, Straub-Huillet allow the author to enter and

intervene in the film-text. This creative relationship is characterized by an act of

resistance that is established by an adaptation practice based on direct quotations. The

quotation and recital of other works introduces a principle of repetition and reproduction

into the films that defines the couple's filmmaking process as a practice of creative labor.

The textual figure of the border draws out further how this practice gives rise to new

understandings of cinema in regard to nation, culture, and history. Figurations of ruins

outline, in addition, how these issues pertain at once to the necessity and to the limits of

representation.

This points, in conclusion, to the difficulty of reinventing images that have not

already been incorporated into the mainstream; a central dilemma affecting all political

filmmaking practices. Straub-Huillet's work addresses this problem in a specific way. The

ii
couple works toward the production of cinematic images by envisioning a (future)

revolutionary event on the basis of a deliberate return to a classical genealogy.

iii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF FIGURES........................................................................................................vi


INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1


The Letters of Venice: Inscriptions of a Filmmaking Practice........................3


Straub-Huillet in Film History and Criticism...................................................8

Post-Theory, Post-Politics ..............................................................................21

Toward a (new) Critique of Political Cinema ................................................22

Notes...............................................................................................................28


CHAPTER ONE: ELECTIVE AFFINITIES ....................................................................34


La Politique des Auteurs ................................................................................38


The Politics of the German Autorenfilm.........................................................42

The Kluge-Straub Debate ...............................................................................47

Collaborations: Mallarmé and the New Munich Group ................................51

Love................................................................................................................55

Notes...............................................................................................................60


CHAPTER TWO: LABOR ...............................................................................................64


From Text to Practice .....................................................................................66


The Rehearsal Scene.......................................................................................71

Theater and the Social ....................................................................................78

Cinematography: The Train and the Factory..................................................84

Montage: Assemblage ....................................................................................91

The Hidden Smile...........................................................................................96

Notes.............................................................................................................100


CHAPTER THREE: THE BORDER ..............................................................................104


The Border as Double Bind..........................................................................106


Border Biography .........................................................................................109

Views Across the Rhine ...............................................................................112

Border Archaeology and Corneille's Radical Return ...................................117

Speaking One's Native Language in a Foreign Tongue ...............................122

Fortress Europe.............................................................................................126

Notes.............................................................................................................131


CHAPTER FOUR: THE RUINS.....................................................................................134


Modernism vs. Realism ................................................................................138


Allegorical Ruins..........................................................................................140

The Phenomenology of the Cinematographic Ruin-Image ..........................148

Political Action after Auschwitz ..................................................................155

The Invisible Ruins.......................................................................................164

Notes.............................................................................................................171

iv
CONCLUSION: THE OLD AND THE NEW................................................................176


Notes.............................................................................................................187


APPENDIX A: FIGURES..............................................................................................188


APPENDIX B: STRAUB-HUILLET – WORK / ADAPTATION.................................194


The Films, 1962-2006 ..................................................................................194


Selected Scripts and Special Editions of Adapted Works ............................196


BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................197


v
 TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1 The Letters of Venice (2006) ............................................................................188


Figure 2 Truffaut and Straub, November 1954 ...............................................................188


Figure 3 Straub's Letter to Kluge (1976) .........................................................................189


Figure 4 Handwritten manuscripts in The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

(1967)......................................................................................................................189


Figure 5 The first draft of the script for Class Relations (1983) .....................................190


Figure 6 The second draft of the script for Class Relations (1983).................................190


Figure 7 Repetitions: Sicilia! (1994) (top), These Encounters of Theirs (2005)

(bottom) ..................................................................................................................191


Figure 8 Nature and Text: Workers, Peasants (2000) .....................................................191


Figure 9 Machorka-Muff (1962): Views across the Rhine. Machorka-Muff's POV

(left) and the Rhine viewed from the Petersberg Hotel (right)...............................192


Figure 10 The Border in Othon (1969)............................................................................192


Figure 11 The Border in Lothringen! (1994)...................................................................193


Figure 12 The "German Corner" in Lothringen! (1994) .................................................193


vi
 1

INTRODUCTION

On October 9, 2006, filmmaker Danièle Huillet passed away at age 70 in the

French town of Cholet. Her sudden death prematurely ended a fifty-year period of

collaboration with partner and co-director Jean-Marie Straub. One month earlier, Straub-

Huillet, as the two filmmakers are usually referred to, had screened their final feature-

length film These Encounters of Theirs (2006) at the 63rd Venice Film Festival. In

addition, the couple received a "Special Lion" award for their contributions to "the

innovation in the language of cinema." The honor was, however, overshadowed by a

scandal that erupted in light of a statement Straub had written in lieu of the couple's

attendance at the festival. The statement was part of three letters – handwritten, typed,

and signed by Straub – that were distributed as photocopies to the press (see Figure 1).

Giovanna Daddi, one of the actresses in These Encounters, read Straub's letters during the

film's official press conference. The third letter ended with the following words:

I wouldn't be able to be festive in a festival where there are so

many public and private police looking for a terrorist. I am that
terrorist, and I tell you, paraphrasing Franco Fortini: so long as
there's American imperialistic capitalism, there'll never be enough
terrorists in the world."1

The statement provoked an outrage in the Italian press and among festivalgoers,

especially since the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was just around the corner. Some

critics objected to awarding Straub-Huillet with a special prize. The festival jury had to

reconvene, but decided nonetheless to honor Straub-Huillet's work.

The reactions to Straub's "publicity stunt" are representative of Straub-Huillet's

lifelong struggle to position themselves creatively and politically within a cultural

domain infused with the corporate and industrial structures of global capitalism. Straub

addresses the dilemma explicitly in his three letters: even though he thanks festival

director Marco Müller "for his courage" to screen and honor the couple's work, Straub
 2

calls the late recognition as having "come too soon for our death – too late for our life."2

Written apparently under the direct impression of Huillet's rapidly failing health at the

time, Straub makes clear that the gesture of support leaves him with no prospect: "what

do I expect from it? Nothing. Nothing at all," he writes.3 Yet by the next sentence

Straub's tone begins to lose its initial weariness. Perhaps, he wonders, it is "a small

revenge … 'against the intrigues of the court,' as is said in [Jean Renoir's] The Golden

Coach. Against so many ruffians."4 Straub speaks about the fact that the couple's work

has consistently been ignored at a festival that is rather known for its star-studded

extravaganzas and tight security policies. The second letter chronicles Straub-Huillet's

previous encounters with the Venice film festival. In addition, Straub articulates his

critique against the mechanisms of the culture industry with the help of another author,

the Italian writer Cesare Pavese on whose novel These Encounters is based on. "Why

Pavese?," writes Straub:

Because he wrote: "Communist doesn't mean just wanting to be.

We're too ignorant in this country. We need communists who aren't
ignorant, who don't spoil the name." Or again: "If once it was
enough to have a bonfire to make it rain, or to burn a vagabond on
one to save a harvest, how many owners' houses need to be burnt
down, how many owners killed in the streets and squares, before
the world turns just and we have our words to say?" …
[And] elsewhere: … "First, the government should burn up all the
money and the people who defend it."5

These words testify, first of all, to Straub-Huillet's lasting commitment to Marxist

politics and, more precisely, to the fact that the two filmmakers identify their own work

as part of a continuous effort to participate in the class struggle. As professional

filmmakers the couple understands its own contributions toward social and political

change in regard to the specific institutional and industrial parameters of cinematic

production, distribution, and exhibition. Moreover, Straub transcribes the violence

inherent in Pavese's words into the formal structure of the letters. In their artisanal

simplicity (the written quotations, the oratory recital, and the manual reproduction of the
 3

photocopies), the letters function as a direct attack against the slick professionalism of a

festival-machinery that is mainly structured around flashy photo ops and red carpet

events. The letters' political significance derives, in this regard, not simply from the

"provocative" wording, but rather from a specific technique of adopting Pavese's call for

social upheaval into a formal counter-practice. This practice is identical to the techniques

of composition and production that define Straub-Huillet's filmmaking.

The Letters of Venice:

Inscriptions of a Filmmaking Practice

Straub-Huillet's approach to filmmaking is similarly based on a distinct method of

adaptation that involves elements of transcription, recital, and quotation as well as an

episodic, fragmentary, and inter-textual structure. Straub's intervention at the Venice Film

Festival occurs on the basis of inviting two other authors – Pavese and Fortini – to

intervene with his own writing. In both cases, the Italian writers resume roles they

already embodied in earlier film adaptations. Both These Encounters of Theirs and the

1978-production From the Clouds to the Resistance are based on Pavese's writings,

which means, the films' entire dialogue is composed of direct quotations from two of his

novels.6 Franco Fortini's autobiographical novel The Dogs of Sinai functioned similarly

as the main dialouge, recited by Fortini himself, in Straub-Huillet's 1976-adaptation

Fortini/Cani.

From the first short-film Machorka-Muff in 1962 to the 2006 scandal in Venice,

Straub-Huillet's work provoked a number of public outcries that erupted especially on the

basis of the couple's formal rigor, an aspect that contributed to the French-born

filmmakers' reputations as radical, austere, and pedantic. However, the political

dimension of Straub-Huillet's work is not only an issue of formal composition. The

political aspect in Straub-Huillet's cinema derives rather on the basis of concrete work
 4

relations that give the films their ultimate form. These relations operate within, across,

and outside of the film-texts.

To be more precise, Jean-Luc Godard's dictum "to make films politically"

acquires in regard to Straub-Huillet's filmmaking practice a quite distinct meaning.7

Instead of simply revealing self-critically the material structures and conditions of a

film's making with the help of a universal set of distanciation and counter-cinema

strategies, Straub-Huillet developed their approach to cinematic materialism on the basis

of concrete encounters and experiences. A foundational impact lies, for instance, in the

specific context of 1950s Parisian (film) culture, while another one involves the couple's

experiences as émigré filmmakers in West Germany and Italy. On the grounds of these

specific conditions and relationships with others, Straub-Huillet produce images that

work in anticipation of a radical turn toward change. This kind of political expectation

pertains on the level of creative practices to the creation of the new, produced by an

unforeseen incident, a formal interference of an event marked by radical difference.

My conceptualization of this revolutionary principle is largely informed by

poststructuralist critical practices, developed within so-called theories of deconstruction

and French feminism (namely the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Julia

Kristeva). I am setting these theoretical practices in relation to postmodern European

continental philosophy, especially the work of Gilles Deleuze (but including,

furthermore, writings by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, and

Francois Lyotard).8 To correlate these theoretical approaches to established notions of

Marxist and materialist theory, i.e., to read these French philosophers alongside a range

of materialist thinkers (e.g. Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, and the members of the Frankfurt

School, but also Soviet-realist filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein) is not only a matter of

personal taste, but results rather directly from my own elective relationship to Straub-

Huillet.9
 5

The couple's work consists, in other words, of certain conceptual underpinnings

that must be seen in the context of Straub-Huillet's roots in postwar French culture,

cinema, and criticism, an affiliation that is all too often ignored in light of the bulk of

scholarship on the French filmmakers' work, such as, the discourses of New German

Cinema and Brechtian film theory. I am identifying Straub-Huillet's work instead much

stronger as part of a lineage connecting postwar French realism with continental

poststructuralism.10 Doing so means, among other things, to argue for a historical

redefinition of Straub-Huillet's contribution to a singular concept of national, especially

postwar German, cinema.

My reasons for mobilizing poststructuralist theories that privilege deconstruction

and difference over a structuralist, materialist dialectics that informed canonical readings

of Straub-Huillet's work as political cinema respond to two fundamental crises that

threatened to undermine the currency of so-called political avant-garde cinema, in

general, and of Straub-Huillet's work, in particular: The first impasse results from a

conception of film-texts as metaphysical, formalist, and finite textual systems. The

poststructuralist underpinnings operating in Straub-Huillet's work make it possible to

deconstruct a dialectic that relies on fixed notions of inside vs. outside, subject vs. object,

modernism vs. realism, or being vs. non-being and reconfigures them, instead, by way of

a marker of hyphenation that links and divides at once the oppositional paradigms. I am

employing poststructuralist discourses furthermore in order to combat the overall sense of

disillusionment that affected radical, political concepts within film theory by the late

eighties. Based on relationships that are first and foremost defined by difference and

indeterminateness, these theories have the potential to formulate concrete political

statements that contribute to the continuity of a Marxist agenda.11

Straub-Huillet's work is informed by the couple's lifelong commitment to two

fundamental principles in Marxist thought: first, the achievement of radical, revolutionary

change is not only considered possible, but remains – in light of ongoing global structures
 6

of inequality – a fundamental and indispensible task to pursue. Second, the relations and

confrontations among different class positions are central to the production of social and

political change. Straub-Huillet incorporate this function of the class struggle into their

films not only as a narrative motif but also by way of a particular engagement with other

collaborators that interact and intervene in the films on the basis of the couple's unique

practice of direct literary (but sometimes also, musical or pictorial) quotations.

This dissertation treats these encounters within and across Straub-Huillet's films

as concrete manifestations of their production modes and labor relations. It expands ways

in which a Marxist and materialist film critique is usually applied as either about the

film-texts' inner workings or about specific institutional and economic frameworks in

which the films were produced. In such critical applications, the historical-materialist

underpinnings that define the social realm are held as distinct from the material

conditions and relations constituted by the text. I approach Straub-Huillet's work instead

as a mode of thought that the two filmmakers develop out of concrete social relations and

production conditions. The concept of the political that appears in the filmic images

produced by Straub-Huillet is, in this regard, a proposition, "an idea in cinema," as Gilles

Deleuze calls it: the production of an image that shows how a politics (of the future)

could look like.12

Straub-Huillet's cinema as a system of thought is undeniably grounded in concrete

historical-material conditions associated with the institutional and cultural framework of

European avant-garde cinema in the late twentieth century (with its historical shifts in

funding conditions and exhibition practices). But whereas Straub-Huillet share such basic

conditions as funding criteria or audience restrictions with many other political and/or

European avant-garde filmmakers of their generation, their work differs nonetheless from

the work of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, or Peter Gidal. Each

offers distinct concepts of the political by way of his filmmaking practice. Political

practice is therefore less an effect of budgetary concerns or formal techniques than a

 7

filmmaker's way of addressing and positioning himself vis-à-vis his material, his

collaborators, and his audience.

This dissertation takes as its foundation an auteurist approach insofar as it defines

Straub-Huillet as producers of a distinct theory of politics and labor, a theory that finds

expression not simply in the formal makeup of the films, but rather in the way in which

Straub-Huillet's filmic images give form to larger concepts and ideas. This mode of

reading Straub-Huillet's films is not necessarily compatible with previous auteurist

studies of the couple's work. In fact, the first two chapters of this dissertation provide a

number of examples of questioning rather than consolidating Straub-Huillet's canonical

status as "typical" auteurs of the European avant-garde. This challenges by extension the

criteria that lead to unitary concepts such as European avant-garde cinema in the first

place. My analysis is not based on the usual criteria of defining such terms, i.e., to point

to institutional, national, or historical conditions. The shared principles that constitute the

relations and affinities in Straub-Huillet's work derive much more specifically from an

ethical position between filmmaker and subject matter, a position that transgresses

temporal, institutional, and national boundaries and that is, in this regard, much closer to

Truffaut's initial concept of the auteur than to the structural auteurism of political

modernism.

Beyond formalist criticism, I am engaging in a reading practice that centers on an

analysis of the conceptual structures that find their form in Straub-Huillet's filmic images.

Such a reading practice reclaims Straub-Huillet's work for its radical politique, an

understanding of leftist politics that instigates fundamental social and political change

globally and on all levels of society. Straub-Huillet's work calls for political radicalism

not on the basis of a history of auteurist contextualization within sixties political

modernism but because of its continuous commitment to a filmmaking practice that

combats and dismantles the false certainty and complacency of auteurist identity politics.
 8

Straub-Huillet in Film History and Criticism

All of the 26 films Straub-Huillet completed between 1962 and 2006 are film

adaptations based on European literature and art, including dramas by Sophocles,

Friedrich Hölderlin, Pierre Corneille, or Bertolt Brecht; poems by Stephane Mallarmé;

musical compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach or Arnold Schönberg; short stories by

Marguerite Duras or Maurice Barrès; and novels by Cesare Pavese, Franco Fortini, or

Franz Kafka (see Appendix B). More than half of the films are German-language films,

which contributed, among other things, to Straub-Huillet's substantial identification with

German culture and cinema, despite of the couple's extensive crossing of national,

linguistic, and cultural borders.

The transnational aspects in Straub-Huillet's work are, indeed, curious. In 1968,

only six years after the two French-born filmmakers had moved from Paris to Munich,

they left Germany and relocated to Rome, Italy, where they lived and worked until the

year of Huillet's passing in 2006. Moreover, since 1969 (the year in which Straub-Huillet

made their first French-language film Othon) the couple completed a substantial number

of French- as well as Italian-language films, aside from continuing to make films in

German. Beginning with Othon, almost all of their films (including the German ones)

were shot on exterior locations in Italy. But despite their strong production record in both

Italy and France and even though they engaged explicitly with the literary and art canons

of both countries, Straub-Huillet remained conspicuously absent from surveys of both

French and Italian postwar film history. Moreover, although Straub-Huillet spent their

early years in Paris during the 1950s and established close relations to members of the

French nouvelle vague, they were rarely discussed as part of the French New Wave

tradition.

German perspectives dominated instead the two main academic approaches to

Straub-Huillet's work from the mid-seventies on to the late eighties. The first approach

discussed the couple's films in the historical context of the New German Cinema,
 9

whereas the second considered them part of the European canon of political avant-garde

modernism. Straub-Huillet's incorporation into the latter occurred notably under the

influence of Bertolt Brecht's dramatic theories. However, similar to Straub-Huillet,

Brechtian modernist criticism was able to bridge national boundaries, allowing, among

other things, for the two filmmakers' second major labeling as "European" filmmakers.

New German Cinema, Brecht, and the European Avant-garde

Beginning with Richard Roud's foundational study Jean-Marie Straub (1972), the

couple's work appeared, first, in a number of historical studies that focused on West

Germany's "new cinema" movements, the Young German Film (Junger Deutscher Film)

of the sixties and its successor, the New German Cinema (Neues Deutsches Kino) of the

seventies. Since Straub-Huillet's career encompasses both periods, they are often

considered to be part of both groups. Moreover, even though some critics continue to this

day to refer to Straub as the sole creator behind the couple's films, most of them were

from the beginning aware of Huillet's status as an equal collaborator. Her contributions

are, therefore, usually mentioned in the books and articles.13

Straub-Huillet's integration into the postwar West German film canon happened

on the basis of an earlier biographical passage – from France to West Germany – that

preceded the production of their first film. In the fall of 1958, Jean-Marie Straub fled

from military conscription into the Algerian war across the French-German border.

Huillet followed him shortly after and, one year later, the couple found a new residence

in Munich, one of the centers of the just emerging young German film movement. Two

years later, Straub-Huillet made their first short film together: the Heinrich Böll

adaptation Machorka-Muff (1962). Made roughly six months after the publication of the

Oberhausen Manifesto (in which a dozen young filmmakers announced the formation of

the Young German Film), Machorka-Muff is largely considered one of the first works of

the movement.
 10

Moreover, all four films the couple made during its German residency (1958-

1968) were instilled with German language, culture, and politics. Machorka-Muff and the

following Not Reconciled (1964/65) addressed the aftermath of Germany's political and

military past in two world wars. Both films are based on original works written by

Heinrich Böll who was, at the time, one of the most renown and outspoken West German

leftist writers. Straub-Huillet's third short film The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the

Pimp (1968) investigates social and economic structures in postwar German society.

Finally, Straub-Huillet's first feature-length film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

(1967) dealt, at the outset, with the life and work of a German cultural icon, the composer

Johann Sebastian Bach. It is consequently not surprising that the two French émigré

filmmakers became integral to the new canon of West German filmmaking, especially

after their films received critical attention at film festivals in Europe and abroad.

Straub-Huillet's canonical status within post-'68 political modernism coincides

largely with the couple's status as so-called Brechtian filmmakers.14 Seventies Brechtian

film theory, as Sylvia Harvey has pointed out, was based on two major premises: it

equated modernism with political art and with European filmmaking.15 Brechtian

criticism and aesthetic practices were utilized in an attempt to analyze and reveal how

radical, political content, textual form, and social practice interacted with one another.

Based on the assumption that capitalist economic structures inform all social relations of

production, including the ones involved in artistic practices, Brechtian film theorists set

out to break the illusions and conventions of industrial filmmaking, while attempting to

reveal, instead, the "real" structures of larger social formations and by highlighting the

material conditions that determined a film's own aesthetic and narrative structure. As part

of this discourse Straub-Huillet were often mentioned alongside other European

filmmakers associated with the political avant-garde and/or Brechtian filmmaking,

including e.g. Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Gorin, Chantal Akerman, Peter Gidal, Marcel

Hanoun, Miklós Jancsó, and Harun Farocki.

 11

Cultural Turn and New Historicism

By the late 1980s, the field of film studies underwent a crucial disciplinary turn

that replaced the focus on structural-textual analyses with a study of film as a cultural,

social, and historical medium.16 Especially the shift from so-called auteurist oriented

studies to popular or early cinema formats pushed Straub-Huillet's work out of the critical

canon. This can be seen best in light of the critical reevaluation of the New German

Cinema, which came under attack, especially since it was so overtly structured around the

figure of the auteur, i.e., its German counterpart the Autorenfilmer. As Tassilo Schneider

states paradigmatically: film historians defined Germany's cultural history solely on the

basis of "a cinema of singular artistic 'masterpieces'."17 Thus, images that were meant to

reflect an overall concept of national identity were ironically "chosen by the critic on the

basis of … their very singularity, or uniqueness."18 In addition to this German postwar

cinema became synonymous with the New German Cinema, a cultural phenomenon that

had remained, however, completely alien to domestic mass audiences. Schneider calls in

conclusion for a reorientation of German national cinema that is stronger oriented toward

the study of German film as a popular medium within a specific historical and social

context. Schneider's intervention is symptomatic for a historicist turn within German film

studies that wrote Straub-Huillet effectively out of the new histories of postwar German

cinema.19 Noteworthy is also that the two feminist revisions of postwar German film

history mentioned Huillet only in passing.20

Anton Kaes' 1989 study From Hitler to Heimat epitomizes how Straub-Huillet's

role shifted from center stage to the margins of West German film culture. Kaes values at

first the importance of Straub-Huillet, calling them "pioneers who greatly influenced the

new German Autorenfilm because they rigorously separated the medium from the sphere

of commercial entertainment and repositioned it in the realm of avant-garde literary

art."21 But although the couple's "avant-garde renderings … won numerous prizes in

foreign film festivals," Kaes objects at a later point, audiences "in the Federal Republic
 12

… reacted to their films either with hostility or, more often, with indifference."22

According to this, Straub-Huillet lose their position as representatives of a new national

film culture due to their inability to connect with the German masses. Straub-Huillet's

fate is, in this respect, intertwined with that of the New German Cinema: similarly

incapable to connect with domestic audiences, the once crucial cultural movement was

similarly deemed a failed project.

But even as "radical outsiders," Straub-Huillet remained primarily associated with

postwar German film culture, especially within Anglo-American film scholarship where

most critics continued to be mainly aware of the couple's German-language films.

Moreover, Straub-Huillet regularly resumed making German-language films until the late

nineties. In its "goal to demonstrate the significance of Straub-Huillet's work as a

cinematic confrontation of German history and culture," Barton Byg's seminal

monographic study Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Jean-Marie Straub

and Danièle Huillet (1995) contributed further to the steadfast affiliation of Straub-

Huillet's work with German postwar cinema.23 Considering the fact that Huillet and

Straub began their collaboration yet already in 1954 in Paris a closer examination of this

early period appears to be more critical than ever.

Forgotten Roots: The French New Wave

Critics have often emphasized how so-called methods of distanciation manifested

themselves in Straub-Huillet's work by way of formal techniques such as extended

sequence shots, direct sound recordings, or the staging of histrionic scenes in a quotidian

setting. Many of these formal principles belong, however, also into the context of French

cinematic realism, including its neorealist impulses and vérité-formats.

The Brechtian film theorist Martin Walsh acknowledges this: "[I]n artistic

temperament and moral sensibility," he writes, "Straub recalls [also] the work of

Rossellini," since both filmmakers "refuse to manipulate or exploit their material for
 13

emotional ends. In each, it is the precise integrity of the director’s analytic powers that

renders his work political, in its profoundest, moral sense: political in the manner they

assume a responsibility to their subject matter."24 Walsh's additional citing of André

Bazin in this context emphasizes a crucial influence of French New Wave realism on

Straub-Huillet's work that goes often unnoticed in light of both the strong German and

the post-'68 political cinema orientation in Straub-Huillet criticism. The following

reinvestigation of broader concepts like authorship, national cinema, or modernism in this

study occurs on the basis of a stronger consideration of the French New Wave period in

its conceptual and formal impact on Straub-Huillet's work.

Even though Straub-Huillet's Parisian residence (1954-1958) coincides with the

French New Wave's formative years, critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the

couple's affiliations with the movement. Reason for this lack of consideration is, first of

all, the fact that Straub-Huillet's emigration in late 1958 occurred a few months before the

French New Wave cinema's official outbreak in the summer of 1959.25 The enforced

exile separated the couple, in other words, from being associated with the young French

film movement. More importantly, Straub-Huillet emerged as "actual" filmmakers not

until 1962, the year in which they made Machorka-Muff in West Germany. Detailed

accounts of Straub-Huillet's Parisian years remain, in addition, sketchy and anecdotal.

Huillet and Straub met in Paris in the fall of 1954 while both were taking a film

course at the Lycée Voltaire that prepared students for their application to the national

French film institute I.D.H.E.C. (L'Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques).

Their collaboration on a script for The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach dates back to

this time. Neither Huillet, nor Straub ended up studying at the film school. Instead, they

established crucial personal and professional ties to a group of self-taught young

filmmakers, the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma. In fact, Straub's affiliations with the

Cahiers group preceded his move to Paris. Until 1954, he had run the local student ciné
 14

club in his hometown Metz. Both André Bazin and Francois Truffaut were frequent guest

lecturers at the screenings.26

In contrast to these early new wave affiliations, critics emphasized rather the

aesthetic influence of a markedly older generation of already established filmmakers, like

Jean Renoir, Abel Gance, Jean Grémillon, and Robert Bresson.27 However, the only

actual credit Straub received during the 1950s for a film was for his collaboration with a

much younger generation of filmmakers. Straub worked as assistant and second unit

director at Jacques Rivette's Fool's Mate (Le Coup du Berger, 1956).28 Produced by

Claude Chabrol, whose apartment functioned also as the main location the low-budget

short film, featured, among others, the Cahiers critics Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doniol-

Valcroze, and Francois Truffaut both in front and behind the camera. The film triggered

not only "a series of shorts made by the writers associated with Cahiers du Cinéma," but

became "indicative to the [new wave] movement as a whole," Dominic Païni confirms

the seminal status of the short film.29

Much less is known about Huillet's creative aspirations and activities during this

time. It seems, however, that in contrast to Straub, who wanted at first to be a film critic

not a filmmaker, Huillet had a much more pronounced interest in directing and, more

specifically, in ethnographic-documentary filmmaking.30 This appears to be crucial in

regard to the strong documentary and quotidian elements that inform Straub-Huillet's

films throughout the couple's career. Moreover, the pair's distinct initial interests parallel

the two most fundamental formative impulses of early French New Wave cinema: it's

affiliations with a film criticism that grew out of the postwar film club movement and a

tendency toward an aesthetic realism that derived from a confrontation of fictional

narratives with documentary, even ethnographic, elements.

Only in recent years Straub-Huillet appeared also in a few revised (i.e., extended)

canons of French New Wave cinema, following the aforementioned cultural and

historical turn of the late eighties.31 This turn instigated a crucial redefinition within the
 15

discourse of post-'68 political cinema. The latter is no longer simply defined in

opposition to the so-called naïve and apolitical realist tendencies of first-generation New

Wave cinema and criticism. 1968 constitutes, in other words, not so much a radical break

with former cinematic traditions, than rather a moment in which the certain formal and

political principles that existed already in earlier French New Wave contexts were

radicalized.

Following this trend, the couple appeared beginning in the early nineties also in

studies that redefined European modernism in terms of a transnational form of New

Wave aesthetics.32 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, for instance, considers New Wave cinema a

cross-cultural phenomenon which spread from late-fifties Paris across countries and

continents. In its radical roots, Nowell-Smith argues further, the New Wave has been kept

alive by a select group of international directors, including Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc

Godard in France, Nagisa Oshima in Japan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Germany and,

not to forget: "the husband-and-wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet."33

Nowell-Smith's aesthetic conception of the New Wave as an ongoing transnational

phenomenon is interesting because it redefines attributes that were formerly associated

with European political modernism explicitly as radical French New Wave features. The

filmmakers he mentions are identical with the canon of European modernist auteurs from

the seventies.

The maneuver of reconfiguring the discourse of seventies political modernism

through the lens of a New Wave aesthetic allows Nowell-Smith to connect the, according

to him, "pedantically realist" aspects of Straub-Huillet's work with the couple's reputation

as political filmmakers.34 The historian Alan Williams situates Straub-Huillet's work

similarly as part of an international New Wave legacy with very specific roots. He

associates Straub-Huillet's work with the so-called Left Bank group whose early films in

the late forties and early fifties foreshadowed the New Wave film movement. Among this

group were filmmakers like Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais. Alongside
 16

ethnographic filmmakers like Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, the Left Bank directors were

most responsible for the introduction of documentary or vérité elements into postwar

French cinema, an influence that is undeniably rendered in Straub-Huillet's own work.35

Redefining Straub-Huillet's work as part of a New Wave legacy that is deeply associated

with realist, rather than modernist connotations, challenges two traditional assumptions

that were made by seventies critics: first, defining postwar realism in principle with a

depoliticized, purely aesthetic, approach to filmmaking while relying, second, on a

structure in which modernism and realism are locked in an insurmountable oppositional

relationship.

By the early nineties, a second strain of critical approaches toward Straub-

Huillet's work that was markedly informed by a postwar French realist tradition gained

momentum in France. The major impulses came from Gilles Deleuze's two books on the

cinema as well as from a number of ciné-philosophical essays.36 André Bazin's critical

writings (ca. 1946-1954) were a major influence for this new discourse of cinematic

"realism."37 Most of the French critics were drawn to Straub-Huillet's cinematic images

for their ability to produce a distinct concept of time. Instead of generating linear, finite

forms of representation and identity, Straub-Huillet's "time-image," as Deleuze calls it, is

structured around the principle of difference. Realist principles are, here, no longer
defined in terms of film's mimetic affinity to the "real" world. Instead, cinema is itself

involved in the creation of ideas and concepts, expressed for instance in its concrete

ability to produce a direct image of time. Since temporality no longer follows spatial

coordinates, this cinema is able to open up virtual spaces that allows the unexpected or

the event of an unknown to take place. Straub-Huillet's cinema, to put it differently, is

able to produce an image of thought attesting to an event of the new, because

preconceived notions of formalization and knowledge no longer apply to an

understanding of these images. In the following, I am foregrounding the political aspect

 17

of this principle of the new in stronger terms than the film philosophers have done in their

writing.

To develop new epistemological concepts in relation to the cinema was also

central to a debate that happened in the U.S. around the same time, beginning in the mid-

to-late eighties. Similar to the French film-philosophers, critics like David Rodowick or

Dana Polan regarded the dismantling of epistemological systems organized around binary

oppositions (such as, modernism vs. realism, subject vs. object, etc.) as a fundamental

task in their attempt to reset the stakes for a political and theoretical discourse of the

cinema. However, whereas Straub-Huillet's work became central to the ciné-

philosophical innovations coming out of France, the two filmmakers disappeared

noticeably in the aftermath of a debate around political modernism that erupted in the

U.S.

The Crisis of Political Modernism

The disciplinary turns of the late eighties had also an effect on the major

theoretical discourses that had informed the field of film studies since its inception in the

mid-seventies. David Rodowick's 1988 publication The Crisis of Political Modernism

exemplifies the effects this disciplinary shift had on Straub-Huillet's status within film

studies as a discipline.38 Looking back at this moment in academic history, Rodowick

writes in the preface to the second edition of his book:

Today I find that the 1970s, or what I call the era of political
modernism, is often treated with an equal mixture of pride and
embarrassment. Pride in a decade in which theoretical work in film
studies defined the cutting edge of research in the humanities and
in which the field itself became increasingly accepted and
recognized as an academic discipline. A certain embarrassment in
that the era of political modernism now seems a bit passé,
especially with respect to its formal and extravagant political
claims.39

Rodowick's words are aimed against the four major discourses that informed first-

generation film studies as a discipline: textual semiotics, Althusserian Marxism,

 18

psychoanalysis, and postmodern deconstruction. However, his attempt to redefine the

scholarly stakes in the field must be seen in the context of larger institutional and

historical developments that occurred around the same time outside of academia. The

overall political climate shifted noticeably to the neo-conservative right (epitomized, e.g.,

by the Reagan era in the U.S. and the Thatcher and Kohl years in Western Europe), the

Left replaced its former "extravagant" calls for systemic social change with social-

democratic and neo-liberal reformism. Thus, Rodowick's "embarrassment" for certain

formal and political "extravaganzas" echoes the general political sentiment of a time in

which the pursuit for radical, if not, revolutionary change was considered increasingly

undesirable and unthinkable. To be more precise, eighties academia reflected and

corroborated a trend toward social and political complacency by promoting a number of

new critical models that were infused with a cynical, pessimistic rhetoric that was capable

to envision only apocalyptic doomsdays without offering the slightest chance of

deliverance: from "the end of history" in a number of humanities disciplines to the death

of "grand theory" as a concern particular to film studies.40 This trend was accompanied

by the fact that many universities operated more and more according to the principles of

corporate capitalism. Institutional merit and financial support became increasingly

determined by the use-value of specific topics and methodologies. Thus, in announcing

the end of political modernism, Rodowick established himself successfully in an

institution that had come to associate critical rigor with the constant need for

methodological rejuvenation. Revision meant in many instances a categorical contempt

or dismissal of the theoretical models that had helped to establish the field in its

disciplinary specificity during the previous decade.

Rodowick's claim – that the main theoretical discourses had reached an impasse –

both corroborated and conformed to a general trend within eighties scholarship. In fact,

virtually around the same time Dana Polan voiced similar concerns in his Political

Language of Film and the Avant-garde (1985).41 In retrospect, so it seems, both Polan
 19

and Rodowick fueled inadvertently the mounting hostility toward theory and political

avant-garde practices in the field of film studies. To be fair, neither scholar actually

argues for abandoning any of the theoretical discourses and practices with which he is

reckoning. On the contrary, both Polan and Rodowick object to instances of

misinterpretation and generalization in the critical reading and appropriation of these

discourses. One of the central issues identified by the two critics is the problem of

treating the (film-)text as a finite aesthetic system. Both object to the empiricism and

formalism that informs this tendency, because it contributes to a structure of binary

oppositions that prevents to envision any form of mobility, alterity, or disruption. Based

on oppositions such as subject vs. object, aesthetic structure vs. social space, or

modernism vs. realism, Rodowick and Polan contend, political modernist discourses

operate on the basis of a dialectic that has become static, that leaves no room for the

intervention of an other or unknown term.

"The reality of cinema," writes Polan, "is not just in what it represents but what it

is: an interaction between text (intra and inter) and spectator."42 In involving "viewers as

historically specific beings in the production of the meaning of a film," Polan continues,

they are reminded, "that meaning is really social meaning, dependent on the way one

decides to relate to history, including film as historical act. "43 In a similar fashion,

Rodowick calls for

the possibility of a theory of reading where the productivity of

meaning is accounted for not only according to the formal
dynamics of the aesthetic text, but also in the intertextual relations
between the text and critical practices, theory, pedagogy, and other
discourses of interpretation or reception that may negotiate the
range of a given text's possible readings and modes of
consumption.44

Polan's and Rodowick's suggestions are vital, because they call for models of a

materialist cinematic practice that account for elements such as: the possible intervention

of the unexpected, an encounter with the new – elements that are equally crucial to the
 20

specific "revolutionary" materialism that operates within Straub-Huillet's filmmaking

practice in that it counters the rigid binary structure that informed the studies of political

modernism in the seventies. In this sense, my study picks up where Rodowick and Polan

left off in the eighties. However, in contrast to the two critics' initial proposition, this

study does not engage with the historical spectator as a differential or resisting figure that

intervenes in the text, if only because a comprehensive analysis of Straub-Huillet's

audience exceeds the scope of this study (and likely of any study) given the fact that "the"

audience is, at the outset, divided by nationality, class, historical specificity, and other

distinctions. As if responding precisely to this impasse of accounting for the distinct and

differential markers that constitute a collective body, Straub-Huillet's work produces,

instead, the image of an audience that is missing, as Gilles Deleuze proposes: if Straub-

Huillet can be considered two of "the greatest political film-makers in the West," he

argues, "it is … because they know how to show how the people are what is missing,

what is not there."45 This is not simply a question of attendance numbers. The missing

spectator is, instead, an expression for the lack of a concept, or even a belief, in

revolutionary politics in contemporary Western society. Yet Deleuze suggests that, in

addressing this dilemma by way of their filmic images, Straub-Huillet attest to a central

political problematic of the time. In this study, I am pushing this figure of the missing

people even stronger toward a politics of the other, as Deleuze perhaps intended. The

figure of the missing people (and spectator) functions, here, not only as a figure for an

absence, but produces instead an image that envisions the missing people as other, i.e., as

a body inscribed by elements of difference that result not in opposition to a present or

known entity and is, thus, able to figure as the promise and potential for revolutionary

change.
 21

Post-Theory, Post-Politics

Not all film scholars understood Polan's and Rodowick's critique as a motivation

to readdress established theoretical discourses and methodologies. Instead, a lasting shift

occurred – away from the theory and research of political avant-garde practices.46 Just

like the New Wave, the New German Cinema, or the canon of post-'68 European

modernism, Anglo-American film theory became redefined as a primarily historical

category that survived – similar to Straub-Huillet – at the margins of the field of film

studies. One reason for this was the fundamental reorientation toward studying cinema as

a popular mass medium. Another was a parallel decline in demand of alternative film

forms that occurred outside of academia at international film festivals and in art house

theater programs. In the context of these developments, Straub-Huillet's films – alongside

with the discursive theories that had once popularized them – lost their currency as a

research topic and disappeared largely from the university curriculum.47

Thus, whereas film critics in the sixties and seventies typecast Straub-Huillet as

"modernist," "materialist," or "Brechtian" filmmakers in the course of promoting and

validating the field's major theoretical discourses, the significance of Straub-Huillet's

work suffered markedly since the late eighties, following an overall skepticism in the

effectiveness of political critical theory and political filmmaking practices. Since then,

the couple is mainly considered an odd historical phenomenon – a curiosity attesting to

the naïve convictions of a bygone era.

This development is not only the consequence of a general form of

depoliticization, but it is also an issue of redefining the meaning of the term "political" in

relation to cinema. For instance, the third and, to this date, last English-language study of

Straub-Huillet's work, Ursula Böser's The Art of Seeing, the Art of Listening (2004)

approaches Straub-Huillet's "politics of representation" (as the subheading states) by way

of a neo-formalist analysis.48 Böser's study stands paradigmatically for a turn in the

definition of the political in contemporary film and media studies that looks as follows:
 22

political structures are not based on the material conditions and relations of production,

but resemble so-called natural, psychological phenomena whose formal parameters can

be analyzed with the help of scientific paradigms.49 The universalism underlying this

kind of neo-formalist criticism stands in direct contrast to an important principle of

Brechtian dramatic theory, to which Sylvia Harvey points in her critical assessment of

1970s structuralist film theory: "Realism is not a mere question of form," she quotes

Brecht, "for time flows on. … Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New

problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it,

modes of representation must also change."50 The cognitivist reinvention of film studies

stands not only in contrast to this Brechtian notion of change, but, in doing so, it repeats

ironically the very formalism of the "politics of form" that became an impasse for

seventies structuralist film theory.

The irony points to a central problem that affects all theories attempting to deal

with the relations of cinema and politics, especially today: the inevitable shelf life of

creative practices. The language of post-'68 political avant-garde cinema is not only

dated, but many of the images and techniques that started out as part of a counter-cinema

movement were seamlessly incorporated into the contemporary flow of industrial,

commercial media images. The steady and apparently painless integration of practices

that were meant to disrupt epistemological and aesthetic conventions, not only threaten

the survival of a contemporary form of political cinema, but point, more generally, to the

difficulty of reinventing new images altogether; i.e., images that are not (yet) clichés or

corporate entities.

Toward a (new) Critique of Political Cinema

Throughout the decades, Straub-Huillet's work responded to the problem of

creative inertia and appropriation. Based on the couple's unremitting belief in the

necessity and possibility of revolutionary change, they generated a number of concepts

 23

and ideas – in the form of cinematic images and material work practices – that envision

the realization of social and political change. In this respect, Straub-Huillet's work must

be understood as a political filmmaking practice.

Straub-Huillet's adaptation technique of accentuating the presence of another

author in the form of direct quotations within the film-texts lies at the heart of this

practice. Based on the notion of an elective affinity, this practice of authorship challenges

and replaces traditional notions of both cinematic authorship and collaboration. The first

chapter discusses this issue by pointing out that, instead of merely referencing another

author's words within a film, Straub-Huillet highlight the original author's function as a

co-writer, co-director, and co-editor. The second function of the direct quotations has the

purpose to define collaboration as a relationship characterized by an act of resistance.

Contained within the direct quotation, the original author (in the form of a text) maintains

a visible, intact presence throughout the film. Thus, as a direct quotation, the other author

(the other text) resists and intervenes in the making of a Straub-Huillet film. This

"faithful" treatment of another writer's work entails a concept of authorship that is based

on an aporetic premise: by inviting other authors (as texts) to participate unaltered in the

production of a film, Straub-Huillet open their filmmaking practice up to elements of

intervention. By giving the other text equal and recognizable autonomy within the filmic

structure, the two filmmakers engage in a practice of authorship that evokes the concept

of an elective affinity, i.e., a relationship based on the premise of difference and alterity.

The first chapter draws, more specifically, upon the idea of an elective affinity between

Straub-Huillet's notion of authorship and Truffaut's concept of the auteur, an attempt to

also reconnect Straub-Huillet's work to the early years of the French New Wave. The

conception of an elective affinity emphasizes that the political operates not only on the

purely formal or structure level of film composition.

Chapter Two outlines more specifically how techniques like rewriting, recital, and

quotation effect the professional and, thus, social relations in Straub-Huillet's filmmaking
 24

practice. Organized as a distinct concept of labor, it is this practice of filmmaking that

gives each film its ultimate form, not the other way around. In reference to Sergei

Eisenstein's montage theory and Bertolt Brecht's theories of performance, this chapter

outlines how Straub-Huillet's labor and production are specifically organized around the

element of repetition: from the first transcriptions of the script, to the rehearsal scenes, to

the cinematographic recording and mechanical reproduction at the editing table. Such a

practice occurs, however, not only on an actual film set or in the editing lab, but involves

in addition an inter-textual form of collaboration that take place inside and in-between

(film)-texts. For instance, by reading Straub's letter at the festival press conference, the

actress Giovanna Daddi reprises her work during the making of These Encounters: she

acts as a performer and reader of Cesare Pavese's work. Daddi reenacts, however, not

only elements of a performers' labor during the making of a Straub-Huillet film. Since the

letter is not only a quotation of Pavese's words, but also a (re-)writing by the hand of

Jean-Marie Straub, Daddi reproduces the ongoing cycle of production and reproduction

that informs Straub-Huillet's entire work process.

Repetition is to Straub-Huillet's concept of labor what resistance and intervention

are to the definition of an elective affinity. As descriptions of critical procedures, both

elements derive from a process of analyzing Straub-Huillet's filmmaking practice from

two distinct angles. The first one, collaboration (based on an elective affinity) centers on

actual subjects (or rather, subject positions) that are involved in the making of a film,

whereas the second angle investigates the activities of creative labor and production.

Both elements – repetition and resistance – function to connect operations of production

that work within the film-text to a realm external to it or to other texts in distinct ways.

But more importantly, both elements work together toward a common goal: to create

conditions that allow for an inscription of difference into the film-text. What is here

conceived by Straub-Huillet on the level of cinematic images and practices, functions in a

 25

wider social and political realm as a powerful model to envision the possibility and

prospect of a revolutionary event.

Chapter Three defines the political in terms of a non-position that is structured

around the figure of the border. The border has, first of all, the function to defy exclusive

notions like cultural, linguistic, and national identity. As a recurring motif the border

interconnects a triangular relationship among the film-texts, the couple's biographical

narrative, and the pertinent geopolitical and historical references. This chapter expands its

investigation of Straub-Huillet's French roots by discussing the transnational aspects in

Straub-Huillet's work by way of a border poetics, a reading practice that is strongly

informed by the deconstructionist principle of keeping definite forms of meaning in

regard to certain objects or topics in suspense. Insisting, on the aporetic

indeterminateness of a position that is neither simply inside nor outside, Straub-Huillet's

work proposes a genealogical approach to national politics and history. The border is at

once capable to frame (to differentiate) national, geographical, and linguistic specificities

while showing them, at the same time, in their historical continuity. In doing so, the

couple's films propose an understanding of culture, nation, and history that, while

rejecting the notion of identity, operates – similar to the practices of authorship and labor

– around principles of difference and alterity.

Similar to the dual workings of affinity and intervention that operate in the

concept of an elective affinity, the border functions both as a passageway and as a marker

of obstruction. This becomes crucial for the ability to expose the historical layers and

shared points of origin that help to constitute singular events in their specificity and in

relation to one another, which means, across temporal and territorial boundaries. Cesare

Pavese's appearance in the Venice letters extends, in this regard, Straub's critique of

contemporary political issues to a wider historical context (referring in the case of Pavese

back to the periods of Italian fascism and the immediate postwar era). Straub defines

current social and political conditions, in other words, as part of a genealogical trajectory.
 26

The chronicle of his and Huillet's specific history with the Venice film festival that

occurs in the second letter repeats this notion of a genealogical legacy. Straub

emphasizes, that while certain semantics may have changed over the course of time, the

fundamental structure that determined their production and reproduction continues forth.

The indeterminate inside and outside formation of the border-function highlights

the fact that Straub-Huillet are not aiming at the creation of a coherent unified vision, but

that they seek to produce instead a film-text that is fractured and incomplete, in short: a

text in ruins. As a second figure, the ruins function, in this study similar to the figurations

of borderlines. They appear across Straub-Huillet's body of work as inscriptions of an

aporetic quandary that aims at the production of difference. But whereas the border-

function establishes a territorial and spatial framework, figurations of ruins pertain to

issues of representation. The ruins address, in other words, not only the question how the

political operates within an image but also how it works as an image.

The forth chapter investigates this crucial function in respect to what I am

referring to as the cinematic ruin-image. Embedded in a larger historical context, this

figure is, on the one hand, engrained with cinematic specificity, yet has its roots, on the

other hand, in critical and aesthetic concepts that markedly predate the beginnings of

Straub-Huillet's career, leading back to the very beginnings of modernity and early

industrialism. From Nietzsche to the Frankfurt School, from the theories of postwar

cinematic realism to the more recent poststructural writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard and

Gilles Deleuze, the ruins outline a creative and critical paradox that is not only a concern

within Straub-Huillet's distinct approach to filmmaking but that is central to the

objectives of all avant-garde practices, especially so-called political ones that use audio-

visual reproductive media.

The continued significance of a political filmmaking practices derives precisely

from this impossible and yet indispensible task of creating cinematic narratives that are

internally structured around elements that fall outside the realm of the representable, the
 27

knowable, and the thinkable. Their political significance lies in the fact that as images

they come as close as possible to envisioning an image that is not yet formed, an event

that can only forecast to represent the arrival of a people that is still missing.

Straub-Huillet's work, to conclude, responds to this difficulty of a genuine

production of new images in a cultural hemisphere that is completely absorbed by "the

society of the spectacle" (as Guy Debord calls it) in two fundamental ways.51 Instead of

pretending to create novel forms and ideas out of nothing, the filmmakers reveal at all

times that their films are constructed on the foundational premises of a recognizable

genealogy and tradition. This relationship between the old and the new is neither defined

by linear progression, nor by binary opposition. The new cannot simply be invented. It

must be produced on the grounds of the creative, material remainders that have shaped

formal as well as social and political structures in the past.

 28

Notes

1 See Tag Gallagher's translation of the letters: "Three Messages," Kino Slang, ed.
Andy Rector, trans. Tag Gallagher (September 13, 2006): no pp.,
http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/search?q=Straub+Venice, (emphasis in original text).
2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 For a detailed filmography of Straub-Huillet's films see Appendix B which lists

also each film's original title, the place(s) and year(s) of production, and information
about the original art works and their authors.
7"Making films politically," a phrase coined by Jean-Luc Godard in 1970, is an
expression that summarizes a task that has been central to all politically left avant-garde
practices, from the twenties onward. The phrase is meant to counter the idealist-
metaphysical structure of a "political film" with a dialectical and materialist approach that
attacks and seeks to manipulate the form as much as the content of a work. See Jean-Luc
Godard, "What is to be done?," trans. Mo Teitelbaum, Afterimage 1 (April 1970). See
also Peter Wollen, "Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d'Est, Afterimage 4 (Fall 1972):
6-17.
8 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Julia Kristeva, Revolution in
Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984);
Hélène Cixous and Cathérine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The
Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989); Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Jean-Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and
"the jews," trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990); Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," In The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984): 76-100; Michel
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
9 Karl Marx, "From German Ideology," in Marx's Concept of Man, trans. T.B.
Bottomore, 153-167 (London: Continuum, 2003); Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1994); Gyorgy Lukács,
"Ideology of Modernism," in Realism in our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle
(New York: Merlin Press, 1962); Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998); Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art
 29

in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.

Harry Zohn, 217-252 (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); Bertolt Brecht, "The
Threepenny Lawsuit," in Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman, 147-
199 (London: Methuen, 2000); Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New
York: Meridian Books, 1957); Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the
Last (1969) (Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1995); Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of
Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997); Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in The Adorno Reader, ed.
Brian O'Connor, 195-210 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
10 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1967); André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Francois Truffaut, "A Certain Tendency
of the French Cinema," in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, 224-237 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976); Jacques Rivette, "On Abjection,"
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/OK/abjection.html, 1961; Serge Daney, "Un tombeau
pour l'oeil (pédagogie straubienne)," Cahiers du Cinéma 258-259 (1975): 27-35; Rolf
Aurich, "Irgendwo muß ein Punkt sein, daß man sieht, da brennt etwas," filmwärts 12
(Fall 1988): 4-9.
11 For such an attempt in deconstruction see e.g. Jacques Derrida's Specters of
Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994).
12 See Gilles Deleuze, "Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-
Huillet)," in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture,
ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, 14-19 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998).
13 Richard Roud, Jean-Marie Straub (New York: Viking Press, 1972); Roger
Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, The German Cinema (New York City: Prager Publishers,
1971); Wolfram Schütte and Peter W. Jansen, eds., Herzog, Kluge, Straub (Munich:
Hanser Verlag, 1976); Hans Günther Pflaum and Hans Helmut Prinzler, Cinema in the
Federal Republic of Germany: The New German Film, Origins and Present Situation
(Bonn: Internations, 1983); John Sandford, The New German Cinema (Totowa: Barnes
and Noble, 1980); Peter Jansen, The New German Film (1982); James Franklin, New
German Cinema: From Oberhausen to Hamburg (Boston: Twayne, 1983); Eric
Rentschler, The West German Film in Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years
since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills: Redgrave, 1984).
Both terms, Young German Film and New German Cinema are slippery. Their
periodization is a construct established by film historians after 1982 (the year of the New
German Cinema's "official" ending) in order to differentiate retrospectively between a so-
called first and second generation of "Oberhausener" filmmakers and between the
movement's domestic beginnings in the sixties and its international success a decade
later. However, West German critics and directors in the sixties used both terms from the
start interchangeably.
14 See e.g. Martin Walsh, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema (London: BFI
Publishing, 1981); Colin MacCabe, "The Politics of Separation," Screen 16, no. 2
 30

(1975/76): 46-61; Gilberto Perez, "Modernist Cinema: The History Lessons of Straub and
Huillet," Artforum 17, no. 2 (October 1978): 46-55; Barton Byg, "History Lessons:
Brecht's Caesar Novel and the Film by Straub/Huillet," in Essays on Brecht = Versuche
über Brecht, ed. Marc Silberman, 125-149 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1990);
Martin Brady, "Brecht in Brechtian Cinema," in "Verwisch die Spuren!" Bertolt Brecht's
Work and Legacy: A Reassessment, 295-308 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
15 Sylvia Harvey, "Whose Brecht: Memories for the Eighties," Screen 23, no. 1
(1982): 45-59. See also Peter Wollen's influential article "The Two Avant-gardes"
(1975), which was mainly responsible for the equation of political modernism with
European auteurism.
16 See e.g. Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984); Tom Gunning, "Early American Film," in The Oxford
Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 255-271 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998); Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The
Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990);
Rick Altman, "Film Sound - All of it," Iris 27 (Spring 1999): 31-47; Anton Kaes, "Mass
Culture and Modernity: Notes Toward a Social History of Early American and German
Cinema," in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year
History, Vol. 2, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, 317-331 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds."Film
Europe" and "Film America:" Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1939
(Exeter: University of Exter Press, 1999); Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A
Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
17 Tassilo Schneider, "Reading Against the Grain: German Cinema and Film
Historiography," in Perspectives on German Cinema, eds. Terri Ginsberg and Kristin
Moana Thompson (London: G.K.Hall, 1996), 30.
18 Ibid., 31.

19 See Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Thomas Elsaesser, New German
Cinema: A History (1989); Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany:
Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1995);
Terri Ginsberg and Kristin Moana Thompson (eds.), Perspectives on New German (New
York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996); John E. Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German
Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Tim Bergfelder, et. al., eds.,
The German Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2002); Sabine Hake, German National Cinema
(London: Routledge, 2002).
20 Julia Knight, Women in the New German Cinema (London/New York: Verso,
1992); Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow, eds., Triangulated
Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1998).
21 Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat,18.
 31

22 Ibid., 20.

23 Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet

and Jean Marie Straub (Berkeley: California University Press, 1995), 35. Byg's study
was the only second book-length investigation of Straub-Huillet's work in English that
came out after Richard Roud's Jean-Marie Straub in 1972.
24 Martin Walsh, "Political Formations in the Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub,"
Jump Cut No. 4 (1974), no pp. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC04folder/
Straub.html.
25 The major catalyst for the official outbreak of the French New Wave was the
screening of Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows at the 1959 Cannes International Film
Festival for which Truffaut earned a best director award.
26 Barbara Bronnen, "Jean-Marie Straub," in Die Filmemacher: Der Neue
Deutsche Film nach Oberhausen, ed. B. Bronnen and Corinna Brocher (Munich:
Berthelsmann, 1973), 42.
27 See Richard Roud, Jean-Marie Straub, op. cit., 15-27; Barton Byg, Landscapes
of Resistance, op. cit., 9.
28 This influence was, above all, established on the basis of Straub's
"assistantships" for these directors. Straub eventually disputed these reports as an "error
of translation. … The only director I ever worked with," he corrected, "was Rivette, and
all I did there was carry valises. I did it because it was a reunion of friends, and they
didn't have money to pay for assistants." Quoted from Joel Rogers, "Moses and Aaron As
an Object of Marxist Reflection," Jump Cut, No. 12/13 (1976): no pp.
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/jc12-13folder/moses.int.html.
29 Dominique Païni, "Preface: The New Wave, or a certain question of style," in
French New Wave, ed. Jean Douchet, trans. Robert Bonnono, 8-10 (New York:
D.A.P/Hazan Editions , 1998), 9.
30 See Wolfram Schütte and Peter W. Jansen, eds., Herzog, Kluge, Straub
(Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1976), 241.
31 Jean Douchet, ed., The French New Wave, trans. Robert Bonnono (New York:
D.A.P., 1998); Jean-Michel Frodon, L’âge moderne du cinéma français: de la Nouvelle
Vague à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).
32 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (New
York: Continuum, 2008). See also Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face
with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005).
33 Nowell-Smith, Making Waves, 214.
 32

34 Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 402.
35 It was, coincidentally, none other than Straub-scholar Richard Roud who
defined Left Bank cinema as a distinct strain within a new form of postwar French
cinema. Roud himself never connected Straub-Huillet to the Left Bank. See Richard
Roud, "The Left Bank," Sight and Sound Vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter 1962-3): 24-27.
36 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Gilles Deleuze, "Having an
Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet)," in Deleuze and Guattari: New
Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon
Heller, 14-19 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Serge Daney,
Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Serge
Daney, La rampe (Cahiers critique 1970-1982) (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard,
1983); Jacques Aumont, "The Invention of Place," In Landscape and Film, ed. Martin
Lefebvre, trans. Kevin Shelton and Martin Lefebvre, 1-18 (New York: Routledge, 2006).
37 André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volumes 1 & 2, op. cit.

38 D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in

Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
39 Ibid., vii.

40 See Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History," The National Interest 16

(Summer 1989): 3-18; David Bordwell and Noell Carroll, eds. Post-Theory:
Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
41 Dana Polan, The Political Language of Film and the Avant-garde (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1985). Both Rodowick and Polan had taken their cue from
Sylvia Harvey's May '68 and Film Culture (London: BFI, 1980).
42 Polan, 30.

43 Ibid.

44 Rodowick, Crisis, 35.

45 Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time Image, 215.

46The new methodological changes were yet far from homogenous. There was,
first, the Wisconsin school's neo-formalist, cognitivist approach, comprised by David
Bordwell and Noëll Carroll's notion of "post-theory." See David Bordwell and Noëll
Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1996). Much more impact had, however, a general reorientation
towards film history, on the one hand, and cultural studies, on the other hand. Both
approaches focused on the study of cinema in relation to gender, race, and other minority
 33

discourses and established new paradigms: such as reception studies or star studies (see
above, footnotes 15-19).
47 Straub-Huillet received, in addition, consistent support in the U.S. from a
number of established film critics and cinephile bloggers; see Jonathan Rosenbaum,
"Intense Materialism: Too Soon, Too Late ," Senses of Cinema, no. 6 (May 2000); Tag
Gallagher, "Lacrimae Rerum Materialized," Senses of Cinema 37 (2005): n.p.; Tom
Gallagher, "Straub Anti-Straub," Senses of Cinema 43 (2007): n.p.; Andy Rector, October
2005, http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/.
48 Ursula Böser, The Art of Seeing, the Art of Listening: The Politics of
Representation in the Work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (Frankfurt am
Main: Lang, 2004).
49 See Dudley Andrew's critique of cognitivism: "Cognitivism: Quests and
Questions," Iris 9 (Spring 1989): 1-10.
50 Brecht quoted in Sylvia Harvey, "Whose Brecht: Memories for the Eighties,"
Screen 23, no. 1 (1982): 51.
51 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Zone Books, 1995).
 34

CHAPTER ONE:

ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

If anyone can speak to anyone else – if a filmmaker can speak to a

scientist, if a scientist can have something to say to a philosopher
and vice versa – it is according to and by function of each one's
creative activity.
Gilles Deleuze, Having an Idea in Cinema (On the Cinema of
Straub-Huillet)

Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art
of producing something with the other's talents. For that, one
requires the other's respect and affection.
Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner

The West German feminist film journal Frauen und Film once asked Huillet to

comment on the fact that Jean-Marie Straub achieved much greater visibility and

recognition as an author of their joint work. "I don't think this is important," Huillet

answered, "I have no interest in giving talks or responding to questions. [...] There are

other things, I do much better; besides, we are only interested in the product, not in the

names."1 Huillet's words are spoken in clear rejection of gender-based identity politics. In

fact, at a later point in the interview, she objects explicitly to the idea of making films

about women's issues. "One should never make films based on general ideas," she states,

but instead only about "something concrete, something precise."2 Neither abstract

personalities, nor conventional ideas, but instead, singular events and conditions

determine, according to Huillet, the couple's basic approach to their work and to the

material they are working with. In this vein, the filmmakers' treat the Baroque composer

Johann Sebastian Bach as a "manual laborer" in their 1967 film The Chronicle of Anna

Magdalena. Bach appears here not as a historical figure, but rather in the form of the

concrete material traces he left behind as a writer, composer, and performer: his hand-

written letters and his musical compositions. Bach collaborates in the making of

Chronicle by way of his musical and typographic texts.

 35

This technique of incorporating another author in the form of his artistic material

into their films is central to Straub-Huillet's collaborative conception of authorship. The

novelist Franco Fortini compared this distinct method once to Bertolt Brecht's definition

of love (see quote above). In a letter addressed to Straub, Fortini writes:

[Your] "work" reminds of Brecht's definition of love: the art to

produce something with the talents of the other. [...] The limits of
your subjectivity concern only yourself (and Danièle...). But one
can see how you appropriate, precisely because of these limits, the
right to treat the things [oggetti] and the subject [soggetti] of your
films as material."3

Fortini's reference to Brecht's definition of love envisions the collaborative process as a

concrete material encounter involving different authors who co-write and co-produce a

text together. A literary text or a musical composition functions here as a material imprint

of an author's talents, is, in other words, crafted by the specific work skills of a writer,

composer, or director. Following this conception of collaboration, even dead or absent

authors participate actively in the production of Straub-Huillet's films.

Possibly in reference to Fortini (and Brecht), Danièle Huillet turns this conception

of love as a form of creative labor on its head: "A love story," she explains, "does not

only take place in the encounter with another person, but it can happen similarly in the

encounter with a text in which something seems right."4 Huillet emphasizes, first of all,

that the norm of differentiating between a living (human) author and a text no longer

applies. Collaboration is here an inter-textual activity traversing the borders across

different types of textual as well as media systems. Straub-Huillet's filmmaking practice

is, in this regard, very close to Julia Kristeva's definition of inter-textuality – or

transposition, as she prefers to call it in order to emphasize that this operation is more

than merely an act of referencing different sources.5 Transposition marks not simply "the

passage from one sign system to another," as Kristeva explains, but identifies, moreover,

the production of a new signifying system.6 Such a passage may involve either the same

or distinct signifying materials. In Straub-Huillet's films, for instance, inter-textual

 36

relations may derive either from inserting other film clips (as cinematic quotations) into

the cinematic structure or from "translating" a literary text into an oratory recital that is

then recorded on film.7 Such an encounter of two signifying systems leads to the

formation of a new one because it "demands a new articulation of … enunciative and

denotative positionality."8 Following this, the "'place' of enunciation and its denoted

'object' are never single, complete, and identical to themselves," an element that is crucial

for the multiplicity of co-authorship that structures Straub-Huillet's work.9 Oriented

toward "[an] articulation of [a] new system with its new representability," the process of

transposition occurs, according to Kristeva, "via an instinctual intermediary common to

the two [old] systems…."10 It is this notion of an instinctual intermediary that registers in

Straub-Huillet's work in the form of an elective affinity.

Straub-Huillet's collaboration process differs notably from conventional forms of

collaboration, especially the ones that are part of industrial production circuits. Straub-

Huillet's major objective is not to produce a streamlined end product that unifies all

singular and conflicting characteristics among individual collaborators, but to produce a

text or to highlight the presence of a collaborator as an other. The principle strategy to

incorporate an original artist in the form of direct quotations into the film is a direct

expression of this relationship. Instead of assimilating the other author into the filmic

structure, the other author resists and intervenes in its construction. Since the act of

quotation is never hidden, but rather foregrounded by a process of recitals and re-

writings, co-authorship is defined in terms of an affinity that acknowledges another

author's singularity and difference.

Straub-Huillet's elective affinity requires, then, more than merely a sense of

common spirit or a shared attitude of respect and affection (as Brecht demanded above).

Straub-Huillet's work relations are rather formed on the basis of a "a prior distance, a

spiritual gap that must be filled, a certain ideological heterogeneity," as Michael Löwy

describes it.11 "For Goethe," he points out as an example, "there was elective affinity
 37

when two beings or elements 'seek each other out, attract each other and seize [...] each

other, and then suddenly reappear again out of this intimate union, and come forward in

fresh, unexpected form'."12 Straub-Huillet's approach to their subject matter works

similarly. The couple does not simply find a text, but the text finds them as well. The text

addresses or approaches the filmmakers, catches their interest – because something seems

right – as Huillet put it. The adapted text is, then, not a passive supplier of lifeless

material, but a material form of expression that actively writes, directs, and co-authors the

production of a "Straub-Huillet"-film. Separated by an initial gap, an elective affinity is

actively chosen by both sides.

This specific conception of an elective affinity explains some of the unusual

alliances Straub-Huillet have engaged with throughout their career (including e.g. their

fondness for filmmakers like John Ford or D.W. Griffith). It helps explain, in turn, their

public disputes with artists that would appear to be natural affiliates, e.g. the couple's

open criticism of former collaborator Rainer Werner Fassbinder and of fellow young

German filmmaker Alexander Kluge.

The so-called Kluge-Straub dispute illustrates two aspects in particular; it shows,

first, that Straub-Huillet's understanding of the political is deeply connected to the

couple's critical understanding of authorship and emphasizes, second, that this

understanding derives largely from an early concept of French new wave auteurism and

cinematic realism that was developed in the mid-fifties in the French film journal Cahiers

du Cinéma. This concept differed markedly from the overall conception of authorship

and political criticism that dominated, around the same time, a young West German film

culture. This explains, in retrospect, why Straub-Huillet's integration into the Young

German Film culture happened much more gradually than the couple's later seminal

status in the historical surveys of the movement suggests. Critics reacted at first with

harsh criticism to Straub-Huillet's two short films Machorka-Muff (1962) and Not

Reconciled (1964/65).
 38

The concept of an elective affinity explains, furthermore, how the early critical

writings of the French filmmaker Francois Truffaut could function as "lessons" for

Straub-Huillet's distinct film adaptation practice. Most critics would position Truffaut and

Straub-Huillet – both in regard to their "politics" and "aesthetics" – at opposite ends of

the artistic spectrum. And yet, Truffaut's concept of the auteur bears a striking

resemblance to Straub-Huillet's concept of collaborative authorship based on notions of

an elective affinity. This urges also to reevaluate the so-called apolitical aspects of early

French new wave film criticism, both in regard to its initial concept of auteur criticism

and to Truffaut's writings. Doing so means, in addition, to reintroduce Straub-Huillet's

work to an author-oriented assessment, a critical approach that has gone out of fashion in

contemporary film studies due to its authoritarian, ideological underpinnings.13 Instead

of resurrecting old theoretical demons, the following examination aims to delineate how

authorship helps to produce a certain concept of political criticism by restoring a specific

text (Francois Truffaut's "A Certain Tendency") in its radical origins.

La Politique des Auteurs

An interview that Michel Delahaye conducted with Straub for Cahiers du

Cinéma, following the French release of Not Reconciled, includes a photograph that

depicts Jean-Marie Straub and Francois Truffaut, both in their early twenties, walking

side by side down the street (see Figure 2).14 The article contains no further explanation

about Straub's French origins or his relationship to Truffaut. But the photograph is

suggestive insofar as it illustrates an affinity between Straub, the filmmaker, and

Truffaut, the critic.

The film historian Michel Marie has suggested that in spite of their apparent

differences in style and personality, many filmmakers that became associated with the

French New Wave were "tied to a collection of critical concepts held by a fairly coherent

group. … [Their] tastes and ideas found a material form in a large number of articles,
 39

public debates, and interventions in the press … throughout the 1950s."15 Marie stresses

the importance of two articles: Alexandre Astruc’s "The Birth of a New Avant-garde:

The Caméra-Stylo" (1948) and Truffaut’s "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema"

(1954).16

Often reduced to the polemical rant of a young rebel, Truffaut’s article is much

more considerate, complex, and analytical than he is usually given credit for. Combining

Astruc’s definition of film authorship as a form of cinematic écriture with Bazin’s theory

of ontological realism Truffaut is specifically concerned with the nature of the

relationship between filmmaker and the creative material he is engaging with. Truffaut

focuses, not coincidentally, on a creative approach that is also fundamental to Straub-

Huillet’s practice of filmmaking: the practice of literary adaptation. Central to the article

is, furthermore, the figure of the auteur who is positioned in contrast to the so-called

metteur-en-scène, the screenwriter or director who works in the "tradition of quality" as

Truffaut calls the French mainstream films of the time. Unlike the auteur, the metteur-en-

scène holds all authority over his characters, the scenery, and ultimately the meaning

expressed in a film. In the tradition of the 19th-century novel, the metteur-en-scène

produces "literary films" based on notions of psychological realism; films that present,

according to Truffaut, a hermetically sealed off world:

The school which aspires to realism destroys it at the moment of

finally grabbing it, so careful is the school to lock these beings in a
closed world, barricaded by formulas, plays on words, maxims,
instead of letting us see them for ourselves, with our own eyes. The
artist cannot always dominate his work. He must be, sometimes,
God and, sometimes, his creature. (232, italics mine)

In contrast to the God-like attitude of the metteur-en-scène, the auteur makes room for a

view other than his. Truffaut is here noticeably informed by André Bazin's notion of

cinema's privileged relationship to "reality," a concept Bazin developed especially in

response to the Italian neorealist films of the forties. The merit of a film like Vittorio De

Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) lies, according to Bazin, "in not betraying the essence of
 40

things, in allowing them first to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is in loving them in

their singular individuality."17 What Bazin describes in terms of mise-en-scène, Truffaut

turns into an attitude that describes specifically the filmmaker's relationship to another

text. In doing so, Truffaut emphasizes that traditional distinctions between reality and

fiction no longer apply, an understanding that echoes Straub-Huillet's own conception

and treatment of the author as text. This does not mean that reality or real conditions have

seized to exist, but rather that they must be located elsewhere; for instance, in the

concrete relationship an artist expresses vis-à-vis the material or the people he is working

with.

Two faculties, in particular, function, according to Truffaut, to restrain the auteur

from exercising too much (or the only) control over the subject matter; one, is the original

author who intervenes by way of his writings; the other is an intervention of the

cinematographic real that results from the technological apparatus' innate ability to record

its own encounter with the profilmic material conditions. Filmmakers who try to

minimize the effects of these two faculties, that is, screenwriters or directors who forge

the illusion of filmic representation in accordance to their own personal worldview,

ultimately distort and exploit the original text, its themes and its characters: "so

inordinate is the authors' desire to be superior to their characters," writes Truffaut, "that

those [characters] who, perchance, are not infamous are, at best, infinitely grotesque. [...]

In the films of 'psychological realism' there are nothing but vile beings" (233).

Conducting a close analysis of some of the adapted scripts that were written by

the French screenwriting team Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, Truffaut outlines in detail

how the two tweak the original material in order to get their own political message

across. One strategy is, for instance, to replace so-called "unfilmable" scenes with new,

"equivalent" scenes and dialogues: "[a]nd what is the point of this equivalence," Truffaut

asks, "it's a decoy for the anti-militarist elements added to the work" (229). This so-called

critical stance is, according to Truffaut, rather hypocritical and conformist. "Thus,
 41

everything indicates that Aurenche and Bost are the authors of [to give another example]

frankly anti-clerical films, but, since films about the cloth are fashionable, our authors

have allowed themselves to fall in with that style" (228). Instead of being critical,

Truffaut concludes, the screenwriters conform rather to the fads of the market. Another

reason for Truffaut to criticize this kind of "political" stance as meaningless lies in the

fact that it is build on contempt – not only for the original author and the characters – but

also for the audience: "Under the cover of literature – and, of course, of quality – … the

public [is given] its habitual dose of smut, non-conformity and facile audacity" (230).

Truffaut anchors the politics of contempt explicitly in the adaptation technique of the two

screenwriters. Under the pretense "of being faithful to the spirit" of a work, he writes,

Aurenche and Bost are "upsetting old preconceptions of being faithful to the letter" (225).

In doing so, they show nothing but "a constant and deliberate care to be unfaithful to the

spirit as well as to the letter" (228, italics in the original text).

Straub-Huillet's explicit use of direct quotations answers Truffaut's call for a

filmmaking practice that is based on an act of being faithful to the letter; i.e., treating the

original author, his material, and the audience with respect. The affinity between Truffaut

and Straub-Huillet has consequently nothing to do with so-called aesthetic parameters,

nor is it a matter of "straightforward" politics. Truffaut never openly shared the political

beliefs of Straub-Huillet and his films differ notably from those of the couple in both

aesthetic and narrative conception. Sharing the notion of "being faithful to the letter"

means, instead, to envision the filmmaker as part of a social setting. Truffaut and Straub-

Huillet's affinity derives precisely from this common attitude of considering the social

position fundamental to the artistic practice of filmmaking.

This contests the "blandness" and "overweening superficiality" that determines

allegedly Truffaut's article.18 In fact, Truffaut's auteur has nothing to do with a naïve cult

of personality or with an expression of bourgeois individualism. In contrast, the auteur

has to be able to relinquish control and solicit the collaboration of other authors, other
 42

texts, and of unexpected incidents that unfold in front of the camera. Moreover, given the

fact that the making of each film encounters a complete new set of conditions, the auteur

has to renegotiate his relationship with the world always anew.

This reading of Straub-Huillet's work alongside Truffaut's initial concept of the

auteur arrives itself on the basis of an elective affinity. Despite of an initial difference,

Truffaut (by way of his critical writing) and Straub-Huillet (by way of their filmmaking

practice) formulate specific ideas that are drawn to one another and, in doing so, produce

a new concept, to recall Kristeva. This new concept defines cinematic authorship and

collaboration neither in terms of an aesthetic premise, nor as a matter of political content,

but instead in terms of an ethical relationship into which each artist has to enter once he

or she agrees to create something with the skills of an other. More importantly, social (or

ethical) relations take not only place on a film set only but similarly within and in-

between textual systems.

The Politics of the German Autorenfilm

This concept of auteurism that emerges as part of an elective relationship between

Truffaut and Straub-Huillet is precisely what alienated West German audiences and

critics, following the release of Straub-Huillet's first short film Machorka-Muff in 1963.

Whereas "Böll’s [original] story [Bonn Diary] met with objections from the Right," its

filmic adaptation "was very badly received by the Left," as Richard Roud has pointed

out.19 "Even the good people in Oberhausen, quite well-known left-wing intellectuals,"

confirms Straub, "came to me and said, this film must not be shown."20 This was even

more surprising since the film – composed largely of direct quotations – followed Böll's

original story "word for word."21 In fact, it seems to have been precisely Straub-Huillet's

ostensible "faithfulness" to the original text that caused the problem. The two filmmakers

quoted Böll's text without adding any form of satirical mannerism to the recital. In effect,

the film was criticized for its failure to explicitly condemn the characters, especially its
 43

title character, ex-Nazi officer Erich von Machorka-Muff, who resumes his career in the

refurbished West German army without protest. "No agitation, no satire, no bitterness, no

cynicism. Instead: Colonel von Machorka-Muff shaves. He orders drinks, ... he ties his

tie," a contemporary German critic describes the laconic tone of the film.22 Not only did

Straub-Huillet represent the characters without turning them into caricatures. The couple

also followed another decree of auteurism: refraining to invent any new or "equivalent"

lines, scenes, or characters for the film.23

The writer and journalist Erich Kuby, a well-known critic of the country's

rearmament politics, played the title character. Yet Kuby's "acting-method" displayed no

prior judgment for the character. He portrayed the officer instead without any affect. His

voice, mostly heard in a voice-over narration, recites Böll's original text in a completely

neutral style, that is, without any animated or expressive qualities to either tone or pitch.

His gestures and facial expressions are similarly subdued and leave no room for external

political commentary. Together with the vérité-style of the camera work the

performances produce a world that is distinctly devoid of any form of psychological

realism.

Straub-Huillet's refusal to instill any form of moral judgment into the film was

taken as evidence for the filmmakers' political conformism. Machorka-Muff was

excluded from the Oberhausen film festival and struggled to find a German distributor.

The initial reactions to the couple's second film Not Reconciled (1964/65) followed along

similar lines and resulted in an infamous fall-out between Straub-Huillet and Heinrich

Böll's publisher (who sought to stop the film's distribution). The Filmbewertungsstelle

(the Federal Republic's official tax-reducing quality-rating agency) denied Not

Reconciled a quality rating and the Berlin Film Festival rejected it. Even people that

became emphatic Straub supporters in later years, for instance, Filmkritik's chief editor

Enno Patalas, reacted at first with harsh criticism, as in this review of Not Reconciled

from 1965: "The greatest German film since Murnau and Lang?" Patalas quoted Michel
 44

Delahaye's review in Cahiers du Cinéma; "Certainly not. The mistakes are frustrating,

especially in terms of [Straub's] directing – or failure to direct – the actors. Badly recited

is not necessarily well alienated, as Straub, who credits Brecht, ... seems to believe."24

Patalas' words must be seen in the context of a general resentment among leftist

West German critics at the time against Cahiers' concept of la politique des auteurs.

Early sixties French New Wave criticism and cinema were criticized for being too

concerned with aesthetics and not enough with politics. Informed by the discourse of the

Frankfurt School, Patalas and co-editor Wilfried Berghahn formulated in 1961 the

journal's critical agenda around the concepts of a Linke Kritik (Leftist critique) or

Politische Linke Kritik (Political, leftist critique). This model of an ideological, self-

critical approach to film and criticism developed in direct opposition to the alleged

"depoliticized … false consciousness" of the French New Wave."25

The French response, as Patalas' quote of Delahaye infers was indeed quite

different. Jacques Rivette called Machorka-Muff "the first (small) film d'auteur produced

in postwar Germany."26 In addition to this he included the letter the German composer

Karl-Heinz Stockhausen had written in support of Machorka-Muff into the review.

Stockhausen's open admiration for the film was a noteworthy public statement, among

the vast negative response the film received in West Germany.27 When Böll's publisher

threatened the release of Not Reconciled, the first outcry came also from France, where

more than fifty critics, artists, and intellectuals signed a petition, calling for the film's

international release and distribution.28 Also Cahiers' rival publication Positif reacted

favorably to the Böll-adaptations. Well aware of the harsh reactions that had come out of

Germany, Michel Ciment commented on the German reactions with the following words:

The seriousness and the courage of such a film did only incite
hostility among the majority of German critics who, in a well-
known fashion criticized the form ... in order to avoid judging the
central issues instead. In this light, it is remarkable how Straub sets
out to treat taboo subjects in such an innovative manner within the
mediocre world of German cinema.29
 45

Ciment points explicitly to the fact that the West German reception of Straub-

Huillet's film derived on the basis of a specific tradition of understanding political

criticism in West Germany at the time. This tradition differed markedly from the way in

which young Cahiers-critics defined political criticism. This seems ironic considering the

fact that the roots of the Young German Film were even back then depicted in light of a

French new wave influence, especially in regard to authorship. "Developed as an

ideological premise of the Nouvelle Vague the politique des auteurs found nowhere a

more fertile ground than in Germany," Wolfram Schütte writes accordingly in his

foreword to the young German auteurist study Herzog, Kluge, Straub.30 Also the label of

the German Autorenfilmer was undeniably inspired by the French New Wave's

international success, yet it differed noticeably in its basic understanding of political

criticism.

The concept of the Autorenfilm derived, according to Thomas Elsaesser, from a

rather "German tradition [of] Romantic anti-capitalism" that had manifested itself

primarily in the literary and dramatic arts during the 19th century.31 The Autorenfilmer

functioned, moreover, as a marketing tool, in an attempt to boost the exhibition and

distribution of new German films abroad. The "concept of the Autorenfilm," had in this

sense "primarily a strategic function," as Elsaesser explains further. "The star directors

were part of a broadly-based movement inside Germany to win new audiences as well as

representing a unique marketing asset internationally."32 By utilizing the French auteur

as a commercial tool for European filmmakers, auteurism experienced its first significant

revision. Initially, Cahiers critics had defined the auteur as someone working within

commercial forms of film production. This is why, French auteur critics had no problem

of adapting their model to the Hollywood system, thus, including directors like Alfred

Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, or John Ford into their auteurist critiques. Young French

New Wave filmmakers understood their position, in the same vein, as an alternative

within, rather than outside of the French commercial film industry. Straub-Huillet always
 46

insisted, in this respect, that "they should have a place in the commercial film industry,"

as Barton Byg has pointed out."33 Yet following the international success of a number of

New Wave-inspired national cinemas around the world, the term of the auteur was

increasingly applied to directors who worked either in countries without a commercial

film industry or who sought to position themselves explicitly outside of the industrial

system. This was the case in the German Federal Republic where young German

filmmakers conceived themselves explicitly in opposition to the domestic commercial

film industry.

Thus, under the pretense of creative freedom – which had yet nothing to do with

the reality of public funding policies – young German filmmakers perceived themselves

not only outside of the industrial and commercial forms of cinema, but also superior to it.

This notion of superiority affected also the ways in which filmmakers addressed their

subject matter and their audience. "Just as the Oberhausener seem to enjoy exposing

people of a lower intelligence to the merciless ridicule of intellecturalis," writes a

contemporary West German critic, "so they please themselves in the attitude of someone

who can afford to ignore contact with the cinema stalls."34

However, by the end of 1966, Filmkritik's critical agenda underwent a noticeable

paradigm shift, from "Politische Linke" to "Ästhetische Linke" (Aesthetic Left). In

contrast to prior statements, Patalas called now for "an aesthetically-engaged criticism"

that follows the model of a "new mode of vision (of filmic reality)," as advocated by

Cahiers and as practiced by the "nouvelle vague."35 This shift in paradigm, as Irmbert

Schenk has pointed out, meant not necessarily an abandonment of political convictions,

but under the influence of Roland Barthes, West German critics began to define the

politics of filmmaking increasingly as a formal and material practice, rather than treating

cinema as a mere transmitter of political messages.36

The shift from political to aesthetic criticism was accompanied by a noticeable

change in the critical reception of Straub-Huillet's films in West Germany. By 1966, i.e.,
 47

only one year after his aforementioned stern review of Not Reconciled Enno Patalas

described the upcoming The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach most enthusiastically in

the following words: "Based on Straub's prior achievements with his short film

Machorka-Muff and, above all, … with Not Reconciled, ... The Chronicle of Anna

Magdalena Bach can be expected to be one of the most important and most interesting

works of the New German Film."37 Patalas' review of a film he had not even seen yet

was accompanied by an appeal to the readers of Filmkritik to financially sponsor the

Bach film, which had just been denied funding from the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film. Aside from Patalas, the appeal was co-signed by two other key directors of the

young German film movement: Volker Schlöndorff and Alexander Kluge.

The Kluge-Straub Debate

Filmkritik's paradigm shift was most likely not the only reason for the sudden

change in status that Straub-Huillet's work experienced within the young German film

culture. West German critics were also impressed by the increasing critical acclaim that

Straub-Huillet's first two films had received abroad. Not Reconciled, in particular, played

very successfully at the international film festivals in Bergamo, London, and Pesaro

during the season of 1965/66. Since the Federal Republic's public image was a central

concern for most West German critics, cultural advocates, and politicians at the time,

Straub-Huillet became central to the Young German Film movement. Attesting to this

pioneering status, film historian John Sandford sums up that "it was [Straub's] and

Kluge’s films that … first brought international admiration to the West German cinema

in the 1960s."38 Sandford attests here not only to Straub-Huillet's central role within the

historical discourse of the Young German Film, but he also points to an often-assumed

alliance between the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Alexander Kluge.

At the outset, Kluge appears to share Straub-Huillet's materialist filmmaking

practice by using seemingly similar formal techniques, such as voice over narration, the
 48

insertion of documentary and archival material (i.e. title cards, newspaper clippings, or

news footage), or the confrontation of fictional and documentary elements (i.e. histrionic

performances within quotidian settings). Both Kluge and Straub-Huillet appear in this

regard as part of the discourse of so-called Brechtian filmmaking. However, "one must ...

distinguish the 'Brechtianism' of Straub/Huillet and Alexander Kluge," Barton Byg

cautions, because Kluge's "relation to the film's material is quite different."39 Byg draws

on B. Ruby Rich's analysis of Kluge's authorial position, which summarizes succinctly

that in Kluge's films,

the narrator holds a position of omniscience as a deus ex machina

privy to information unavailable to the film's characters and
inaccessible with the film text. In this guise, the narrator quickly
becomes the favored replacement for the viewer in search of
identification. The narrator, in his display of wit and wisdom, wins
the respect of the viewer over the course of the film. The viewer, in
turn, repays this narrative generosity with downright chumminess,
uniting in a spirit of smug superiority with the narrator over and
against the character(s).40

Rich's last sentence in particular echoes Truffaut's description of the French metteur-en-

scène. She also recalls Elsaesser's critical evaluation of authorship in the New German

Cinema as a cinema that either belabored "the spectator by relentlessly selecting events

and incidents as proof for a thesis" or that assumed a "spectator [who already] shared the

film's perspective and the mode of address presumed agreement, without actually

creating it."41 The German Autorenfilm, as represented by Kluge, has, in other words,

more in common with the French "tradition of quality" than with the French New Wave.

Alexander Kluge, in turn, challenges Straub-Huillet's work explicitly for its

notion of authorship. Responding directly to the couple's 1976-production Fortini/Cani, a

collaboration with the Italian writer Franco Fortini, Kluge objects to Straub-Huillet's

refusal to provide the spectator with any concrete information about the events and places

that are mentioned or depicted in the film. "It is no use," writes Kluge, "that an author

makes a few steps forward even if these steps seem correct from the film's position,
 49

objectively speaking, if the spectator is not allowed to follow these steps as well."42 The

film features the original author Franco Fortini as its main performer/character. Fortini

can be seen reading from his autobiographical novel, thus, he appears both as the writer

and as a reader in the film. Straub-Huillet's camera films, in addition, the geographical

locations mentioned in the recital but refrains from further explanations. The spectator is,

therefore, kept at bay, is unable to establish a concrete relationship – and here Kluge

speaks explicitly about a historical relationship – to the film, to the filmmakers, the

characters, and the political and historical issues that are raised. The spectator cannot

connect what he sees to his own situation. Engaging, in other words, in an aesthetic of

abstraction, Kluge concludes, Straub-Huillet prevent the viewer from becoming an active

participant, depriving him from developing a potential for action in the future.43

Kluge, in contrast, as Miriam Hansen has pointed out, "proposes a structural

affinity of cinematic discourse with the stream of associations in the human mind."44 For

Kluge, she explains further, "meaning does not materialize in the film itself but in the

head of the spectator by means of ruptures between the various elements of cinematic

discourse."45 Strongly influenced by Soviet Avant-garde cinema of the twenties and the

Frankfurt School Kluge envisions a spectator who extracts (negates) from the ruptures

operating in the film-text a new ("unseen") image, created in the spectator's mind. Kluge

anchors the "real" image, to be more precise, in the sphere of cognitive imagination,

which means, the "real film" is produced in the mind of the spectator. Everything that

happens in Straub-Huillet's cinema takes place, on the contrary, in the material structure

of the image, a notion that is overtly inflected by Bazin's ontological realism and postwar

French mise-en-scène criticism. Straub-Huillet's films are, in other words, neither created

in the mind of the spectator, nor in the mind of the film author.

Kluge's approach as an author is, in addition, deeply informed by a pedagogical

imperative that stands in stark contrast to the way in which Straub-Huillet conceive of

their own relationship to the spectator. Whereas Kluge believes in the virtue of explicit,
 50

unmistakable statements, Straub-Huillet refuse to install such commentaries into their

films in order to avoid formulaic, predetermined truths and in an attempt not to patronize

the spectator. In a handwritten letter, published in Filmkritik, Straub attacks Kluge's

scholarly superior attitude (see Figure 3):

And here come die Herren Doktoren [the Ph.D.'s]! The self-
appointed watchdogs of the culture industry and of social
democracy.... To Kluge ... I would let Schönberg reply, for me as
well…: 'To include the artist [into the debate] is partly nonsensical.
It is end of the nineteenth century, and has nothing to do with me.
The material and its treatment are purely religious-
philosophical.'46

By lending a voice to Schoenberg, who speaks for the two of them, Straub structures his

disagreement with Kluge around his kinship with Schoenberg. The composer is clearly

identified – in fact, identifies himself in his own words – as one of Straub-Huillet's

elective affinities for the following reasons: like Straub-Huillet (and like Truffaut),

Schoenberg rejects the traditional author as an outmoded 19th-century bourgeois concept

and argues, instead, for a treatment of artistic material that derives only from specific

textual and discursive contexts.

This does not mean, however, that Straub-Huillet consider learning or coming to

some form of realization during the viewing of a film is completely out of the question.

"When I saw [John Ford's] The Searchers," Straub explains, "I understood better the

attitude of the settlers in Algeria – I had really tried hard to understand them when I was

in Paris during the Algerian war – when I saw the film by John Ford, the one that shows

the settler and the Indian-hunter with a certain initial respect because he understands

him."47 Straub admires Ford's reluctance of judging his characters and subjecting them to

an already established thesis. Ford's viewer is able to notice "for a fraction of a second

that something is false," as Straub emphasizes.48 Ford presents, in other words,

ideological conflicts and contradictions within the structure of the film instead of

declaring them top down in the form of a lecture. Following this, Straub declares that
 51

Ford – not Kluge – is "the most Brechtian of all film-makers."49 Ford and Straub are

certainly apart in terms of which political camp they identify themselves with, but they

share an affinity in refusing to subject the characters to an overarching political message.

They approach their characters, in other words, as an other. Straub's statement highlights,

thus, what constitutes the basic principle under which Straub-Huillet form their circle of

elective affinities, including artists from radically different historical, industrial, and

political backgrounds.

Collaborations:

Mallarmé and the New Munich Group

Both the West German reactions to Straub-Huillet's early work and the Kluge-

Straub dispute indicate how two distinct definitions of authorship generated two equally

distinct models of political criticism. Even though embedded in the critical framework of

specific national film movements, these models cannot only be defined according to

nationality or geography. In this regard, Straub-Huillet found some of their closest

collaborators among a specific group of young West German filmmakers.

During their Munich residence, Straub-Huillet belonged to a circle of filmmakers

to which Enno Patalas once referred to as the "New Munich group."50 Aside from Huillet

and Straub, the group included the filmmakers Peter Nestler, Klaus Lemke, Rudolf

Thome, Max Zihlmann, and Eckhart Schmidt. Most of them started as documentary

filmmakers and even though they received some critical attention at short-film and

documentary film festivals in the sixties, none of them made it into the canon of the

Young German Film, neither in Germany, nor abroad. Enno Patalas characterizes the

group as follows:
 52

All of them are Munich residents and closely connected to the city.
All of them belong to the same generation; they are around thirty.
They know each other very well and often work together ..., even
prefer the same shooting locations. But taking aside their group-
appearance and personal friendships or animosities, the collective
character ... results mainly from their films. Not only do they
utilize similar visual motifs, formed by way of similar filmic
methods, they also respond to the same historical situation: all of
their films are about life in the Federal Republic.51

The connection among the New Munich Group filmmakers resulted, in other words, in

light of concrete collaborations. Huillet was, for instance, the editor of Thome's short film

Jane erschießt John, weil er sie mit Ann betrügt (1967/68), which also included left-over

footage from both Lemke's and Straub-Huillet's earlier films, and Peter Nestler appeared

in a role in Straub-Huillet's Introduction to Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a

Cinematographic Scene" (1972).

On an aesthetic level, the New Munich Group was much stronger influenced by

the French New Wave than most other filmmakers in West Germany at the time. This

was, according to the film historian Thomas Brandlmeier, especially the influence of

Straub-Huillet.52 Films like Nestler's Aufsätze (1963), Schmidt's Die Flucht (1965),

Thome's Die Versöhnung (1964), or Lemke's Kleine Front (1965) promoted the "identity

of chronometric and filmic time," thus, "allowed events to unfold in front of the

camera."53 Both the influence of Bazin and of contemporary French documentary and

vérité approaches are significant here. One must also stress Huillet's specific impact in

reference to her early interests in ethnographic documentaries. However, similar to

Straub-Huillet's early Parisian period, details about these specific Munich affiliations are

mostly anecdotal: the group met frequently in Straub-Huillet's apartment that was

conveniently located above a neighborhood movie theater in Munich's downtown area.

There, the former film-club manager Straub would give lectures, often on films that the

majority of the young Germans had never seen. "After dinner," Klaus Lemke remembers,

Straub and Huillet "served real French coffee in their small studio apartment which was

completely filled with books, a big bed, more and more books ... as well as an expensive
 53

record player."54 Thirty years later, Rudolf Thome included a special homage to the

period into his feature-length film Das Geheimnis (1995): in two scenes the protagonists

are having "spaghetti with butter and cheese" for dinner – the special dish that the

Straubs' used to serve their guests during these gatherings.

The affinity between the émigré couple and the other members of the New

Munich group was also noticed in France. Michel Delahaye describes the work of the

New Munich Group as "an elegant and direct cinema;" a rare attribute, he continues to

point out, for a German cinema that remains otherwise captured by the formal ghosts of

its past.55 Straub echoes Delahaye's reaction by stating in 1966:

What's missing in contemporary German cinema is humility. I'm

thinking of the humility of a Jean Rouch. At heart, my characters
are similarly free than his, because they speak like his characters. It
is this kind of humility that gives importance to the films of Nestler
and of three others who are currently making something.56

What sets Nestler and 'the three others' apart from the rest of young German cinema is,

according to Straub, that they "simply record, film, paint, or draw what they see, without

trying to implement a specific form beforehand and, in doing so, cause reality to

disappear."57 Straub builds his familial ties – in this case to Rouch and to Nestler – on a

basis that differs markedly from conventional forms of categorizing film. Straub's canon

of elective affinities, so to say, is not defined by genre, aesthetics, nationality, or by

institutional relations. What counts is instead, as Jacques Rivette once put it:

tone, or emphasis, nuance […]; that is to say, the point of view of a

man, the auteur, badly needed, and the attitude that this man takes
in relation to that which he films, and therefore in relation to the
world and to everything: that which can be expressed by a choice
in situations, in the construction of the storyline, in the dialogue, in
the play of actors, or in the pure and simple technique,
"indifferently but as much.58

Indifferently but as much, a direct quote from Stéphane Mallarmé's poem A Throw of the

Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (1897), points coincidentally to Straub-Huillet's

Mallarmé adaptation Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice (1977). The collaboration
 54

that takes place in Every Revolution – between Mallarmé, the performers, the filmmakers,

and the rest of the crew – is based on a specific technique of adaptation that follows

Truffaut's dictum of "being faithful to the letter" to the core.

The ten-minute film features the recital of Mallarmé's poem by nine performers,

none of them professional actors, among them, the film critics Michel Delahaye and

Helmut Färber. Mallarmé's text is quoted in its entirety and in chronological order. In

addition to this, Straub-Huillet follow the original author's structural organization of

words, sentences, and passages. The film follows, in other words, Mallarmé's specific

way of highlighting the beginning and end of each textual fragment by arranging the

letters in a specific way on the page or by setting them apart through spaces or different

typographical settings. Each text fragment is, first of all, associated with a different

"voice" and, consequently, assigned to one specific actor. The poem's structure directs

furthermore the shots and montage of the film. The performers are sitting in a semi-circle

on a hill. Each actor is depicted in a specific shot. The camera alternates, in other words,

between nine different shot positions. The length of the corresponding text fragment

determines the length of a shot. In other words, the syntactic rhythm of the poem

determines the film's rhythmic montage. A word may produce a shot of less than a

second, whereas larger paragraphs may take up more than half a minute. In the form of

the concrete material structure of his writing, Mallarmé collaborates as one of the

scriptwriters, directors, and editors of the film.

As the first film Straub-Huillet shot on locations in their native France, more than

twenty years after Straub had been forced into emigration, Every Revolution stages

explicitly a communal gathering of the couple's long-time friends and supporters from

different national and linguistic backgrounds. Seated in a circle, the nine performers

recite Mallarmé's poem at a location that establishes a direct relationship between a

community of friends and collaborators and a historical site of collective (revolutionary)

uprising: Every Revolution is filmed at the cemetery Père Lachaise in front of the graves
 55

of the Communards of 1871. Located at this specific historical setting, Straub-Huillet

invite their friends to collaborate in the production of Every Revolution, a film that is

above all produced through each performer's struggle with Mallarmé's text.

Love

A love story, to recall Huillet's introductory remark, happens also when one

encounters a text in which something seems right. Huillet's and Straub's own love story

and professional collaboration begins similarly as an encounter with a text. "[When] I

met Straub in November [1954]," Huillet recalls, "he had this idea to make a film about

Bach and asked me if I would help him write the thing."59 The Chronicle of Anna

Magdalena Bach, the film that emerges from this encounter is neither about a creative

genius, nor about a historical figure. It is rather a story about a personal relationship that

is at the same time also a form of creative collaboration. Bach's life is told from the

perspective of his second wife Anna Magdalena, an accomplished singer and musician in

her own right and deeply involved in her husband's work. Aside from obvious parallels to

Straub-Huillet's own life and labor, the filmmakers resist any temptation of imagining the

other pair's life for a contemporary setting. The Bachs appear rather in the form of the

material remains they left behind: letters, sheet music, and, above all, the compositions

on which they worked together.

Chronicle was initially based on a short fictional biography (1925), written by the

British biographer Esther Meynell.60 But since Meynell narrated the story in modern

English Straub-Huillet decided to refrain from using the book as a source for their

adaptation. They did, however, keep the title "out of gratitude," as Straub explains; "If I

hadn't read the book, I would have probably never thought of the film."61 Thus, the film's

title functions as a material trace that testifies to Meynell's influence during the early

stages of the project and to her preliminary collaboration with Straub-Huillet. "I also

liked the title because of this word: chronicle," Straub points out further. In fact, Straub-
 56

Huillet turn the literal meaning of the term into the material structure of the film: Bach's

life and work is presented in a series of sequential, episodic fragments that resemble quite

accurately the form of a chronicle.

The narrated events and dialogues derive predominantly from historical sources

the filmmakers found in West and East German archives. Straub-Huillet quote from these

documents, but also include them as visual illustrations into the film. Facsimiles of

historical drawings, maps, handwritten letters, sheet music, or concert programs appear

throughout the film. Aside from these external documents, the film quotes Bach directly

on two other levels: in the dialogue and in the form of musical recitals. Chronicle stages

Bach's music in a series of recitals that are performed live in front of the camera. Each

musical piece is filmed in one take and features the original audio that was recorded

simultaneously with the visual. The actors/musicians play on original instruments and are

dressed in costumes and wigs from the period.

In addition to narrating the relations between Anna M. and Johann S. by way of

the written documents the couple left behind, the film documents the musicians at work,

especially German singer and pianist Christiane Lang (in the role of Anna Magdalena)

and Dutch pianist and conductor Gustav Leonhardt, a renown Bach specialist, (as J.S.

Bach). His Dutch accent and his anti-illusionist performance undermines any attempt of

embodying a historical character. The film is only insofar a "biopic" as it depicts Bach's

life and work in the form of his music. This requires a specific act of creative

collaboration between Bach and Leonhardt. The contemporary musician embodies Bach

literally by way of his physical performance. Leonhardt plays Bach by performing his

musical compositions live in front of the camera. The film documents the specific

characteristics of this relationship, for instance, in a scene that shows Leonhardt's hands

playing one of Bach's sonatas on the harpsichord in a close-up shot. At this moment, the

film not only reveals its own mode of production – a rather conventional technique of

"anti-illusionism." Straub-Huillet show, more precisely, what it means to produce

 57

something with the skills of the other: closing in on Leonhardt's fingers moving swiftly

across the keyboard, the shot documents how Leonhardt physically traces and re-enacts a

specific aspect of the skills and manual labor that Bach performed originally. Leonhardt's

relation to Bach is, first of all, a work process that depends on concrete instruments,

tools, and techniques and not on lofty forms of artistic inspiration.

Chronicle includes the shot of a bible page written in Anna Magdalena's

handwriting alongside Johann Sebastian's own handwritten letters and notations (see

Figure 4). These handwritten documents deliver more than simply an illustration of Anna

Magdalena and Johann Sebastian's creative skills. They testify rather to the two co-

authors' (Anna M. and Johann S.) material presence in the making of the film. In their

own handwriting the two musicians leave an imprint of their creative work in the form of

a direct bodily trace. Following a screening of the film, Jacques Rivette once pointed out

that Bach's handwriting changed over the years (and over the course of the film).62 But it

is not in all cases clear which documents derive, indeed, from Johann Sebastian's

handwriting. "For a long time people attributed manuscripts written by Anna Magdalena

to Johann Sebastian's handwriting," as Straub explains in an interview.63 "Only the more

recent Bach scholarship has found out what has been written by Anna Magdalena

specifically; the harmonies and even entire scores she transcribed. They discovered that

their handwritings became more and more alike."64 Straub-Huillet decide to account for

this aspect of the Bachs' relationship by introducing a female voice into the film. Anna

Magdalena's voice-over narration dominates the narrative of the film. Since no actual

letters of Anna S. survived Straub-Huillet constructed her narrative from letters and

notices written by Johann Sebastian and his son Philip Emmanuel Bach. In doing so,

Straub-Huillet transpose one of Anna Magdalena's main labor activities – the

transcription of her husband's musical compositions – onto the level of oratory narration

in the film. Christiane Lang embodies, in other words, the written language of Anna

Magdalena's male contemporaries, a form of verbal expression that is inevitably closer to

 58

Anna's original language than any one the twentieth-century filmmakers could have

invented for her. In addition to this, Lang recreates also Anna's other work skills as a

professional singer and pianist.

Straub-Huillet's understanding of authorship, as seen at the very beginning of this

chapter, rejects emphatically any notions of gender identity politics. That does not mean,

however, that the two filmmakers remain indifferent to the power structures implemented

by a patriarchal discourse. On the contrary, the couple's deliberate and consistent use of

writing and recital techniques evoke the theories of French feminism and its poetic

practice of écriture féminine, a technique that is not exclusive to women, as Hélène

Cixous emphasizes: "There have always been those uncertain, poetic persons who have

not let themselves be reduced to dummies programmed by pitiless repression … Men and

women: beings who are complex, mobile, open."65 And perhaps it was precisely this

kind of a "bisexual" mobility, as Cixous calls it, which provided the foundation for

Huillet and Straub's own elective relationship. Engaged in a form of feminine writing,

Straub-Huillet imagine a new life for a couple that loved and worked together more than

two hundred years earlier. Straub-Huillet envision this life, more importantly, from the

perspective of Anna Magdalena, thus, grant Anna Magdalena a voice by using written

material of her male relations as "a passageway, [as an] entrance … [and a] dwelling

place of the other in me – the other that I am and am not, that I don't know how to be, but

that I feel passing," to borrow from Cixoux.66 Writing works here as a practice, not

simply as a formal principle or product; or as Cixous puts it: "writing is working; being

worked; questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned) of same and of

other."67

The quotations of the written manuscripts, of the musical performances, and of

the spoken dialogue accomplish that the Bachs do not appear as static and self-identical

historical figures, but rather as artists who gain a presence in a twentieth-century film by

expressing themselves by way of specific material remainders of their work. This strategy
 59

does not hide the fact that the surviving material authored by Johann Sebastian

significantly outnumbers the records his wife left behind. Yet, Straub-Huillet use this

material to sketch from it a place (and a voice) for Anna Magdalena. In effect, Bach's

music comes alive as part of a distinctly collaborative work process, not as the product of

an individual. The Bachs are, in addition, portrayed in light of a relationship that bears

explicit markers of temporality and alterity. Especially through the acts of tracing and

embodying specific work processes the actors/musicians are captured in the act of writing

the part in relation to the historical figure's work, rather than merely portraying a stock

character according to already existing features. The written documents in the film

highlight the elements of temporality and non-presence further. Mobility, transformation,

and change are then not only properties that pertain to the musical elements of the film

but are here equally intrinsic to the practice of filmic écriture and adaptation.
 60

Notes

1 Helge Heberle and Monika Funke Stern, "Das Feuer im Innern des Berges,"
Frauen und Film 32 (1982): 5 (my translation).
2 Ibid., 10.

3 Franco Fortini, "untitled letter," Filmkritik 241 (January 1977): no pp (my

translation).
4 Heberle and Funke Stern, 10.

5 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New

York: Columbia Press, 1984).
6 Kristeva, 59 (italics in the original text).

7 Filmic quotations occur, for instance, through the incorporation of archival

footage in Not Reconciled (1964/65) or Introduction to Schoenberg (1972) or by quoting
a scene from Jean Renoir's Madame Bovary (1932) in The Death of Empedocles (1986).
8 Kristeva, 60.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central

Europe, A Study in Elective Affinity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 12.
12 Ibid., 8.

13 For a critique of auteur theory and criticism see e.g. Edward Buscombe, "Ideas
of Authorship," Screen, vol. 14, no. 3 (1973): 75-85; Jane Gaines, "Dorothy Arzner's
Trousers," Jump Cut, vol. 37 (July 1992): 88-98.
14 Michel Delahaye, "Entretien Avec Jean-Marie Straub," Cahiers du Cinéma
180 (July 1966): 52. The photograph is reprinted in Jean Douchet, ed., The French New
Wave, trans. Robert Bonnono (New York: D.A.P., 1998), 47.
15 Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, trans. Richard
Neupert (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 26.
16 Alexandre Astruc, "The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Caméra-Stylo," in
The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, 17-23 (Doubleday: Garden City, 1968); Francois
Truffaut, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," in Movies and Methods: An
Anthology, 224-237 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
 61

17 André Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005), 69.
18 See John Hess, "La Politique des Auteurs, 2: Truffaut's Manifesto," Jump Cut
2 (1974), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC02folder/auteur2.html.
19 Richard Roud, Jean-Marie Straub (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 30. See
also Eric Rentschler, "The Use and Abuse of Memory: New German Film and Discourse
of Bitburg," in Perspectives on German Cinema, ed. Terri Ginsberg and Kirsten Moana
Thompson, 163-183 (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996), 174.
20 Andi Engel, "Andi Engel talks to J.-M. Straub," Cinemantics 1 (1970): 18.

21 Roud, Jean-Marie Straub, 30.

22 Helmut Färber, "Machorka-Muff," Filmkritik 10 (January 1964): 36 (my

translation).
23 This does not mean that there are no alterations at all. Straub-Huillet make
changes in the form of abbreviations to the text and usually only transcribe passages that
are written in direct speech.
24Enno Patalas, "Nicht Versöhnt," Filmkritik 9 (August 1965): 474 (my
translation).
25 Enno Patalas and Wilfried Berghahn, "Gibt es eine linke Kritik?," Filmkritik 5
(January 1961):135 (my translation).
26 Jacques Rivette, "Machorka-Muff," Cahiers du Cinéma 145 (July 1963): 36
(my translation).

27 For a full translation of Stockhausen's letter see Roud, 37-38.

28 "Défense de 'Nicht Versöhnt', Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 171 (October 1965): 8.

29 Michel Ciment, "Suite Bergamasque," Positif, no. 72 (Dec./Jan. 1965/66): 61

(my italics and my translation).
30 Wolfram Schütte, "Akte des Widerstands," in Herzog, Kluge, Straub (Munich:
Hanser, 1976), 12 (my translation). The book discussed, aside from Straub, also the
directors Werner Herzog and Alexander Kluge. Even though the title focused on Straub,
Danièle Huillet was mentioned as his principal collaborator.
31 Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1989), 48.
32 Ibid., 2-3.
 62

33 Byg, Landscapes, 36.

34 Joe Hembus quoted in Elsaesser, 70.

35 Irmbert Schenk, Filmkritik: Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven (Marburg:

Schueren, 1998), 58 (my translation).
36 Ibid., 62.

37 Patalas, "In eigener Sache," Filmkritik 10 (November 1966): 601 (my

translation).
38 John Sandford, The New German Cinema (Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1980),
17.
39 Byg, Landscapes, 42.

40 B. Ruby Rich, "She says, he says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist
Film Politics," in Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 239 (my italics).
41 Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 73.

42 Interview with Alexander Kluge, "Straub (1) – Fortini/Cani," Filmkritik 240

(December, 1976): 576 (italics in the original text) (my translation).
43 Ibid., 577.

44 Miriam Hansen, "Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere:

Alexander Kluge's Contribution to Germany in Autum," New German Critique 24/25
(Autumn/Winter 1981-1982), 48.
45 Kluge quoted in Hansen, 48.

46Jean-Marie Straub, "Zum Kluge [To Kluge]," Filmkritik 241 (January 1977): no
pp. (inside front cover) (my translation).
47 Engel, 21-22 (italics mine).

48 Ibid., 21.

49 Ibid.

50 Patalas, "Ansichten einer Gruppe," Filmkritik (May 1966): 247-249 (my

translation).
51 Ibid., 247.
 63

52 Thomas Brandlmeier, "Die Münchner Schule: Zur Vorgeschichte des Jungen

Deutschen Films 1962-1968," in Abschied von Gestern: Bundesdeutscher Film der
Sechziger und Siebziger Jahre (Frankfurt/Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am
Main, 1991), 58 (my translation).
53 Patalas, "Ansichten," 248.

54 Lemke quoted in Brandlmeier, 58.

55 Michel Delahaye, "Allemagne Ciné Zéro," Cahiers du Cinéma 163 (February

1965), 65 (my translation).
56 Delahaye, "Entretien Avec Jean-Marie Straub," Cahiers du Cinéma 180 (July
1966): 56 (my italics and my translation).
57 "Gespräch mit Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub," Filmkritik 10 (October
1968): 694 (my translation).
58 Jacques Rivette, "On Abjection," http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/OK/
abjection.html, no pp (italics mine).
59 Heberle and Funke Stern, 5.

60 Esther Meynell, The Little Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Boston: E.C.
Schirmer, 1934).
61 "Gespräch mit Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub," 694.

62 Ibid., 690.

63 Straub in Die Früchte des Zorns und der Zärtlichkeit (Vienna: Vienna Intern.
Film Festival, 2004), 61 (my translation).
64 Ibid.

65 Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 83-84.
66 Ibid., 85-86.

67 Ibid., 86.
 64

CHAPTER TWO:

LABOR

For all films are commodities and therefore objects of trade, even
those whose discourse is explicitly political – which is why a
rigorous definition of what constitutes 'political' cinema is called
for.
Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cinema/Ideology/Criticism

The revolution is like God’s grace, it has to be made anew each

day, it becomes new every day.
Jean-Marie Straub

"The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness," Karl Marx writes in

the German Ideology, "is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the

material intercourse of men, the language of real life."1 Economic conditions and

relations, Marx points out further, generate formations of thought – not the other way

round. Marx illustrates historical materialism's radical break with older ideological

hierarchies with the help of the following illustration: mimicking "the inversion of

objects on the retina … men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera

obscura."2 Marx's use of the camera lens is suggestive not only because it anchors

epistemological and phenomenological processes in a material groundwork but by

describing the image produced by the camera in terms of a tangible, physical imprint the

figure identifies also the transposition between systems (from socio-economic system to

the formation of ideas) in terms of a material relationship.

More than a century later, Louis Althusser developed Marx's notion of ideology

as a form of optical inversion into his full-fledged critique of state ideological

apparatuses and identified the mode of vision produced by them explicitly as a

fundamental process of mis-recognition.3 Following Althusser's considerable impact on

post-'68 film theory, the camera became an ideological apparatus par excellence,

especially in light of classical, narrative cinema's "illusionist" qualities.4 But exactly the
 65

uneasy shift from cinema as a mechanical reproductive medium in general to specific

types of film language emphasizes that it remained overall unclear if the ideological code

operating in the cinema could be broken (e.g. by way of narrative and aesthetic counter

techniques) or if this code was simply an intrinsic property of the medium.5 Both

possibilities are interconnected and lead inevitably to an impasse in regard to cinema's

radical, political potentials: the production of cinematic practices capable to permeate, if

not counteract, ideological formations seems limited given an overwhelming reification

of images that renders even the creation of so-called alternative or counter images as

superfluous.

Whereas the previous chapter discussed Straub-Huillet's work relations from the

perspective of authorship, the task is now to examine Straub-Huillet's work from the

perspective of labor itself. This process goes through a number of production stages: from

the original text to the script to the rehearsal to the cinematographic recording, etc. Each

stage of production involves not only a particular set of material conditions, but also

exists in a concrete relationship to other stages of production across distinct media and

textual systems. It is precisely this process of a "reproductive," inter-textual cycle that

gives rise to the image of a revolutionary event in Straub-Huillet's work.

Aside from investigating labor relations and modes of production, this chapter

contests also the widely held assumption that Straub-Huillet's films fail to address class

politics explicitly as part of their narrative content. The films discussed in the following

refute such claims. There are, first of all, the three Elio Vittorini adaptations Sicilia!

(1998), Workers, Peasants (2000), and The Return of the Prodigal Son – Humiliated

(2001-03), which are all based on novels by the postwar communist writer Elio Vittorini

and deal with rural proletarian politics in postwar Italy. There is, second, the West

German short film The Bridegroom, The Comedienne, and the Pimp (1968) which

discusses production and labor explicitly in terms of mechanical reproduction and there

is, third, the ethnographic documentary Too Early, too Late (1981) which is structured
 66

around texts written by the communist writers Friedrich Engels and Mahmoud Hussein.

And yet, Straub-Huillet's labor practice also exceeds their films' immediate textual realm,

an aspect that will be discussed in regard to the couple's collaboration with the local

theater ensemble Teatro di Bartolo in the Tuscan town of Buti, Italy. In other words, both

the ideas and form expressed in the films are based on concrete conditions of social and

economic exchange. It is precisely the relationship of material circumstances giving rise

to the conceptual realm, to recall Marx's introductory remark, which lies at the heart of

this examination.

From Text to Practice

Like many other films that emerged as part of 1960s and 1970s European new

wave movements, Straub-Huillet's films represent a materialist approach to filmmaking.

This means on a basic level that their films defy the conventions of "illusionism" by

revealing the structures of the films' own making. This happens, in Straub-Huillet's case,

through the use of specific, recurring techniques, like long-take cinematography, direct

sound recordings, or a minimalist conception of oratory recitals consisting of unaffected

dialogue delivery, the frequent casting of non-professional actors, and historical

costuming in a quotidian setting. Whereas most critics identified these formal features as

Brechtian distanciation techniques, not all critics agreed with Straub-Huillet's status as

Brechtian filmmakers.6

Based on Brecht's novel fragment The Business Affairs of Julius Caesar (1937-

39), the film adaptation History Lessons (1972) has become a test case for the critical

evaluation of the couple's Brechtian tendencies, given the fact that the film's Brechtian

influences lie both in its form and content.7 The structural-materialist filmmaker and

theorist Peter Gidal, for instance, criticized Straub-Huillet, in particular, for the extended

long-take cinematography in History Lessons' "car-sequence."8 Filmed from the interior

of a car that navigates through the streets of contemporary Rome, the "car sequence"
 67

establishes a quotidian scene that operates in contrast to the histrionic scenes in which

actors perform Brecht's drama in historical costumes. The "interspersion with the drive

through the city streets," writes Gidal, "distanciates in a most academic fashion,

questioning neither the veracity of the present-day Rome nor the faithful fiction of 194

BC. ... Here perception equals knowledge, instead of being questioned by it."9 Gidal

considers both the couple's quotidian scenes and their theatrical performances as too

reliant on cinema's representational qualities. "Instead of drawing attention to the film's

mode of production," Gidal contends, "the car-sequence envisions "historicism" and

"reality" by conceding to "a phantasm of documentary truth."10 Straub-Huillet's

materialism is, according to Gidal, a form of unreflected naturalism.

In a debate that erupted in response to the screening of History Lessons at the

Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1975, Colin MacCabe voiced similar criticism:

"The Brechtian idea is to take something which we all know about, as we all know about

Caesar, and then deconstruct it into a set of social relations .... Straub's film doesn't do

this."11 Like Gidal, MacCabe argues that History Lessons, despite of its title, fails to

produce any knowledge about the class conditions and relations Brecht addresses in the

novel. The film leaves, in consequence, no incentive for the spectator to take up a class

position and to work as an active participant. "The Marxist ethic and the Brechtian ethic

is that you work because you have to. The only reason you have to work at History

Lessons is because you are in a cinema – and practically nothing else."12 Perhaps due to

their disagreement, both Gidal and MacCabe manage to provide a much clearer picture of

the distinctive character of Straub-Huillet's materialist practice than many of its declared

critical supporters.

Many critics have argued, in contrast, that Straub-Huillet's work practice is

heavily informed by Brechtian techniques of distanciation, especially regarding the

actors' work on the text/script. But there are important differences between some

Brechtian principles and Straub-Huillet's materialist approach. Brecht was, first of all,
 68

mainly interested in revealing and attacking dominant power structures by educating and

informing the masses (i.e., the spectator) about the relations and conditions of production

that governed modern life. This conception corresponds widely to the way in which

political criticism is considered to operate in the arts, from the leftist avant-garde

movements of the twenties and thirties to those of the late sixties and seventies.13 Yet

Straub-Huillet apply very different goals to their contemporary appropriation of

Brechtian methods. For instance, Gidal is absolutely correct to point out that Straub-

Huillet forego to disclose social relations as part of a concrete body of knowledge

administered by way of an educative process. What this means is, in fact, something very

specific. First of all, Straub-Huillet are not trying to cover up social relations, but,

echoing Huillet's aversion against "general ideas" from the previous chapter, they refrain

from expressing general ideas about social relations. For instance, by quoting Brecht's

original Caesar text, the couple incorporates automatically the text's own, specific

comments on class relations. But what the filmmakers refuse to deliver is an

interpretation that explains why they embed Brecht's text into the quotidian landscape of

late-sixties Rome. In failing to do so, Gidal and MacCabe argue, History Lessons remains

incapable of articulating a meaningful political critique of existing social structures and

conditions. Gidal and MacCabe echo unmistakably Alexander Kluge's earlier critique of

Fortini/Cani.

Indeed, as seen in the previous chapter, Straub-Huillet are unequivocally opposed

to techniques such as commenting or lecturing by way of their films. The social

dimension of their work lies, first of all, in the couple's encounter and struggle with

Brecht's text, based on the assumption that "something seems right" in Brecht's own

treatment of political and social issues. But the crucial social dimension in the making of

History Lessons lies in the moments of textual/representational transposition which

means in the most general terms: in the encounter between literary and filmic medium.

The authority to render social and economic conditions visible derives, in other words,
 69

not only from the filmmakers conscious choices, but depends also on the other

collaborators involved in the production and, is no less determined by the cinematic

apparatus. Following both Bazin's and Truffaut's dictum to letting the viewers see with

their own eyes, Straub-Huillet bestow a certain faith not only onto the original text, but

similarly onto the camera's ability to register the material real-life processes (to borrow

Marx's expression) via its lens and to imprint them onto the filmic material. In fact,

similar to Marx's camera obscura this camera is capable to reveal the structures between

basic social structures and conceptual formations due to its specific optical and

technological properties. The camera participates and mimics the specific mode of

production exercised in the so-called age of mechanical reproduction.14

Social and political structures operate in Straub-Huillet's work never exclusively

on a textual-narrative level, but always in direct relation to the phases of writing and

performance that produce them. This is what defines Straub-Huillet's materialism as a

distinct form of social practice. The social is here defined as a struggle with a text and as

a struggle with a place (or setting). This struggle is experienced by all the members of the

cast and crew and, thus, obtains not simply an individual, but rather a communal and

heterogeneous experience. This experience is recorded by the cinematic apparatus, a

device that inscribes, in addition, also its own encounter with a text and with a place into

the film-text.

The "car sequence" in History Lessons is, in this regard, not really the filmic

version of the historical materialist critique Brecht articulates in the Caesar novel in

regard to ancient Rome. Instead, Brecht's critique is framed as an event in itself through

the quotation and recital of the Caesar novel. The actor's ancient costumes, the recital of

the text separate (the quotation of Brecht) from other material inscriptions into the film-

text. Thus, within the same image – yet separated by an inferred borderline – Straub-

Huillet articulate their own take on the subject vis-à-vis Brecht. The quotidian aspects in

the scenes document the contemporary social space of 1960s Rome. The social space is
 70

framed and captured with the means of modern technologies of reproduction. These

images depict not so much social relations in general than rather the filmmaking process's

specific encounter and involvement with a social space. This space is not a mere

backdrop, but its specific characteristics shape and intervene with the image. This

happens, for instance, when the sounds of the quotidian environment counteract the

visual acoustically. Another example is a scene in which the material conditions at the

profilmic scene intervene through movement: the image is shaky, bounces up and down,

because the camera is located on a boat that is rocked by waves. Moreover, letting the

camera roll for several minutes during the sequence shots becomes a direct expression of

the temporal and material expenses that went into the making of the film. The driving

vehicle that participates in the production of the "car sequences" emphasizes these

elements of economic flow and material consumption further. Similar to the camera, the

vehicle consumes capital and material resources, while following the routes staked out on

an urban map.

Each social space directs the movements of cast and crew in different ways. It

reorients the performers in front or behind the camera in their steps; at times paving the

way, at other times creating obstacles. Once again, the "car sequences" epitomize this.

The car struggles to find its way through the narrow Roman streets that are packed with

people and traffic. Over and over again, the driver – a character in the film – is hindered

to move forward due to a sudden obstruction – a pedestrian crossing the street, a car

cutting in, unexpectedly, in front of him. Straub-Huillet invite these unpredictable

incidents into their scene and let them occur side-by-side with the well-rehearsed

histrionic recitals. The rupture between the two constitutes precisely how labor works in

Straub-Huillet's oeuvre to produce a scene in which the political is able to emerge.

The political element in Straub-Huillet's films is not defined by explanations or

interpretations of an already existing form of a social critique, but aims instead at the

production of an image that is informed by the possibilities of radical change within

 71

existing structures. Straub-Huillet are not that much interested in merely educating the

masses about general structures of ideology. Straub-Huillet's labor process aims at

exploring social relations as part of a singular event. In doing so, the filmmakers follow

Marx's call of attempting to change the world, instead of merely interpreting it.

In order to do so, Straub-Huillet treat all elements of filmmaking (i.e., writing,

acting, editing, etc.) as a form of labor embedded within relations and conditions that

determine, but also reach beyond, the production of a Straub-Huillet film. Beyond,

because Straub-Huillet's work relations for a specific film belong often to a larger social

network, as the couple's collaborations with the local theater ensemble in Buti

epitomizes. Second, the social and labor relations that condition the production of a

Straub-Huillet film impact also the final product in its formal structure. The performers,

the camera- and sound-operators, or the editors inscribe themselves – by way of their

specific skills – as much into the film-text as the original authors. In fact, Straub-Huillet's

mode of filmmaking involves a labor process that is built on direct relationships between

distinct stages of production. For instance, rather than using the original text as a

blueprint the mostly non-professional actors reproduce the text (i.e., to produce it from

scratch) on the basis of each actor's specific relationship to the original text. The making

of a Straub-Huillet film functions, in this respect, as an explicit refusal to alienate the

worker from the work process as a whole and from the final product. Based on a series of

reproductions and repetitions this form of an unalienated labor process leads to the

eruption of an unforeseen event, like e.g. the sensation of a hidden smile.

The Rehearsal Scene

Three major documentary films about Straub-Huillet were made in the past two

decades, all of them made by directors with close personal or professional ties to the

couple and all of them with a noticeable focus on Straub-Huillet's work method. Harun

Farocki's Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work (Jean-Marie Straub und
 72

Danièle Huillet bei der Arbeit an einem Film, West Germany, 1983) documents the

acting rehearsals that preceded the filming of Class Relations (1983). Pedro Costa

focuses on the couple's post-production work in his feature-length documentary Where

Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, Portugal/France, 2001).

Giulio Bursi's I Listen (J'écoute, Italy, 2006) was filmed on the set of Straub-Huillet's last

feature-length film These Encounters of Theirs. Three making offs that capture three

different stages of the filmmaking process: before, during, and after the shooting of the

film. The couple's personal life and relationship is never directly addressed, but captured

only as part of their interaction at work.

Harun Farocki's documentary offers an in-depth analysis of both the filmmakers'

and the actors' collaborative approach to the original text, in this case, Franz Kafka's

posthumous novel fragment Amerika: The Missing Person (1927).15 This process differs

significantly from conventional film adaptation practices, since the conception of a

hermeneutic circle is explicitly rejected: the film version does not assume to capture or

translate the original work's "whole" or "universal meaning."16 Filmmakers and

performers approach the original work, instead, as an object whose structural elements

are yet to be discovered and invented. Farocki, who also appears in a supporting role in

Class Relations, captures how this method unfolds in his documentary. The film

emphasizes that Straub-Huillet treat filmmaking as work and that they conceive of the

performer as a laborer. The text/script is the actor's material of production, the other

members of the cast and crew are his co-workers, and his body or voice are the tools in

the production of words, mimics, and gestures. The actor's skills correspond, in this

respect, to any other form of material expression.

Collaboration includes, at this point, no longer only the filmmakers and the

original author/text, but also the performers. Thus, following the practice of quotation,

which constitutes the first step of collaborative work (between Straub-Huillet and the

original author/text), a second collaborative act takes place: a reading practice that leads
 73

to the production of the final script. To be precise, the actors read their parts from a first

transcription of the text that constitutes the first script (see Figure 5). This reading

process is repeated multiple times in order to determine precisely each accent, pause, and

word-length specific to each actor's spoken delivery. The notation of each pause or word-

length is as important as the word itself. The pauses derive, for instance, from each

actor's specific mode of breathing. "Some of them have more breath, due to physical

ability or training," explains Straub, "but this is not the only reason. It has also something

to do with the text. When Therese [a character in Class Relations] speaks of the long

snowy streets in New York and her mother's death, she cannot utter the sentences in the

same way in which she says, 'Good morning, Mr. Rossmann'."17 It is Straub's job during

the reading and rehearsal process to remind the actors to treat the text as an unknown

territory and to avoid an interpretation on the basis of already set conventions. Huillet

transcribes and documents each performer's unique relationship to his or her role into a

new script version. On the basis of her notations, she types a second transcript and final

script that records all the important markers of oratory distinction, all pauses, etc. in the

form of highlighted characters and sentence breaks (see Figure 6). With the help of this

second script, the actors learn their parts and enter an intense series of rehearsals in which

they repeat the text over and over, while adding more and more gestures, props, and

physical interaction to their roles. As documented in Farocki's film, the oratory delivery

of the text remains at the center of attention throughout.

Repetition becomes the key methodological device that functions to remove the

text from its original, familiar connotations. As the actor repeats a sentence over and over

again, the words detach themselves further and further from their initial context. The

structure that once gave meaning to the sentence falls apart and the text loses its familiar

framework. As the gap between signifier and signified broadens, the text removes itself

also from the one speaking it: the actor. This is a practice that corresponds to Brecht's

conception of the Verfremdungseffekt (trans. estrangement or alienation effect) in

 74

dramatic performances: "the actor's holding himself remote from the character portrayed,

along the lines described."18 Very similar to the performance technique described by

Brecht, the typical actor in a Straub-Huillet film "rejects complete conversion" with the

role/text and "limits himself from the start to simply quoting the character played."19

This has neither something to do with "an unnatural way of acting," nor with "ordinary

stylization," as Brecht emphasizes.20 Time and again, Straub reminds the actors during

the rehearsals not to mistake accustomed modes of expression for "natural" behavioral

patterns.

As a work method, Brechtian Verfremdung seeks to destroy normative systems of

understanding both within and outside of the (movie-)theater. Via the performer, the

historical spectator is meant to develop a critical understanding of his class position. Due

to the actor's distanciation from the character, the spectator can no longer immerse

himself fully in the character and his world. Like the actor, he views the situation

portrayed from the outside. In sharp contrast to Western (i.e., Aristotelian) modes of

theatrical performance, actor and spectator are no longer bound in an empathic

relationship. Instead of inciting a situation in which spectator, actor, and character are

forced into one and the same position, Brechtian Verfremdung insists on their

distinctiveness. Yet, even though prevented from embodying the same position, actor and

spectator are by no means completely alien to one another. Distanced from the character,

the actor assumes instead a position of cohabitation. He does not become "the spectator

himself," writes Brecht, "but his neighbor."21 Spectator and actor are, in other words,

allies in a shared labor process organized around the principle of difference. They have

certain interests and perspectives in common, but never occupy an identical position. In

this regard, Straub-Huillet's labor relations prefigure the crucial workings of a "border-

function" that shall be discussed in the upcoming chapter. Such a structure differs

dramatically from the usual divisions of production and consumption in capitalist

discourses: instead of separating the producer from the consumer (or, the performer from
 75

the spectator) the Verfremdungseffekt highlights at once their distinction and co-

existence.

As a distinct strategy toward distanciation Straub-Huillet's use of repetition

reminds of a principle that defined, according to Karl Marx, proletarian revolutions.22

Whereas "bourgeois revolutions … storm swiftly from success to success, [while] their

dramatic effects outdo each other," the proletarian revolutions

criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in

their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in
order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the
inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts,
seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw
new strength form the earth and rise again, more gigantic before
them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of
their own aims … .23

Straub-Huillet's rehearsal process pushes the actors into a similar struggle with the text.

In fact, the more the text is attacked in a cycle of repetitions, the more it loses its

transparency. Captured by the "mechanical" gesture of repetition, the text becomes an

obstacle, it points to its own limitations. The actor resists the text in its familiar form and,

in turn, the text resists the actor.

This mode of repetition, interruption, and rephrasing gives the work sessions a

tedious and didactic quality. However, the educative principle is only a first step. Self-

critical detachment is followed by the realization that things "can also happen quite a

different way," as Brecht puts it.24 This critical insight results not from the gesture of

detachment alone, but more precisely, from the feeling of estrangement it produces. First

of all, the rephrasing of each word introduces an attitude of negation into the rehearsal

scene: each new utterance negates all those that were articulated before. Negation

functions in this case not as a counter-term to a positive principle and does, therefore, not

confirm identity. Introduced in a continuous mode of repetition, negation functions rather

as an affirmation of difference, in the sense that repetition is here "not a variation on an

already existing, known model," as Gilles Deleuze outlines paradigmatically in his study
 76

Difference and Repetition (1968). Instead, Straub-Huillet make every effort to destroy the

notion that there is but one original model of the text. Instead they engage in practice that

seeks, in contrast, "to represent disguise and displacement as the constituent elements of

repetition."25 Inasmuch as a throw of the dice will never abolish chance, the repeated

event is always a (re)creation from scratch.

Particularly within a setting such as the rehearsal scene, which is at the outset

associated with the production of similarity and identity, difference intervenes as a key

experimental character. Experimental because, following its own system of trial and

error, Straub-Huillet's rehearsal process is literally conceived of as an experiment, yet an

experiment that is based upon a paradoxical premise: a process of continuous revisions

gives form to the possibility of a new text. This new text pertains not to the film produced

in the process (the film as final product). The new text means rather: the new written as a

series of texts.

Any attempt of "bringing out the unexpected," says Brecht, requires a course of

action "that takes place on a conscious plane."26 In other words, the new does not occur

just for the sake of its own being. Paradoxically, someone has to desire it and has to

provide a stage for it, a stage on which it can erupt, albeit unexpectedly.

The processes of repetition, Verfremdung, and negation operate in Straub-Huillet's

work not simply for educational purposes. They function rather as methodical attempts to

unleash elements that point outside the frameworks that govern representational as well

as economic and political systems. The quotation, transcription, and recital of the original

text functions here similar to the basic characteristics of the Brechtian gest or gesture.

The gesture, explains Walter Benjamin, exists in "a strict, frame-like structure" and "is

falsifiable only up to a point."27 Brecht himself describes the social dimension of the

gesture not only in terms of dramatic performances, but also in regard to poetic writing

and rhythm, a technique that resembles Straub-Huillet's own approach to transcription

and recital. In a segment entitled "On Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhythms" Brecht
 77

describes the structure of one of his poems with "the jerky breath of a man running" a

gestural mode that functions, according to him, "to show the speaker's conflicting

feelings."28 The irregularity and syncopatic ruptures of his verses function, according to

Brecht, as a direct expression of social and class conflicts. The revelation is yet much

more part of an instinctual or automated writing process, than the result of an educated

analysis, as Brecht points out further:

My political knowledge in those days was disgracefully slight, but

I was aware of huge inconsistencies in people's social life, and I
didn't think it my task formally to iron out all the discordances and
interferences of which I was strongly conscious. I caught them up
in the incidents of my plays and in the verses of my poems; and did
so long before I had recognized their real character and causes. …
I wrote more and more poems with no rhymes and with irregular
rhythms. It must be remembered that the bulk of my work was
designed for the theatre; I was always thinking of actual delivery.
And for this delivery (whether of prose or of verse) I had worked
out a quite definite technique. I called it 'gestic'.29

Whereas Straub-Huillet share Brecht's basic conviction that social ruptures

manifest themselves in the structural framework of a text, they locate the social

elsewhere. Whereas Brecht merely records social inconsistencies happening all around

him, Straub-Huillet inscribe (i.e., transcribe) their own struggle with another author's

material into their own work. In addition, they urge the performer to develop their role as

part of an inter-personal/textual interaction with other performers and with the text. The

other is here the text in its most basic structure. By repeating the text over and over, the

text loses, as said, its conventional coating and begins to reveal itself in its most radical

material form. It is this disclosure that lies at the heart of Straub-Huillet's materialist

filmmaking practice and less the ability to reflect on general social structures. In doing

so, the filmmakers move from an act of political interpretation to the production of an

image that renders change visible. Straub-Huillet's tenacious and uncompromising

rehearsal process functions, thus, as a deliberate attempt to create a set of conditions that
 78

allow the unexpected and the new to emerge. The stricter the original scene is defined,

the more radical the eruption of the new.

Theater and the Social

As "the very figure for the collective and a new kind of society," the theater

provides a social space "in which the classic questions and dilemmas of political

philosophy can be 'estranged' and rethought," writes Fredric Jameson.30 What Jameson

describes here could not be more accurate for the specific function the theater occupies in

Straub-Huillet's collaborative work process. The majority of the couple's adaptations are

based on works that are, at the outset, conceived as stage productions. This includes

musical and dramatic performances as well as poetic recitals. From literary genres, such

as novels or stories, Straub-Huillet adapt exclusively the parts or passages that are written

in direct speech, omitting, in other words, any descriptive or indirect forms of narration.

A direct mode of address informs also the historical and biographical source material

used in the films, often in the form of letters or personal memoirs.

Over the course of their career Straub-Huillet applied this process of eliminating

any additional descriptive or impressionistic elements from the script also seemingly to

the mise-en-scène of their films: throughout the 1960s (from Machorka-Muff to The

Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp) Straub-Huillet's films depicted a set design

that corresponded largely to conventional principles of filmic realism. But beginning with

Othon in 1969 the couple refrained increasingly from embedding the narrative events into

a verisimilar social milieu. The histrionic performances take instead place at exterior,

quotidian locations that have no "realistic" connection to the narrative world. This form

of displacement undergoes yet another transition by the mid-seventies: since Moses and

Aaron (1974) most settings are either located at the periphery of cities or they involve an

indeterminate rural environment. Devoid of any concrete spatial and geographical

coordinates, this landscape appears, in other words, as a "ruined" landscape, a figure that
 79

is especially important to the forthcoming critique of representation discussed in the next

chapter.

Straub-Huillet's last Italian-language production These Encounters of Theirs

epitomizes this development. The performers are filmed at a number of undifferentiated

locations somewhere in the woods and hillsides of Tuscany. The landscape bares no

significant geographical or cultural markers. At first sight, it seems, that Cesare Pavese's

Dialogues with Leucò (1947), on which These Encounters is based on, motivates this

ahistorical setting since its narrative is taken from Greek mythology.31 However, nearby

locations and a very similar mise-en-scène existed already in the Vittorini adaptations

Workers, Peasants and The Return of the Prodigal Son. Both films are based on

Vittorini's novel Women of Messina which contains in contrast to Dialogues with Leucò

very specific historical as well as geographical references.32 The two films are yet

similarly embedded in an undifferentiated, rural landscape. The shift from recognizable

historical, narrative locations to undifferentiated and often unpopulated landscapes

represents yet, by no means, a rejection of the social. In fact, the woods around Buti that

function as locations for Workers, The Return, and These Encounters obtain a distinct

social function in regard to Straub-Huillet's collaborative work process.

The move to the countryside parallels the couple's engagement with a crucial

social and professional network located in the Tuscan town of Buti. All the actors that

appear in the Pavese and Vittorini adaptations made between 1998 and 2006 (four films

in total) are local actors from the Teatro Comunale Francesco di Bartolo in Buti. Both

Cesare Pavese's and Elio Vittorini's literary works share an affinity with the specific

history and practice of theatrical performances in this region. First of all, both writers

have a few biographical keynotes in common: both born in 1908, they each grew up in

rural, working-class communities and remained, throughout their lifetime, indebted to the

life and struggle of Italian workers and peasants. Aside from writing novels and poetry,

each one worked, in addition, as journalist, translator, and editor. Both of them were
 80

imprisoned and censored during the Fascist era and both joined the Communist party

after the Second World War. In their final years, each one experienced severe forms of

political disillusionment and personal depression, leading Pavese to suicide in 1951 and

Vittorini to abandon his writing before he died prematurely in 1966. The Italian

landscape, the class struggle, and the historical period during and after the Second World

War are the most dominant features in both of their works.

The theater work conducted in Buti relates to these works insofar as it involves a

specific tradition of communal theater with roots in an ancient tradition of folk song and

performance: the maggio or "May Drama." Traditionally performed in an open space (the

village square, a private yard, or an open field), by the beginning of the 1800s maggio

theaters existed in most villages in Italian mountain regions, especially in Tuscany. "As

plays that were frequently written by peasant authors and acted by peasant actors for

peasant audiences, the May dramas were a truly popular form of entertainment."33 The

Tuscan dialect functioned as a lingua franca of the plays, equipped with the potential to

promote both national unity and "the rise of a new social order."34 To this day, maggio

performances employ mainly non-professional actors who recite dramatic texts written in

verse form. Even though a more open form eventually replaced the original octosyllabic

quatrain verses, contemporary maggio performances remain indebted to a declamatory

style that rejects opulent settings, psychological dialogue, or the unities of time, place,

and action. The collaboration between Straub-Huillet and the Buti-maggio is triggered by

these formal affinities as well as by a shared interest in certain social and cultural

relations.

The woods and the countryside surrounding this community obtain a crucial

social as well as political function, as exemplified by the theater tradition in the region.

The actors as well as the dramas and their authors are explicitly connected to the local

class of workers and peasants in the rural area. Vittorini's novels epitomize this trend

insofar as their narratives take predominantly place in rural communities, albeit located
 81

mostly in Sicily and in the Italian South.35 He shares with the Tuscan maggio-tradition,

however, a tendency to identify social politics and resistance specifically with local

farming and worker communities that are located outside of the urban (and mostly

Northern) centers of Italy. The theater, with its historical roots in folklore and carnivals,

has a long tradition of functioning as an alternative political space. Based on local

dialects and mannerisms, the language and performances used in this setting articulate

expressions of resistance that counter an official and unified national Italian discourse.36

The work process among Straub, Huillet, and the local theater ensemble in Buti

exceeds the usual rehearsal and shooting practice for the film. Starting with Sicilia!

(1998), the first Vittorini adaptation, Straub-Huillet performed all of their Italian

productions first on stage at the Teatro Francesco di Bartolo, prior to the shooting of the

films. The principle of repetition involves here explicitly the transition from written text

to oratory recital, from interior stage to rural location, from theater to film, from the

performance to the recording to the projection. Each production phase adds another layer

to the reproduction of the text. Each phase is at once defined as production and

reproduction. It emerges in the concrete relationship to an already present text but also

constitutes the formation of a new text, often on the basis of a material transposition, to

recall Kristeva's definition of inter-textuality, from one representational system to

another.37

The performance on the theater stage in Buti is at once a product in itself and

another form of rehearsal predating the shooting of the film. As a series of live-

performances, the plays embody the principle of repetition that already informed the

rehearsal work. As a series of live-performances of one specific text, the theater versions

reflect, in addition, the multiple film versions of Straub-Huillet's Italian productions. The

film repeats not only the formal delivery of the original text, but also the actor's blocking

and bodily movements that were exercised during rehearsals and performed on stage (see

Figure 7). The difference that intervenes in the cinematographic repetition of the theater
 82

mise-en-scène results, first, from the alteration of the space itself and, second, from the

editing process that follows. Once outside, in the woods, the cast and crew interact and

struggle with very different environmental conditions (see Figure 8). The light, the

weather, the noise, all these elements impact the scenery and the performances

differently, compared to the interior architectural framework of the theater. The rural

setting participates in the re-production of the text/performance in two major ways: it

constitutes particular forms of settings and props and it establishes new optical

perspectives in its relationship to the cinematographic apparatus.

Film set and theater stage produce, however, not only distinct representational

spaces, but effect also the social and professional relations among cast and crew

members. A supplementary feature that accompanies the DVD-edition of These

Encounters of Theirs captures the earlier stage production of Pavese's drama at the Teatro

Francesco di Bartolo. Supported by the acoustics of the semi-circular theater auditorium,

the voices of the performers have a rich and deep resonance. The film version transmits,

in contrast, a very different kind of mise-en-scène and soundscape. Even though

permanently competing with the ambient sounds of the countryside, the actors' voices

sound much closer and sharper in pitch than they did in theater space, due to the use of

direct microphones and sound technology. Also, in the theater version, the frame is

largely determined by the stage itself. In the accompanying DVD material, the stage

performance is captured in one single long shot framed by a static camera. The only

movements present are a few very minimal gestures by the actors. However, on the film

set, the finding of the right frame becomes a substantial investment for each single shot,

as can be seen in Giulio Bursi's documentary I Listen. A scene depicts the lengthy

process of trying out several camera angles, waiting for the right lighting conditions,

finding the right lens, and revising the entire process again. The rehearsal and practice of

repetition impacts at this point also the labor conditions and relations of the other crew

members: the camera operators, the sound engineers, and the additional set aids.
 83

Straub-Huillet's films vary significantly in terms of their production value, which

is, however, not necessarily a reflection of the films' actual funding situation. For

instance, Fortini/Cani was filmed on 16mm not due to the lack of money, but because it

seemed the appropriate material and technical format for the film Straub-Huillet

envisioned at the time. In turn, Straub-Huillet rather refused a substantial amount of

funding for Chronicle (which put the project indefinitely on halt), than to compromise on

the extremely costly technique to film all musical scenes live, with direct sound, and in

one take. Thus, while working undeniably outside of the commercial film industry,

Straub-Huillet's affiliation with "low-budget" filmmaking is less categorical than their

"minimalist" film style surmises. The money spent on a Straub-Huillet film is, like all

other artistic decisions, determined strictly by the demands of the original text and the

mode of adaptation it solicits from its collaborators. Budget expenses are, furthermore,

due to the demands of the other coworkers, as Straub's following statement exemplifies.

Asked about the filmic convention of shooting a scene through the repetition of several

takes, he says:

Well, you always do another take, perhaps following Renoir, who

always said: 'It was so beautiful, let's do it one more time.' That's
right; and then, you also want to give the technicians the possibility
of doing it once more and better, especially the sound-guys, who
are more diligent than the picture-guys. [...] But there is also
another reason worth thinking of: as a gift to the performer. When
some of them sit up to three hours until one hallway is lit correctly,
and another half hour until I have found, inch by inch, my space
(lens, height, and distance), and then another half hour for the
sound-guys [...]. One shouldn't make films if one isn't willing to
devote some of the film material to the performers.38

In other words, the flow of capital that determines the production of a Straub-Huillet film

depends on two premises: the requirements of the text and the relations of labor that

contribute to the making of the film. The filmmakers' investment in collaborative labor

practices is, in other words, directly translated into the production of images. Unable to

represent capital itself, the film renders production visible as the production of images. A
 84

long take consumes, in this regard, as many feet of filmic material as the original scene

(i.e., the original author) and the labor of the other members of cast and crew require.

Instead of reacting to these fundamental conditions with the attempt of reducing

production expenses to a bare minimum, for instance, by making only low-budget films,

Straub-Huillet create, at certain times, a material and economic overflow of images, e.g.

by insisting on certain work practices and qualitative standards involving direct sound

technology, sequence shots, live-performances, and high demands on casting or

employment values. Straub-Huillet's production strategy is then to pull on two ends

simultaneously: while insisting in particular instances rigorously on pushing financial

expanses to the limit, they work at the same time under artisanal and low-budget

conditions (which includes the self-distribution of their films and the fact that many

members of cast and crew work for a reduced salary).

Cinematography: The Train and the Factory

The correlation between overall conditions of social labor relations and the

representation of production as the production of cinematographic images is an

established feature within Straub-Huillet's oeuvre, for instance also in their short film The

Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and The Pimp (1968). The film opens with a four minute-

long tracking shot, filmed out of the passenger window of a driving vehicle. The image

depicts the sidewalk of Munich's Landsberger Strasse by night, a red-light district located

at the industrial periphery of the city. Prostitutes and their customers appear against a

backdrop of brightly lit billboards and storefronts. Tracking alongside the sidewalk the

image unfolds a human assembly line of streetwalkers by depicting the female bodies at

once as subjects and objects of labor: as workers and as commodities. Positioned in a car

driving by the production of the filmic image becomes embedded into this relationship of

production and consumption. On a narrative level, the camera position occupies the point

of view of the soliciting customers, whose POV generates the production of a spectacle.
 85

On a formal level the travelling shot produces, and is produced by, its very own process

of exchange and consumption. Filmed in real time, as an uninterrupted sequence shot, the

image is also a direct expression of the energy and material that was invested in the

production of this particular filmic spectacle. Like the streetwalker, the commercial

buildings, or the advertising boards, the camera is itself inscribed into the manual labor

relations that help to produce a particular commodity and product: the film.

Straub-Huillet's work steadily emphasizes cinematography's innate affinity to

other technological devices of mass production. In many of the films, the camera films

from the position of a moving or driving vehicle which gives the unfolding tracking shot

a distinctly mechanical or industrial form of vision. In fact, the couple's alleged focus on

natural landscapes must be qualified at this point. Both Sicilia! and Too Early, Too Late

include numerous images in which a so-called natural landscape is notably filmed from

the position of various transportation devices, from horse-carriages to locomotive trains.

The cinematographic image is, in other words, not only affected by the work of

the actors and the scenery as such, but it records, more precisely, the specific physical

conditions it itself operates upon. Thus, the cinematographic element in Straub-Huillet's

work is not simply produced by a specific technological device, but depends evidently on

a much larger framework of manual or industrial relations of labor. For instance, the

decision about framing etc. is not only the directors' or cinematographers' alone. The

particular curve of the tracks, the speed of the train, they also participate and, in fact,

direct the framing of each tracking shot filmed out of the open train window in Sicilia!'s

train-sequences.

To repeat: each Straub-Huillet film is a product of labor and gives, at the same

time, rise to a formalized notion of production (the production of images, but also:

production conceived as an image). The basic pro-filmic conditions introduce another set

of differential markers into the filmic reproduction of the earlier rehearsal and

performance scenes. The mode of repetition and difference that underlies these images of
 86

labor relations is, however, not necessarily confined to the labor of the performers, but

occurs in similar ways in more straightforward documentary scenes, like the one

described above from The Bridegroom. Also the ethnographic documentary Too Early,

Too Late exemplifies how repetition and difference function in Straub-Huillet's work as a

fundamental labor and production process.

The narrative content of Too Early deals explicitly with the rise of bourgeois

capitalism and the failed revolutions in both Europe and the Middle East. Accompanying

the first segment, set in France, the first texts derive from a letter written by Friedrich

Engels to Karl Kautsky in 1889 and from excerpts of the Cahiers de Doléances

(Notebooks of grievances), official records that gave meticulous account of the dire

economic conditions under which French peasants and workers suffered at the eve of the

French Revolution.39 Set in Egypt, the second segment consists of excerpts from

Mahmoud Hussein's Class Conflict in Egypt (1969) in which the author recollects how

the revolt of Egyptian peasants against the English occupation was contained by the

"petit-bourgeois" revolution of 1952.40

Almost completely devoid of human protagonists Too Early begins with scenes

that were either filmed in the countryside or at the outskirts of French cities and villages.

"Maybe people live there," Serge Daney wonders, "but they don’t inhabit the locale. The

fields, roadways, fences and rows of trees are traces of human activity, but the actors are

birds, a few vehicles, a faint murmur, the wind."41 The landscape itself is the main

performer in the first segment of Too Early, Too Late. "The cloud that passes, a breaking

loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind [...]. One hasn’t seen anything like it

for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise."42

Daney's reference to silent cinema produces a direct link between the class

discourse (articulated in Huillet's voice-over reading of Engels' text) and the inferred

origins of cinematographic mass media representation. Whereas Engels recalls the

specific class conditions in France around 1789, Straub-Huillet reflect the conditions that
 87

govern the mechanical (re)production of images in the present. This is done by

foregrounding the material relationship between the apparatus and the objects and

subjects it reproduces. This seems less problematic in the deserted French landscape than

in the densely populated places Straub-Huillet encounter on locations in Egypt. The

second segment stages, in other words, the encounter between a foreign (largely French)

film crew and an indigenous landscape populated by peasants and workers from the

nearby rural communities and cities. In its relationship with the foreign territory,

filmmaking becomes "an odd performance," as Daney describes: "[m]ade up of

approaches and retreats," the film crew searches evidently for "the right spot, where their

camera can catch people without bothering them."43 Thus, the historical impasse of

starting too early and arriving too late is here redefined in terms of the material

relationship between camera position and landscape: how to avoid positioning the camera

too close (i.e. to interfere and exploit) without moving too far away (i.e. turning the

camera into an invisible instrument of observation or surveillance)?

A scene in Too Early gives view onto a factory building. Egyptian workers can be

seen entering and leaving through the gate. Some of them glance vaguely into the

direction of the camera, while the others react with indifference to it. The scene recalls

the Lumière Brothers' short Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La Sortie des

Usines Lumière à Lyon, 1895). "The first camera in the history of cinema," writes Harun

Farocki, "was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly

drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it."44 Too Early redirects the camera's view

back to the factory and, thus, toward the filmic representation of industrial labor and

production.

Straub-Huillet's quotation of the Lumière scene suggests that certain conditions

continue to exist, albeit within different historical and geographical settings. The first

segment emphasizes the change that occurred in the past two hundred years by

confronting Engels' narrative about the social and labor conditions of French peasant and
 88

working class communities with a contemporary geographical landscape that appears to

be unpopulated. Unpopulated; yet not uninhabited. Most of the images include markers of

human existence, such as houses, roads, etc. The camera is, moreover, often located in

view of a city or village stretching out in the background of the image. The unpopulated

landscapes in contemporary France assume, therefore, not the absence of a contemporary

working class, but rather the absence of the class struggle as a contemporary political

discourse. The people are missing means here not that the proletariat has ceased to exist,

but rather that a certain type of politics that are here expressed by Engels' words have

been buried in the ground, similar to the ruined buildings that appear in a few images of

the French countryside.

Straub-Huillet's camera finds the missing people – as a political force – instead

outside of France, on another continent: in a so-called Third World country. The people

that live and work in the Egyptian towns and landscapes depicted in the second segment

of the film are presented as a continuation of Engels' discourse on class conflicts, whereas

Mahmoud Hussein's study (read in a voice-over monologue by Bhagat el Nadi) presents

these images of a Egptian working class in their specific geopolitical and historical

context. No doubt, the Egyptian proletariat in the twentieth century has its own specific

history and development that distinguishes it from the workers and peasants of 18th

century central Europe. However, by crossing the border from eighteenth-century France

to twentieth-century Egypt, Straub-Huillet confront two distinct (cinematic and written)

discourses with one another and, in doing so, attest not only to their dissimilarities, but

also to their continuities. Straub-Huillet's dual narrative suggests that the Egyptian

peasants repeat the same mistake that defeated, according to Engels' letter, the French

revolutionaries in 1789: they revolt too early and succeed too late. The element of

repetition operates here simultaneously on the level of the historical narrative and on the

formal level of mise-en-scène. But instead of deriving from a theatrical scene, the
 89

mimetic gesture is now solely produced by the means of mechanical reproduction in its

relation to a quotidian setting.

Egypt, as a location, expresses not only a historical and geopolitical shift from a

national to a global social divide, but – framed by a cinematographic lens – Too Early

enters also markedly the historical context of ethnographic filmmaking and visual

anthropology. This is no longer a group of actors struggling with one another and with an

original text toward the production of a film. This is rather an interaction with a social

scene that remains in the background, behind an invisible borderline separating the

histrionic space in the foreground and in which camera and crew perform from a largely

quotidian setting that is here strongly connoted as a foreign territory. Similar to the way

in which Straub-Huillet produced Bridegroom's image of the streetwalkers at the

Landsberger Allee via the direct point of view of a customer, the images belong here to

an ethnographic perspective. Straub-Huillet insert themselves into the landscape as

foreign explorers and documentarians, yet conscious of this role, they maintain a specific

distance to the paranorama that stretches out before them.

The ethnographic perspective is, more precisely, inscribed by a certain kind of

Verfremdungs-technique that involves here not the recital of a literary or musical text by

a performer, but rather the quotation of a filmic image: the Lumière factory is reproduced

as part of the contemporary Egyptian mis-en-scène. Doing so means to render a familiar

historical (cinematic) image strange, reproducing it – with the means of the medium's

technological specificities – at an other location. The element of repetition is here, again,

crucial in regard to the mode of production and inscribes the scene with a significant

intervention of difference. Expressed by means of mechanical reproduction, the quotation

or act of repetition occurs not only on the level of content, but also on a formal level. The

self-critical gesture of quotation highlights that the instrument of critique, the cinematic

apparatus and the filmmakers behind it, are intrinsic parts of the conditions they review.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory establishes, in this regard, the fundamental
 90

correlation between film work and industrial labor: the Lumières were at once film and

factory directors and the factory workers were also film actors. In Too Early, a film about

the history of class relations, Straub-Huillet situate their own work practice explicitly as

part of this legacy.

The alteration in place and time produced by the quotation involves, however,

also a number of noticeable formal differences that derive on the basis of different

technological conditions. The Egypt factory is, first of all, filmed in color, accompanied

by direct synch-sound, and the take is significantly longer in duration: whereas the

Lumières' factory scene lasts about 45 seconds, Straub-Huillet's factory scene is eight

minutes long. There is also a noticeable difference in the performance of the people on-

screen. Since the Lumière-film was, above all, staged to demonstrate the new medium's

capacity of rendering movement visible, the workers leave the frame with purposeful

steps either to the left or right of the camera. The opening of the two gates functions like

a curtain call for the masses to appear and little room exists for an alternative

choreography.

The factory scene in Straub-Huillet's film begins, in contrast, without an actual

cinematographic image. The ambient soundtrack introduces the spectator acoustically to

the space (the wailing of a factory siren, people talking, shouting, etc), while the image

shows nothing but black leader. Once the cinematographic shot begins the camera is,

indeed, positioned close enough to be noticed by the workers and far enough in the

distance to allow them to move freely. Some of the workers look or even approach into

the direction of the camera, while others ignore the presence of it completely. The open

framing of the Egypt sequence contrasts the spatial confinement in the Lumière scene. It

allows the workers to move freely, whereas the workers in the Lumière factory walk in

streamlined formations. The question of camera distance – "how does one see what one

needs to see without exploiting either the spectator or the person being filmed?" – is here

not only a moral question, as emphasized by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Serge Daney.45 It
 91

is rather a question of how to produce and work in relation with others and, more

precisely, how to sketch out a work territory for oneself that invites others to participate

on their own terms. In other words: "creating something with the skills of the other" (to

recall Brecht's definition of love) without forcing or directing the other. Doing so means,

among other things: to invite the unrehearsed and the unforeseen into the work process.

More importantly, by depicting an Egyptian population at work (in contrast to the

deserted landscapes of France), Straub-Huillet seem to suggest that the idea of a

revolutionary uprising has more of a future in the Middle East, rather than in Europe.

Montage: Assemblage

While focusing in their critical analysis on vérité techniques like the so-called

"Straubian sequence shot" critics undermined the importance of filmic editing and

montage in Straub-Huillet's work. Following the long-standing rift between "formalist"

and "realist" theories within the history of film theory critics ignored, thus, the vital

affinity that exists between Straub-Huillet and the Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei

Eisenstein. Yet, as much as Brechtian theories of drama help to delineate key concepts in

Straub-Huillet's work on performance, Eisenstein's theories of montage assist in gaining a

critical understanding of Straub-Huillet's method of montage as a form of artistic labor.

Pedro Costa's feature-length documentary Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?

documents this method by focusing, for the most part, on the editing process of the

Vittorini adaptation Sicilia!.

The first image of the documentary depicts a shot from the film, accompanied by

the mechanical clatter of projector sound. The image comes to a stop, resumes, until it

freezes again. Instead of watching a clip from the completed film the viewer of Costa's

documentary witnesses the film's projection on a 35mm flatbed-editing table. The

elements of repetition, estrangement, and negation that were central during the rehearsals

and performances are equally significant to the post-production process of editing. Acts
 92

of repetition occur, first of all, in the form of mechanical replay. A cinematographic

recording of a certain scene is played back on the flatbed and, at times, rewound and

watched again. The raw footage includes in addition different takes of a particular scene.

Such a series of takes resumes the principle of repetition and difference on the basis of

mechanical and technological specificity. Each take inscribes a scene with an act of

repetition marked by a slight difference.

Straub-Huillet turn this phenomenon that is inherent to the practice of editing

inside-out with their production of different versions (i.e., different negative edits with

different sound mixes) of "one and the same" film. The different film versions vary

slightly in length and, in the case of Lothringen! (1994) and Cézanne (1989) also in

language (one French, one German). All of the different versions refer to different

negative edits and sound mixes and may use different takes of certain scenes. The

distribution of multiple versions is as follows: Empedocles (1986) and Black Sin (1988)

each have four different versions; Cézanne, Antigone (1991), Lothringen! and A Visit to

the Louvre (2004) have two different versions each; and the films of the Vittorini cycle

(Sicilia!, The Return, and Workers, Peasants) each consist of three different versions.

Costa's film documents, for instance, the editing of the third version of Sicilia!.

Repetition as a formal device is also crucial to Europa 2005, a film that repeats three

"identical" takes of one and the same scene, shot during different times of one day.

Sicilia! and Empedocles contain, similarly, a number of repeated landscape shots that

derive from different takes. Whereas camera movement and optical parameters remain

identical in these shots, each take registers different external conditions, e.g. slight

changes in natural lighting or in the surrounding soundscape.

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? documents the general division of labor in

Straub-Huillet's editing process. While Straub remains in the background and only

comments once in a while or makes suggestions, Huillet silently operates the flatbed and

makes final decisions on where to cut. Costa emphasizes the manual aspect of her labor
 93

in a number of close-up shots that depict her hands turning the knobs or inserting a new

roll of film into the nooks of the editing table. Both Farocki's and Costa's documentary

make clear that the couple's division of labor is organized around traditional gender lines:

Huillet engages with manual tasks such as transcribing, taking notes, and editing while

Straub assumes more "metaphysical" activities like commenting, speaking, and directing.

This does not mean, however, that Straub has therefore a stronger impact on the

couple's collaborative process or on the work as such. On the contrary, the politics in

Straub-Huillet's filmmaking practice derive, at first sight, rather from Huillet's distinct

engagement in manual labor (the work with the text, its transcription, its recital, its

montage, etc.) since these techniques are directly responsible for Straub-Huillet's

materialist approach to filmmaking. All of these techniques are oriented toward a

tangible treatment of the text by the means of physical labor (the practice of reading, the

act of transcribing, the editing of the film, etc.).

More explicitly in charge of the manual side of the filmmaking process, Huillet

seems thus stronger involved in the crucial juncture at which the text is transformed into

another material form of expression (from original artwork to script, from actor's work to

the text and back, from cinematographic material to the montage of the film, etc.).46 Yet

to argue for Huillet's privileged position in the couple's filmmaking practice would be

equally false. The couple's division of labor is rather a direct expression of a crucial

dialectic in the couple's conception of image production: it constitutes the struggle

between an idea and the material that resists it, a conflict that gives rise to form.

This struggle is already evident in regard to the actors' toil with the text during the

rehearsal process. In light of montage it becomes clear that the filmmakers take the

conception of form by way of conflict directly from Sergei Eisenstein with which the

couple shares at the outset an interest in the practice of transcriptions: from word to

image and vice versa. In his essay "Word and Image" Eisenstein produces a series of

theoretical montage sequences (in writing) that are based on paintings, poetry, and
 94

literature.47 This procedure is comparable to the series of transcriptions Huillet conducts

in preparation of producing a final script during pre-production. In fact, in its function to

assemble a selection of the cinematographic material produced on the set, montage

repeats the gesture of transcription and editing during the script-writing process. At the

time of editing, the editing table replaces the actor's body and Huillet's pen/typewriter. In

its specific form of accumulating and organizing cinematographic images, montage

resumes also the production of difference, yet based on its own material skill set.

Eisenstein calls upon the director to build his "thought not through inference, but

[to] lay it out directly in frames and in the course of composition."48 Instead of creating

ideas out of nothing, Eisenstein insists, "the artist thinks directly in terms of manipulating

his resources and materials. His thought is transmuted into direct action, formulated not

by a formula, but by a form."49 Straub elaborates this thought in the setting of a darkened

editing suite in Costa's documentary film: "The material resists us, because we cannot

simply cut anywhere between shots." Occupied with her work, Huillet remains mainly

silent. But her montage technique gives material expression to Straub's (and Eisenstein's)

conception: in search for a place to cut Huillet repeats, rewinds, and replays the

beginning of a take over and over again, sometimes frame by frame. Her actions are, at

the outset, dictated by the structure of the dialogue. She tries to cut at the beginning and

end of sentences or passages. Yet, the material resists her both on a visual and audible

level. The length of a text fragment, a pause that is too short, an actor's gestural

expression, or the movement of an object in the frame – all of these incidents may

intervene with Huillet's original idea of where to cut. In a scene captured by Costa, it is a

performer's instantaneous blink of an eye that turns into a concrete and unexpected

obstacle, affecting Huillet's initial montage scheme and, ultimately, the form of the film

itself.

Needless to say, Huillet and Straub have, at times, diverging ideas of how to solve

the material's act of resistance, like in the case of the actor's blinking eye. "This is you...
 95

And this is me," Huillet remarks while freezing the shot at the two different instances that

indicate, first, Straub's and then her own preferred place of cutting. "A one-frame

difference," she concludes laconically. Once again, Huillet articulates an idea in material

terms. The one-frame difference that separates her and Straub is neither a metaphor nor

an analogy, but a concrete inscription of the two filmmakers' distinctive response to a

formal problem into the raw material, i.e., the celluloid strip feeding through the reels of

the flatbed. Sergei Eisenstein describes this process of inscribing an artist's "creative

work and [...] creative vision" into a visible, material context as "the highest possible

degree of approximation to transmitting visually the author's perceptions and intention

[...] with 'that strength of physical palpability'."50 Projected at the editing table, the two

different ideas are transmitted to a spectator, in this case, the spectator of Where Does

Your Hidden Smile Lie?.

The spectator of the third version of Sicilia! perceives only one outcome of such a

conflict among different and conflicting ideas. As a final product, the third version

records and transmits via its material structure one version out of an infinite number of

possibilities; one throw of the dice, so to say. The first and the second version of Sicilia!

manifest respectively two others. Walter Benjamin, writes Stanley Mitchell, "came to

regard montage, i.e. the ability to capture the infinite, sudden or subterranean connections

of dissimilars, as the major constitutive principle of the artistic imagination in the age of

technology."51 This work process is by no means random. Despite of the fact that sudden

dissimilarities and contingencies may intervene at any point, as in the case of the actor's

blink of the eye, Straub-Huillet's editing practice remains essentially determined by the

creative labor that generated the montage material in the first place: the filmed recital of

the text, the performance on the set.

The in- and out-points that determine the beginning and end of a shot follow in

most cases the structure of the dialogue, both in its form and content. A cut may follow

simply at the end of a dialogue passage, marking the transition from one character to
 96

another character's speech or it accentuates an instantaneous shift in the narrative content.

For instance, Sicilia! is composed of four long segments. The third one is a scene in

which a young man, after years of exile in America, returns to his mother's house in

Sicily. The twenty-five minute long sequence depicts the conversation or, more precisely,

a series of conversations between mother and son that range from quiet talk to intense

confrontation. The editing in the scene follows largely the spatio-temporal rules of

continuity editing, including establishing shots and a symmetrical shot/reverse-shot

pattern. Sudden shifts in camera angle or shot distance correspond largely to changes in

either narrative content (the introduction of a new subject discussed) or in dramatic

temperament (e.g. anger in the mother's or pathos in the son's voice).

No doubt, with its roots in the maggio oratory tradition the recital in the Italian

films differs from the much more somber dialogues in Straub-Huillet's German films.

But it is, for the most part, the linguistic texture of the original material that informs the

voice and speech of the performers. For instance, Elio Vittorini's literary writing

produces a much denser speech delivery than the studious style of Heinrich Böll. In its

language, style, and narrative specificities, Vittorini's text informs, thus, the performance

of the actors and the cinematographic breakdown of the text into shots. In this regard,

Vittorini and Böll participate and intervene differently with Straub-Huillet's filmmaking

practice.

The Hidden Smile

"The desired image," writes Eisenstein, is not fixed or ready-made but arises – is

born. The image planned by author, director and actor is concretized by them in separate

representational elements, and is assembled – again and finally – in the spectator's

perception. This is actually the final aim of every artist's creative endeavor."52 What

Eisenstein disregards, however, is the fact that the first spectator of a film is often the

film author himself. This is certainly the case in Straub-Huillet's work practice, where the
 97

first screenings occur in the editing room on the screen that is attached to the flatbed-

editing table. This screen offers to the filmmakers not only a repetition of by now well-

known, well-rehearsed scenes; but, at certain points, this screen offers the filmmakers

something entirely new and unexpected.

Pedro Costa captures such a moment that turns Huillet into a first spectator in his

documentary. The scene takes place in the darkened editing suite and, once again Huillet

rewinds and replays a certain part in a shot over and over, in order to establish the exact

point of cutting. "Is this mark tighter than the one you did before?" Straub asks. "No, it's

the same," replies Huillet. "But I’m wondering if it's not too tight. Let me think for a

second." After a moment of silence accompanies the stopped frame that depicts the actor

Giovanni Buscarino (in the leading role of Silvestro) in a medium close up, Huillet

explains: "There's the start of a smile lighting up in his eyes, but it's difficult… ." Again,

she rewinds and replays the part multiple times. It is difficult, indeed; because the hidden

smile resists and intervenes with Huillet's work process. It seems impossible for her to

exactly determine where the hidden smile lies, that is, to freeze it at an exact instance.

Countering, in this regard, Kluge's conception of filmic meaning, the "hidden smile" is

not simply produced in Huillet's mind. The hidden smile is registered in the image in the

form of a fleeting facial sensation. Played back on the flatbed the hidden smile appears

yet also relinquishes to be fixed in a final form. The spectator may see how it grows but

never sees the smile as a complete form of (mimetic) expression.

The hidden smile functions, then, as a figure for a practice that points beyond

cinema's formalizing function. Buried in the film the hidden smile lies outside of the

film's formal structure and is, yet, produced by concrete filmic techniques. Something

quite similar happens also in regard to another performer in Sicilia!, the actor Giovanni

Interlandi. "Suddenly, freedom had come to him," Straub remarks elsewhere in Costa's

film, "the freedom of the musician. It comes when he masters the mechanics. … Things

don't exist until they have found a rhythm, a form. The form of the body gives birth to the
 98

soul." Thus, the hidden smile is more than an "esoteric" impression. For instance, the

hidden smile noticed by Huillet is determined by specific narrative conditions. It follows

instantly after a character, which was earlier identified as a policeman, tries to conceal his

true identity from Silvestro: "I'm working for the registry of real estate," he lies. The

image cuts back to Silvestro who responds with subtle mockery in his tone. The hidden

smile emerges just before he begins to speak, unexpectedly, as if compelled by the

rehearsed line that follows. The instantaneous facial eruption results, more importantly,

from the actor's struggle to suppress any form a sardonic commentary in his voice –

which would be the conventional reaction to the narrative situation. According to this, the

hidden smile is not produced through the conscious mobilization of certain facial

features. The hidden smile escapes rather from a condition of intense oppression and

control. Thus, in addition to the conscious labor and rehearsal process and in relation to

the camera the actor's body works similar to the leaves in the tree; it is at any time

vulnerable to the physical conditions of the wind, that is, to render an alternating, fleeting

character visible that never attains a final form or finish.

The hidden smile that appears in the image, unexpectedly, resists and intervenes

with the filmmakers', actors', or cinematographers' initial intention. In doing so, it allows

the filmmakers and editors of the film to become first spectators of an unforeseen event.

Rather than producing an entirely new scene, this form of intervention produces the new

within a well-rehearsed scene. The hidden smile emerges, in this respect, as a vital

political element in Straub-Huillet's work, because it gives rise to an image (within an

image) that is radically other. The image of the hidden smile is, of course, not by itself

the cause of radical, political change. But as a concept or idea expressed in the creative

context of a cinematographic image, the hidden smile must be understood as an

affirmation of the possibility of radical change within existing social and ideological

formations. To produce and explore such possibilities – rather than educating the
 99

spectator in preconceived lessons of social or political science – lies at the heart of

Straub-Huillet's materialist practice of filmmaking.

 100

Notes

1 Karl Marx, "From German Ideology," In Erich Fromm, Marx' Concept of Man
(London: Continuum, 2003), 153.
2 Ibid (italics in the original text).

3 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and

Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85-126.
4 See Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in Cinema," in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings,
ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 760-777 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999). Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," in Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 812-
819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1976): 6-18.
5 E.g. both Laura Mulvey (op. cit.) and Peter Wollen develop ideas how such
counter-techniques could look like. Peter Wollen, "The Two Avant-gardes," Studio
International 190 (Nov/Dec 1975): 171-175.
6 For a selection of critics who consider Straub-Huillet as Brechtian filmmakers,
see Maureen Turim, "Textuality and Theatricality in Brecht and Straub/Huillet: History
Lessons (1972)," in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations
(New York: Methuen, 1986); Barton Byg, "History Lessons: Brecht's Caesar Novel and
the Film by Straub/Huillet," in Essays on Brecht = Versuche über Brecht, ed. Marc
Silberman (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1990); Martin Walsh, "'History
Lessons': Brecht and Straub/Huillet," in The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema
(London: British Film Institute, 1981); Martin Brady, "Brecht in Brechtian Cinema," in
"Verwisch die Spuren!" Bertolt Brecht's Work and Legacy: A Reassessment (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2008).
7 Bertolt Brecht, Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar (Berlin: Gebrüder Weiss,
1957).
8 Peter Gidal, Materialist Film (London: Routledge, 1989); see also Gidal,
"Straub/Huillet Talking, and Short Notes on Some Contentious Issues," Ark/Journal from
the Royal College of Art (January 1976).
9 Gidal, Materialist Film, 90.

10 Ibid., 91.

11 Colin MacCabe, "The Politics of Separation," Screen 16, no. 2 (1975/76): 60.

12 Ibid., 52.
 101

13 Brecht developed his theory about film and capitalism to a large extent
together with Walter Benjamin. See Bertolt Brecht, "The Threepenny Lawsuit," in Brecht
on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman, 147-199 (London: Methuen, 2000);
Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," New Left Review 62 (July-August 1970):
83-96.
14 See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, " in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 217-252 (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968).
15 Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Missing Person, trans. Mark Harman (New York:
Schocken Books, 2008).
16 About this conventional approach to film adaptations see Dudley Andrew's
Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 97.
17 Jean-Marie Straub in Die Früchte des Zorns und der Zärtlichkeit: Werkschau
Daniele Huillet / Jean-Marie Straub, ed. Filmmuseum Vienna/Viennale International
Film Festival (Vienna: Vienna International Film Festival, 2004), 143.
18 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and
trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 93.
19 Ibid., 94.

20 Ibid., 95.

21 Ibid., 93.

22 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York:

International Publishers, 1994), 19.
23 Ibid.

24 Brecht quoted in Walter Benjamin, "What is Epic Theatre. First Version," in

Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, 1-13 (London: Verso, 1998), 8.
25 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 271.
26 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 91.

27 Benjamin, "What is Epic Theatre. First Version," 3.

28 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 116.

29 Ibid.
 102

30 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 11.

31 Cesare Pavese, Dialogues With Leucò, trans. William Arrowsmith (Boston:

Eridanos Press, 1989).
32 Elio Vittorini, Women of Messina, trans. Frances Frenaye and Frances Keene
(New York: New Directions Publications, 1973).
33 Roland Sarti, "Folk Drama and the Secularization of Rural Culture in the
Italian Apennines," Journal of Social History 14, no. 3 (1981): 466.
34 Ibid.

35 Workers, Peasants and The Return of the Prodigal Son are both about the
formation and collapse of such a rural community. Based on Women of Messina, the story
is set in a village populated by migrants who fled across the country during the turmoil
created by the era of post-WWII Italian reconstruction. Mainly cut off from the urban
centers of the country, the exiled community is forced to create and organize its own
social body in order to guarantee the survival of its members. The class conflict occurs
here between workers and peasants who, in light of each group's distinct needs and work
practices, struggle to articulate a common ground.
36 See Romano Guelfi, "Necessity and Change." of a people who are missing
(December 18, 2009, http://ofapeoplewhoaremissing.net/video/8.
37 See discussion of Kristeva and inter-textuality in previous chapter.

38 Straub in Wolfram Schütte, "Gespräch mit Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie

Straub," in Klassenverhältnisse: Von D. Huillet und J.M. Straub nach dem Roman "Der
Verschollene" von Franz Kafka (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1984), 52 (my translation).
39 Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Karl Kautsky, 20 February 1889," in Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 481-486 (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1953).
40 Mahmoud Hussein, Class Struggle in Egypt, 1945-1970, trans. Michel
Chirman and Susan Chirman (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973).
41 Serge Daney, "Cinemeteorology [Serge Daney on TOO EARLY, TOO LATE],"
JonathanRosenbaum.com, trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum (October 6, 1982),
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=21944, no pp.
42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Harun Farocki, "Workers Leaving the Factory," Senses of Cinema, no. 21 (July
2002). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/21/farocki_workers/, no pp.
 103

45 Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Intense Materialism: Too Soon, Too Late," Senses of

Cinema, no. 6 (May 2000), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/6/soon/, no pp.
46 In addition to this, Huillet is also usually in charge of the other "bodily" or
"material" aspects of production, e.g. the selection and rental of costumes and make-up.
47 Sergei Eisenstein, "Word and Image," in The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda, 1-
64 (New York: Meridian Books, 1957).
48 Eisenstein, "Form and Content: A Practice," in The Film Sense, trans. Jay
Leyda, 155-216 (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 215.
49 Ibid.

50 Eisenstein, "Word and Image," 32.

51 Stanley Mitchell, "Introduction," in Understanding Brecht, ed. Stanley

Mitchell, trans. Anna Bostock, vii-xix (London: Verso, 1998), xiii.
52 Eisenstein, "Word and Image," 31.
 104

CHAPTER THREE:

THE BORDER

Hence the duty to respond to the call of European memory ... [and]
heritage of an idea of democracy, while also recognizing that this
idea, like that of international law, is never simply given … but
rather something that remains to be thought and to come [à
venir]….
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's
Europe

[The scene] ends with a pan shot that ... concludes at a window
overlooking the Rhine – one does not see [the river], but I, I know
it is there and one can sense it.
Jean-Marie Straub on the final scene of Not Reconciled

The principles of resistance and difference that have been described so far in the

context of certain practices – practices of collaborative authorship and practices of labor

– are now examined in regard to two figures that appear consistently throughout Straub-

Huillet's oeuvre: the border and (in the following chapter) the ruins. Both figurations

have the basic function to challenge and suspend finite structures of a historical

epistemology in favor of a concept of a political genealogy. This chapter deals in this

regard specifically with the way in which Straub-Huillet's work relates to the triangular

relationship of nation, culture, and history. As epitomized by the figure of the couple's

elective affinity, this work is notably defined by numerous national, cultural, and textual

border crossings. But instead of merely defining Straub-Huillet's work as "transnational,"

the figure of the border allows to state more precisely: Straub-Huillet's work emerges and

articulates the significance of a (political) position that is, strictly speaking, defined as a

border-position. The gesture of negation (that was already of importance in the analysis

of the cycle of repetition governing Straub-Huillet's labor relations) is equally significant

for the articulation of this peculiar position, because it is a position that occupies neither

inside nor outside. This position is, in other words, precisely located, at the border. The
 105

border appears as a central figure in an oeuvre that is, at the outset, informed by a number

of transnational passages.

These passages have their roots in the couple's own biographical experiences of

migration and exile. The four films discussed in this chapter are informed by a wider

historical and geopolitical context of border politics and the effects these politics had on

Straub-Huillet's own border crossings. Bracketing roughly the beginning and end of

European cold war politics – from the construction of the Berlin Wall in the early sixties

to the reconfigurations of the European map in the early nineties – Machorka-Muff

(1962), Othon (1969), Lothringen! (1994), and Europa 2005, 27 October (2006) evoke,

not surprisingly, discernible traces of border figurations. These traces of border

figurations inscribe a foreign perspective into the film, a perspective that is taken from a

position that is simultaneously interior, in-between, and exterior to the film-text.

Filmed after the couple's first border crossing from France to West Germany, the

Böll adaptation Machorka-Muff deals at the outset with the German Federal Republic's

politics of rearmament. However, impelled by the two filmmakers' own experiences of

exile, the film is equally inscribed by an expatriate point of view that opens the film to

the outside, toward France and its main geopolitical, military conflict at the time: the

Algerian war.

Made right after the couple's second border crossing, their move to Italy in the

late sixties, Othon stages Pierre Corneille's French drama of the same title on ancient sites

located in Rome, in full view of the contemporary cityscape of the Italian capital. A

predominantly Italian cast recites the original French-language text. In doing so, the film

transgresses numerous historical, geographical, and linguistic boundaries in order to

unfold a genealogical trajectory of European power structures and politics: from the

modern European capital city Rome to France in the era of the Grand Siècle to the

ancient Roman empire.

 106

Filmed mainly on locations around Straub's birthplace Metz, Lothringen! deals on

the surface with the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the

Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71. Like Machorka-Muff, the film points, in addition,

outside of its own narrative context in order to open up a larger historical trajectory,

which includes Straub's biographical WWII experiences and ends with the image of a

unified German (and European) landscape in the post-wall era. Similar to Othon, the film

treats the dialogue from the perspective of a foreigner who recites the text with an accent.

Europa 2005 revisits, in a certain sense, the border politics of Machorka-Muff

through a twenty-first century lens by emphasizing that it is a genealogy of historical

shifts and repetitions that governs contemporary European class structures and

immigration policies. Set in a French immigrant neighborhood, the so-called banlieu,

Europa 2005 evokes the border as a social and political line of demarcation and extends

it beyond France's national borders to a larger network of European and global politics.

Engaged in the reading practice of a "border poetics," this chapter traces recurring

motives of inter- and extra-textual configurations of borderlines in their shared purpose to

defy fixed notions of identity politics (defined as either national, cultural, linguistic, or

historical) and replace them in favor of an aporetic structure that allows to highlight a

genealogy of principles that govern European national history and politics in their

specificity and continuity.1

The Border as Double Bind

Straub-Huillet and Jacques Derrida share the following experience: their work

(methods) are often considered as not political (enough).2 In The Other Heading (1991)

Jacques Derrida responds to his critics by sketching out a proposal for a future concept

and program of European politics. What makes Derrida's and also Straub-Huillet's

political vision so susceptible for criticism is the fact that they are based on an aporetic

principle: the notion to "think, speak, and act in compliance with [a] double contradictory
 107

imperative" that demands "to recognize both the typical or recurring form and the

inexhaustible singularization – without which there will never be any event, decision,

responsibility, ethics or politics."3 Such a double-bind condition, as Derrida points out

further, must remain in negative form, because "as soon as it is converted into positive

certainty … one can be sure that one is beginning to be deceived, indeed beginning to

deceive the other."4

The border as a figure puts this political function to a test in its innate structure of

tracing "both an impossible and a necessary passage," as Derrida outlines in Aporias

(1993).5 Derrida distinguishes between three types of borderlines: first, "those that

separate territories, countries, nations, States, languages, and cultures; second, "the

separations and sharings between domains of discourse" (i.e. domains that have been

represented e.g. in writing, in science, or in film); and third, "the border that separates

what are called concepts or terms."6 All three border-formations intersect one another in

Straub-Huillet's work and share the overall function to highlight at once the unique and

common features of political structures.

As an aesthetic or formal figure the border obtains a similar function of framing

texts or works of art and of assigning a certain purpose or meaning to them. As Derrida

explores in his critique of Kantian aesthetics in The Truth in Painting (1978), the frame

itself destroys its own purpose at the very moment it wraps itself around a work, because

of its ambiguous status of being at once external and part of the work: the frame "gives

rise to the work," yet, in doing so it "is no longer merely around the work. That which it

puts in place – the instances of the frame, the title, the signature, the legend, etc. – does

not stop disturbing the internal order of discourse."7 This is neither a blind destruction of

boundaries, nor is it a process of aimless deferral. In its aporetic structure the bordering

function is crucial because it renders a work visible by separating it from other

surrounding discursive systems while maintaining, at the same time, a passageway to the

outside. The border allows showing the text as part of a larger con-text. "Neither simply
 108

outside nor simply inside', this border-effect 'comes against, beside and in addition to ...

the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation,

from a certain outside."8 Like the parergon in painting, the cinematic frame must be

similarly understood in terms of a border effect. In fact, as film theorists Peter Brunette

and David Wills have pointed out, there are far more borders (or frames) involved in the

conception of cinema, than in painting: from the frame that designates a singular image

on the celluloid strip to the threshold that separates (and links) the acoustic from the

visual field to the border between darkened theater space and illuminated screen.9 Aside

from these basic material borders there are, in addition, the boundaries between text and

referent, text and reader, text and other texts, etc. Following this, it becomes significantly

harder to determine with certainty where the cinematic frame ends and where it begins.

"The outside of the frame, far from being the opposite of the inside, is a differential

variation of the same order," from which follows that "the image creates its own frame

that, conversely, constructs its own inside."10 Following this, the border appears in

Straub-Huillet's work in a variety of shapes by crossing formal, (inter-)textual, discursive,

and biographical boundaries.

The border appears, first of all, as a formal element that is inscribed into the

filmic mise-en-scène. There, it dissects both the frame and the cinematographic space into

two parts. The border attains, second, the form of a paratextual, discursive trace that

operates in relation to a reference that enters the text from outside. This con-text may

include biographical events or the profilmic conditions; e.g. Straub's biographical

experiences or an actor's foreign accent. "Foreign" elements intervene, in other words,

with the film's internal order and open the view onto another discourse, an other event in

another time and space. The foreign elements intervene, however, not at random, but are

called up because they share similar traits and structures with the "original" event. The

"endless" deferral implicit in this border effect constitutes, thus, less an impasse than

rather an affirmative, productive, and political function attesting to the following: works,
 109

texts, historical, and political events are presented as distinct parts that share and cohabit

a larger genealogical ground across various temporal and territorial boundaries.

Two adaptation techniques are key to the production of Straub-Huillet's border

poetics: virtually all of their films involve the displacement of an original setting onto a

foreign location and it is often a non-native speaker who recites the original text with a

foreign accent. These two techniques draw attention to the border's double-bind function:

the border is simultaneously a crossover point and a marker of delimitation. Based on this

aporetic structure, the border poetics in Straub-Huillet's cinema obtain their political

function: from Machorka-Muff to Othon to Lothringen! to Europa 2005 the figure of the

border operates in Straub-Huillet's work to disclose at once the specificities and the

continuities that define modern European power politics and border conflicts, from the

cold war politics of the European Economic Community to ancient Rome, the ideological

cradle of modern European civilization, to the post-wall politics of the German

reunification to the global politics of the European Union.

Border Biography

Even though borders are rarely "natural," to dismiss them simply as "constructed"

is not only naïve but also impractical. Borders exist, because they institute very real

effects of power in their concrete physical or topographical presence and in their

"merely" representative function. In both cases the border functions "to assign 'identities'

for collective subjects within structures of power, therefore to categorialize and

individualize human beings," as Etienne Balibar summarizes in a recent article on

European border politics.11 One of the border's most effective political measures is its

ability to institute conflicting meanings. With their "polysemic nature," as Balibar points

out, borders "do not have the same meaning for everyone."12 A particular border may

welcome some to cross, while (often violently) prohibiting others to do the same.

Moreover, one and the same person may experience the "same" border in more than one
 110

way. Straub's own biography is an excellent example for the border's vicissitudes in

meaning.

Straub's border crossing to West Germany in the fall of 1958 constituted at once

an act of expulsion and liberation. First of all, threatened by the draft he (and many other

young Frenchmen) had only three options: going to war (which meant to participate in a

violent conflict that happened outside of Europe, yet within the nation's colonial

borderlines) or refusing the draft, which meant either: prison (a form of social and civil

expatriation within national boundaries) or exile (an expulsion outside national

boundaries). The border appears here both as a marker of exclusion and as a protective

barrier.

Roughly twenty years earlier, Straub had experienced the "same" border that

protected him from the draft in the fifties and sixties in very different ways. Born in 1933

in Metz in the border region of Alsace-Lorraine, Straub spent parts of his childhood

under Nazi-occupation. During this first border experience it was the border that moved

by crossing and violating an entire region and its people. But in the late 1950s, the

"same" borderline had changed its meaning, because this time it was Straub who actively

crossed it. Straub's later ostensible engagement with German-language arts and culture

appears in light of his biography especially interesting. Even though Straub has

occasionally emphasized that he was forced to learn German during the occupation, his

familiarity with the language may have been one of the reasons why the couple chose

West Germany as their first location of exile.

Huillet, in contrast, did not have any German-language skills at the time. She

learned the language from the texts the couple consulted in its research of the Bach film,

i.e., from the lyrics of Bach's cantatas and letters.13 Huillet learned, in other words, a

language connoted as doubly foreign: the language of another country as well as the

language of another period, which means, she traversed not only geographical-linguistic,

but also temporal-historical lines. Moreover, Huillet's acquiring of language skills evokes
 111

yet another reason for the couple's border crossing from France to Germany. The

filmmakers' exile seems to have been dictated by the Bach project itself.

Indeed, in his first year of exile, Straub (who was often accompanied by Huillet)

traveled freely across inner-German state lines in search for original locations and

archival material for the film. As a Frenchman, Straub was able to ignore the

contemporary, territorial configurations of a divided German map, following instead on

the historical trail of Bach. Chronicle is, in this regard, not only a film produced in exile,

but also one of the first German-German co-productions, at least in terms of filming on

original locations in both East and West Germany. The border crossing confronted the

two filmmakers, in other words, with certain conditions they would have not have

encountered in their native France.

What attracted Straub to adapt Böll's short story Bonn Diary into a film was,

among other things, that he was given the chance "as a Frenchman … to make in

Germany a film that no German could make – just as no German was able to make

Germany, Year Zero, no American The Southerner . . . and no Italian could have written

The Charterhouse of Parma."14 In turn, it would have been nearly impossible to make an

anti-militarist film such as Machorka-Muff in France during the time of the Algerian war.

In any case, Straub emphasizes in a number of interviews Machorka-Muff's importance

and relevance across national borderlines:

The reason I wanted to make [the] film was precisely [due to] my
first strong political feelings, as I was still a student in Strasbourg
… my first bout of political rage … the fact that Germany had
been rearmed – the story of a rape. That is to say – the only
country in Europe which, after a certain Napoleon, the first
gangster in the series, had the chance to be free. This chance was
destroyed. I know for a fact that in Hamburg people threw stones
at the first uniforms, i.e., people didn't want them, they had had
enough of it.15

Straub embeds Germany's postwar remilitarization into a larger historical discourse of

modern European imperialism, from the Napoleonic era to the cold war period under
 112

Adenauer and de Gaulle. He presents the film, in addition, as part of a personal narrative

that takes place in Strasbourg, a town located at the French-German border.

Straub's opposition against West Germany's rearmament is, thus, as much

informed by the past, as it is seen in light of more recent conflicts of military

confrontation: "After having left Paris where the streets where dominated by soldiers

carrying machine guns, threatening you on every corner, I moved to a country [Germany]

where you didn't use to run into uniforms on the streets – until now; now I'd run into

them here too."16 To Straub, West Germany resembles temporarily an alternative space,

especially in contrast to the conditions that exist in France around a time when many

people believed that the country was close to civil war. Straub invokes the image of

soldiers patrolling through the streets in reference to the repressive measures taken by the

French government against citizens who opposed the military campaign in Algeria and

the military conscription that went along with it.

In this light, Böll's story registers with Straub because it opens relations that go

beyond its specific national, historical context (West German rearmament in the fifties).

Straub recognizes conditions that are shared across national boundaries, conditions that

were developed by "a series of gangsters" throughout the history of modern European

border politics.

Views Across the Rhine

Machorka-Muff highlights these genealogical affinities in the form of a "foreign"

perspective that points across the border and outside of the film's narrative framework. A

scene in Machorka-Muff opens with the principal character, Erich von Machorka-Muff,

sitting on the outside-patio of a café, reading a newspaper. The scene follows his

promotion as one of the highest officers in the German Federal Republic's restored army.

Directly quoting from the Böll-text, his off-screen voice-over commentary states: "In

honor of the occasion, I permitted myself an aperitif [and] looked through some
 113

newspapers." During his final words, the images change and a two-minute long sequence

consisting of cinematographic depictions of eighteen different newspaper clippings

begins. The articles and advertisements are all taken from West German newspapers

published in the 1950s. All of them deal, at the outset, with the country's military

rearmament. But under closer examination the content is more specific: each article and

each ad deals specifically with the issue of military conscription: "Those who enlist

voluntarily remain in control of their own time and their own free decisions," reads the

first line of an ad in favor of the draft. This specific theme does not appear in Böll's

original story in which the newspaper articles are only described with the words "a few

editorials on defense policy."17 The camera's movements highlight the draft as a central

theme further. Tracking or panning across some of the pages, they draw attention to

specific sentences, like to this quotation of a nineteen-year old man, who is quoted in

support of a "humane" military service: "With good conscience we gladly want to fulfill

this duty for our country and our people."

The selection and montage of these articles does thus not function to

cinematically illustrate Böll's original text. The overt focus on military conscription

presents rather an issue that played a pronounced role in Straub and Huillet's own life and

in the national debate surrounding the Algerian war in France. This does not mean,

however, that Straub-Huillet merely use Böll's story to get their personal agenda across.

In fact, the theme of the draft is never explicitly pointed to and only decipherable when

watching the scene multiple times. During a regular screening situation, the movement of

the camera and the framing of the articles produce a rather fragmentary, if not,

disorienting impression, which is reinforced through the atonal musical score that

accompanies the sequence on the audible level. In other words, the sequence contains

undeniably a viewpoint specific to Straub-Huillet's own experience; but this viewpoint

gains neither superiority over the narrative, nor does it become the film's main political

lesson. The other discourse remains instead at the margins, takes place at one of the film's
 114

borderlines. The newspaper sequence obtains an inter-textual borderline function that

incorporates a discourse that is never explicitly addressed in the film and that remains, in

this regard, external to it. In doing so, the sequence invokes places and events (France,

Algeria, etc.) that lie beyond the national boundaries the narrative is explicitly referring

to. These other events or discourses have the concrete function to introduce an expatriate

perspective into the frame that works in conjunction with the theme operating on the

surface of the screen.

In addition to interjecting an external discourse into the film, the border appears

throughout Straub-Huillet's work also as a formal motif whose function it is to dissect the

filmic mise-en-scène into two parts. Examples include the shots across the river Arno in

Fortini/Cani's Florence-segment, the shoreline and horizon of the Baltic Sea in The

Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, the wall surrounding the Roman Palatine Hill in

Othon, and, in general, the roads, fences, hedgerows, or riverbeds that appear in

numerous Straub-Huillet films. The frequent use of panning or tracking movements

alongside or across these horizontal or diagonal markers highlights their bordering

function further.

Positioned in the foreground of the images the camera observes the area behind

these borderlines from a distance without ever breaking or entering it. In fact, neither the

actor/character nor the camera crosses ever beyond these lines of delimitation. As a

formal motif, the border functions to separate between two modes of representation that

are essential to Straub-Huillet's construction of mise-en-scène: the border allows at once

to separate and correlate the quotidian from the histrionic realm. These two "paradoxical

cinematic propensities" of the quotidian and the histrionic, Lesley Stern has pointed out,

are "always and to varying degrees present in the cinema."18 Yet in Straub-Huillet's

work, the relations and conditions that inform the quotidian and the histrionic are

explicitly addressed in terms of a border effect. While dissecting the image into two parts,

histrionic performances (by actors or the camera) take always place in the foreground,
 115

while the quotidian scenery spreads out largely in the background. The line of

demarcation renders each mode visible as equal parts and cohabitants of one and the

same image. Separating and connecting each part at once, this line remains at all times

clearly discernible, even though it is impossible to state with certainty where one realm

ends and the other begins. What is clearly visible only, is the border that attests to the

limit and passageway between them. Moreover, operating clearly within the text, this

borderline includes an outside space into the image's interior, produces a frame within the

frame.

Machorka-Muff incorporates this motif in the form of the river Rhine, a

geographical marker of a long, contested history of French-German border politics.

Machorka-Muff includes two shots of the Rhine. During the first one, the camera is

located at the Eastern riverbank. In a semi-circular pan across, the camera scans the river

and the landscape that stretches out in the background (see Figure 9). After the 180-

degree turn, Erich von Machorka-Muff appears suddenly screen-left, looking onto the

river, and the shot is retroactively established as his point of view. But the shot renders

not only the fictional character's point of view visible. Gazing into the direction of the

French-German border region and France behind it the shot invokes, in addition, the two

émigré filmmakers' viewpoint toward their native country.

A second shot in the film repeats the cinematographic gesture of a view across the

Rhine in the direction of the French-German border region: a 180-degree pan scans the

Rhine from the position of the outside terrace of the Petersberg Hotel, located east to the

river in the mountains near Bonn. Taken from Böll's novel, this location has a significant

historical connotation: from 1945 until West Germany regained conditional sovereignty

and military power in 1955 the Petersberg Hotel was the seat of the Allied high

commissioner. Beginning in 1955 it became the official guesthouse of the German

Federal Republic. Böll chooses this specific setting to evoke a figurative meaning: Erich

von Machorka-Muff and his bride Inn (a descendent of an old, aristocratic line) celebrate
 116

their marriage here. The new union between two old German traditions, the military and

the aristocracy, is thus staged at a location that is overtly inscribed by the most recent

changes in postwar German state and border politics. In the film, the view from the

Petersberg Hotel obtains more than merely a figurative meaning. It presents in a direct

relationship a view across the Rhine in the direction of the French-German border and,

thus, toward the filmmakers' native country.

Panning across and alongside the river the cinematographic movement

underscores the river's bordering function in this image. As a so-called natural line of

geographic demarcation, the river figures as a supplement for the actual border between

the two countries. On an aesthetic level, the Rhine inscribes a line into the image and

dissects it in two halves: a foreground, where the action takes place, where both character

and camera perform their looks and gestures; and a quotidian landscape that stretches out

beyond the left river bank into the background of the image. In so doing, the image itself

produces a specific layering of historical and geopolitical connotations: the reinstitution

of West Germany as a military power that is played out in the foreground is staged in

view of the French-German borderland.

As French filmmakers working in West Germany, Straub-Huillet inhabit a unique

position, that constitutes them simultaneously inside and outside of a specific national

context. As émigré filmmakers they are able to make a film about Germany in Germany

that no German could have made (to recall Straub's words). As expatriate French

filmmakers they are, in turn, able to make a film about France – a film they were only

able to make outside of France; for once, because of the French censorship conditions

that exited at the time and, second, because according to Straub's earlier statement, to

make a film about a country requires a foreign perspective. Thus, only in Germany were

Straub-Huillet able to make a film about France.

Due to the couple's shifting position in-between inside and outside, Machorka-

Muff is a film that is made at the border. Only located at the border, the filmmakers were
 117

able to incorporate traces of a foreign conflict into an "ostensibly" German film.

Machorka-Muff is, thus, neither a German nor a French film but rather a film that

addresses the specific structure of modern European military defense politics across

specific national, geographical, and historical borderlines.

Border Archaeology and Corneille's Radical Return

Machorka-Muff presents relations of history, nationality, and cultural specificity

in terms of a genealogical trajectory – established by a series of gangsters – which defies,

in turn, reducing the film to only one national context. In a similar vein it becomes

impossible to determine if the German-Italian co-production Othon can be considered a

French film, or not. The film's ambiguous nationality results neither from the fact that it

was produced outside of France nor from the act of displacing a French seventeenth-

century drama onto the foreign location of 1960s Italy. Othon's transnational

underpinnings are more complex, for once, because this act of displacement is, at the

same time, also a homecoming, since it returns a drama that is about ancient Rome to its

"original" location. This location, one might add, surpasses the original author's, i.e.,

Corneille's, own national, geographical, and not to forget historical origins. Othon maps

out multiple layers of textual "origins" and, in doing so, produces a film around

borderlines that emerge noticeably from the sedimentary structure of an archaeological

site.

In the same year in which Straub-Huillet made Othon, Michel Foucault articulated

a related thought, similarly, around figurations of borderlines: "The use of concepts of

discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation," he writes in The

Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), "present all historical analysis not only with questions

of procedure, but with theoretical problems."19 Foucault is not so much speaking of the

impossibility to attest one eternally relevant meaning to a concept, but rather argues that

not even shifts in meaning follow the rules of a linear progression. The only regularity
 118

Foucault is instead able to identify in the history and development of discursive

formations derives from the constitution of power relations "established between

institutions, economic and social processes...."20 A few years later, Foucault identifies

this notion of historical affinities explicitly in terms of Nietzsche's concept of genealogy.

"The traits," that such a genealogical approach "attempts to identify," Foucault continues,

are not the exclusive generic characteristics of an individual, a

sentiment, or an idea, which permit us to qualify them as 'Greek' or
'English'; rather, it seeks the subtle, singular, and subindividual
marks that might possibly intersect in them to form a network that
is difficult to unravel.21

As a genealogical project Othon discloses that throughout a network of accidental

discursive formations "only [one] single drama is ever staged ... the endless repeated

play of dominations."22 The question, whether or not a film such as Othon can still be

considered French is, thus, beside the point. What matters only is in what ways the film

delineates how "[t]he domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of

values…;" or in short, how it unveils distinct dynamics of power according to their

shared origins.23

Othon is, after four German-language productions, Straub-Huillet's first French-

language film and the first film the couple shot on Italian locations. Following Straub-

Huillet's move from Munich to Rome, Othon inaugurates in other words Straub-Huillet's

preference for Italian locations. More than half of the twenty-one films they made after

1970 were shot on exterior locations in Italy.

Dressed in ancient Roman costumes, the mostly Italian actors perform Corneille's

drama (1664) against the quotidian backdrop of the modern cityscape of Rome. The view

onto the city occurs, for the most part, from the position of one of the oldest ancient

Roman sites. Othon is filmed on the terrace of the Palatine Hill and in the gardens of the

Villa Doria Pamphilij. These temporal and territorial shifts between ancient and modern

Rome are highlighted on the level of mise-en-scène as well: almost every shot in the film
 119

positions the actors/characters in front or alongside a horizontal or diagonal structure

(some straight, some curved), including the wall surrounding the terrace of the Palatine

Hill or the rim around a fountain in the villa's garden (see Figure 10).

Similar to Machorka-Muff, the film employs a specific cinematographic

movement in relation to these physical markers of demarcation. Yet in Othon it is not

only the usual slow, extended pan or tracking movement but, instead, a number of fast-

paced tracking shots that move either directly toward or away from the performers. The

movement reframes the performers (e.g. by showing an actor who was initially depicted

in a wider shot or two-shot, suddenly alone and in a close up). The specific camera

movement alters only the relationship between camera and performer which means the

following: whereas the outer borderline around the image changes, the internal borderline

remains intact, since the limit that separates the histrionic performative in the foreground

from the surrounding quotidian scenery in the background does not change. Even though

the camera leaps, at certain times, forward as if to breach that borderline, it never

succeeds in doing so, but stops instead right in front of the performer. The formal motif

of the borderline functions in Othon thus explicitly to emphasize the two realms in their

spatial distinctiveness: the space of theatrical and cinematographic performance is

rendered as a realm of mobility and spatial depth, whereas the quotidian space in the

background appears as static and flat.

The confrontation between the ancient setting and the modern, urban cityscape

continues forth on the audible track: the recital of Corneille's text competes with the

environmental sounds of the city. The spatial elements of depth and flatness correspond

here to the density of the voices (recorded with a directional microphone) versus the flat

ambient noise. Moreover, written in flexible alexandrine verse form – typical for the

neoclassical seventeenth-century French drama – Corneille's text is performed mainly by

actors for whom French is a foreign language. Some of them recite the complex verses

with a noticeable accent. The element of mispronunciation accentuates the border's

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presence also on a linguistic level and it further highlights the displacement of the French

drama onto a foreign location. Nevertheless, the relocation of Othon onto ancient Roman

sites means, at the same time: to return the play's narrative setting onto its native grounds.

Othon frames, in other words, different kinds of temporal, territorial, and

linguistic origins without dissolving them into one. The accent of the Italian actress

Olimpia Carlisi, for instance, demarcates the line that separates her from the character

Camille, even though both character and actor share one and the same body. In doing so,

her performance contributes to the precise framing of Corneille's text within the film. The

wall surrounding the Palatine Hill distinguishes, in the same vein, the histrionic

performance space from the quotidian realm of the twentieth-century Roman cityscape,

even though both "worlds" share one and the same image.

The political genealogy produced in Othon articulates itself as part of a concrete

formation of textual borderlines that insist on a separation of distinct historical as well as

representational specificities. By way of the borders aporetic structure, these borderlines

have yet also the ability to set these different origins in relation to one another. Othon

produces therefore also links between a modern, twentieth-century capital city, the

Roman Empire (the mythic birthplace of Western European civilization), and France at

the beginning of the industrial era. The French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras

emphasizes the specific genealogical trajectory of the film:

Straub has traveled through time to rediscover Corneille. He has

broken the link between tragedy and its literal historical meaning,
established once and for all by rationalist culture. … Miraculously,
I see the man from Rouen [Pierre Corneille] in a rage against the
authorities as he writes his play. …I understand that it is a play
about power and its internal contradictions. I did not know this."24

What opens Duras' eyes to the play's forgotten radical content is precisely the film's

border poetics, the fact that "the framing here is done by words. All accents are allowed

except that of the Comédie Francaise – in other words, the accent of camouflaged

meaning, of authority."25 Othon manages to destroy the conventions that "imprisoned"

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both the historical and contemporary readings and performances of Corneille's play,

whose filmic version appears, in contrast, "liberated from all visions prior to [one's]

own."26 Corneille's play is instead restored to its genealogical beginnings: "Othon has

been exhumed from the tomb in which it has lain since 1708; Straub has traveled back in

time to restore it to its nascent state."27 The frame, the tomb, the prison –Duras' own

critique is heavily infused with the vocabulary of a border poetics: "Subversion there is,"

she concludes, "outside as well as inside."28 As if illustrating this very practice of a

border archaeology in form of a typographic placement, Duras includes the following

remark about the reasons for Straub's exile into a footnote, which means, into the peculiar

neither-inside/nor-outside margins of her review: "Jean-Marie Straub is French. His films

... are German. Because Straub refused to fight in Algeria, he was forced into exile. The

army still dogs his footsteps."29

The radical origins Duras detects in Straub-Huillet's Corneille adaptation have

nothing to do with an attempt to restore the play to its "actual" historical conditions or to

return it to its proper place in a chronological chain of (historical) events. Returning the

play to its nascent state means instead to force Corneille's drama to touch base with its

own radical potential. Realized as a film, the play becomes an anti-authoritative text that

is written, so to say, in opposition to the conventions and hierarchies that determined the

drama's later performance and reception. In doing so, the seventeenth-century play is

returned to the currency of its present and future context.

To return Othon to its radical future origins is not an automatic process of "textual

digging." Othon's border archeology is uncovered because Duras' herself engages in a

reading practice marked by a border poetics. Such a poetics demands a reader (or viewer)

who engages with a text in an attempt to uncover precisely those elements that lie

underneath the surface. In Lothringen! Straub himself appears as such a reader, a reader

who opens a text to an outside, to its others, by reading a native text in a foreign

language.
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Speaking One's Native Language in a Foreign Tongue

An adaptation of Maurice Barrès' short novel Colette Baudoche: The Story of a

Young Girl From Metz (1908), Straub-Huillet's 1994 production Lothringen! investigates

inter-discursive political relations also in terms of a linguistic and territorial double bind.

Barrès' story is about the courtship between the young Collette and the German Professor

Asmus during the German annexation of the region, following the Franco-Prussian war

of 1870–71. Like Machorka-Muff, the film is largely filmed on original locations that,

here, coincide with Straub's place of birth: Metz and its surrounding countryside. A co-

production between the regional German television network Saarländischer Rundfunk

and the independent French producer Pierre Grise, the twenty-minute short film was

made with a small French production crew and cast. Recalling the difficulty whether or

not Othon identifies as a French film and Machork-Muff as a "German" film, Lothringen!

is neither French nor German, but emerges similarly from a border state.

However, Lothringen! is, strictly speaking, not one but two films, since Straub-

Huillet officially released a French-language and a German-language version of the film,

that differ slightly from one another. The main difference in the two versions, aside from

the language, is the casting of the voice-over characters. In the French version, the voice-

over narration is divided between a female voice (Dominque Dosdat, speaking the text

that belongs in the novel to Colette's grandmother) and a male voice (André Warynski as

the narrator). The German-language version differs from this insofar as Jean-Marie

Straub speaks the entire text, i.e., both the male and the female part. In doing so, the

native French-speaker Straub reads with a French accent the German translation of a text

originally written in French. By speaking the entire voice-over narrative, Straub assumes,

furthermore, the roles of two different characters in the novel: that of Colette's

grandmother and that of the narrator. As a reader of Barrès' text, Straub recites this text in

translation and, thus, as someone who reads his native language simultaneously with an

accent and in a foreign tongue.

 123

Reading a novel about the French-German border conflict in German evokes

inadvertently Straub's own encounter with the German language in the years of the

German occupation of Metz: "Until 1940 I only heard, learned, and spoke French – at

home and outside. And suddenly, I'm only allowed to hear and speak German outside,

and have to learn it in school (where French is forbidden)."30 Thus, by reading a German

translation of Barrès' novel in a language that was once forced upon him Straub performs

a type of border crossing that opens the text to another discursive event (in this case, the

Nazi occupation of Alsace/France). This event remains yet outside of the film's actual

narrative content. Straub incorporates an experience that is alien to Barrès' novel into the

filmic adaptation. But transposed onto the audible track, thus, expelled from the visual

register, the other discourse is made "visible" in the film. Both the linguistic and verbal

border effects have the function to insert temporal and territorial transgressions into the

filmic structure. For instance, when Straub assumes the voice of the old Alsatian woman,

he traverses historical, textual, linguistic, and, not to forget, gender lines. And yet, all of

these boundaries remain, at the same time, intact, since the character of the old woman is

only explicit in the novel and since Straub's biographical references remain outside of the

text. Once again, the border poetics that operate in Straub-Huillet's film produce a text

that correlates distinct historical and geopolitical events without lumping them into one,

without eradicating their distinct origins and contexts.

Only one character from the novel, the female protagonist Colette Baudoche,

gains actual visible presence in the film. Dressed in historical costume, Colettte appears

in only two shots. In the first one, she is positioned in front of a metal railing, her back

turned to the camera, while she is looking out toward the horizon in the background

across a lake. In the second shot, she sits on an old stonewall, located on a hill, while the

cityscape of Metz stretches out beneath in the background of the image. Like in

Machorka-Muff and Othon, the character is situated at a physical borderline that separates

the image into histrionic foreground and quotidian background. In this specific shot, the
 124

view across the border is noticeably Straub's birthplace Metz. The rest of the film is

composed of similar shots, all structured around figurations of borderlines: a row of trees,

a highway, or an old stonewall (see Figure 11).

The film includes, in addition, also a view across a river, a river junction, to be

precise, where the Moselle flows into the Rhine.31 In doing so, the film frames Barrès'

historical fiction with a contemporary quotidian landscape that is not part of the original

novel. This setting is a particular area in the German border town Koblenz, the so-called

Deutsches Eck (German Corner). Located on the triangular river promenade (the

"corner") with view onto the Rhine and the Moselle, the camera engages in a 360-degree

pan that circumscribes not only the banks on the opposite side of the rivers, but also a

memorial site that is located at the promenade and that features a memorial statue built in

honor of the German Emperor William I (reign: 1861-1888). Completely destroyed

during WWII, the emperor's monument was newly erected in 1990 in celebration of the

German unification. To underscore the recent historical development, the pan shot

includes the 16 federal state flags that are placed in a neat semicircular arrangement at the

foot of the monument. The circular movement produces an explicit link between the

country's contemporary exterior and interior borderlines and a specific historical legacy

of German imperialism: from the country's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 (under

the rule of William I) to its post-wall unification. Eventually, the shot dissolves into the

image of a historical map of Alsace-Lorraine during the period of the Prussian

occupation, accompanied, on the audible track by the German national anthem and

gunfire-sounds. With these images, the film transitions into the past and to Colette's

story.

By starting with a sequence that is exterior to both Barrès' novel and to the film's

primary location (the Alsace-Lorraine region) Straub-Huillet adopt the novel not only

into a future/present context, but underline once more the continuities and shifts that

inform the film's historical discourse. Germany's national and imperial aspirations are, of
 125

course, represented by the figure of the emperor. The statue functions here as a double

cipher; it attests figuratively to the history of these aspirations, while representing, at the

same time, a commercial token of these aspirations: the status is one of the city's main

tourist attractions. This transformation from historical icon to commodity figure parallels

the transition from nineteenth-century German imperialism to late-twentieth-century

global capitalism. The military and physical acts of occupation, persecution, and

deportation that defined the border relations between Germany and its neighboring

countries for centuries have been replaced by the new politico-economic alliances of the

post-WWII era. These alliances began with the European Economic Community in 1957

and ended with the ratification of the EU Maastricht treaty of 1992. The opening

sequence emphasizes that these shifts are part of a longer trajectory and displays them in

their current fabric: in the form of economic transit (cargo ships passing up and down the

two riverbeds) and in the form of the tourist and leisure industry (sightseeing boats,

camping sites that stretch out on the left bank of the Rhine, and tourists who visit the

memorial site) (see Figure 12).

While these images in the opening scene derive from the specific context of a

post-wall topography, they are in their structural core, nevertheless, already present in the

account of the Prussian occupation given in Barrès' novel: the central male character,

Professor Asmus, a teacher from Germany who is hired to teach German to French

school children (again, the reference to Straub's childhood gains momentum) approaches

the region and its people from the perspective of a "cultural" explorer and consumer, an

attitude he is mocked for throughout the novel. These parts are excluded as narrative

events from the film, yet Straub-Huillet incorporate them, nevertheless, by emphasizing

that the same forces and structures of exploration, exploitation, and consumption have

survived, for instance, in the form of the contemporary sightseeing scenery that informs

the border landscape of Koblenz in the opening scene of Lothringen!

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Fortress Europe

The continuity of old hierarchies and relations of power in a seemingly altered

world has been one of the main points of critique directed against the consolidation of the

European Union in recent years. In addition, extreme measures have been undertaken to

enforce Europe's outer boundaries, leading to increasing security measures at the border,

a development that has lead to the infamous term Fortress Europe.32 Etienne Balibar

writes in this regard that "[f]ar from disappearing with the 'end' of the Cold War and the

collapse of communism" global borders "tended to give place to the idea of a great

'North-South' divide along clear lines separating the developed and the under-developed

countries, which was never officially accepted."33 Propelled by globalization and the

institution of ever-larger supranational entities (such as the European Union), this global

divide takes part within the territorial property of most member states of the EU in the

form of interior border regions (e.g. the Turkish neighborhoods in many German cities or

the so-called banlieues at urban peripheries in France).

The last work that Straub-Huillet were able to complete together, the short

vidéotract Europa 2005, 27 October addresses these most recent geopolitical

developments.34 The film completes a cycle that had begun more than forty years earlier

with Machorka-Muff during the birth years of the EU. Set on exterior locations in the

French migrant, working-class suburb Clichy-sous-bois near Paris, the video incorporates

literal and figurative inscriptions of borderlines that are similar to the other films

discussed in this chapter. In this case, the borders are part of France's colonial past.

Instead of having vanished, these borders assume an afterlife and manifest themselves in

their present state in the form of a North-South divide that is now projected within

France's own national borders. Thus, whereas actual geographical and physical borders

may have shifted in the course of time, the structure and function that constituted them in

their origins continue to exist elsewhere; in this case, in a territory located at the
 127

periphery of the country's inner, urban centers: in the French low-income, ethnic

neighborhoods, the so-called banlieues.

The setting of Europa 2005 is, however, not simply a representation for the

French banlieues in general. The video takes place at a rather specific historical site, a

crime scene, to be more precise. Europa 2005 is set at the place where on October 27,

2005, two teenagers of North African and Arab descent, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré,

burned to death in an electrical transformer while trying to escape from the police chasing

after them. Their death triggered the outbursts of social unrest known as the "banlieue

riots" that spread in the following two months from the Parisian suburbs to other socially

deprived, ethnic neighborhoods all over France. In consequence, the French government

declared a state of emergency on November 8. Two weeks later, the prime minister

tightened controls on immigration.

Never explicitly addressed in the film, the specific historical events remain

outside of the film-text. However, Straub-Huillet are quite explicit about the structure and

conditions of power that generated the two youngsters' death. The 10-minute long video

is composed of only two pan shots. Both of these shots are repeated five times. Each

repetition depicts, in fact, a different take of these two shots that were filmed at different

times on the same day. Panning from left to right, the first shot depicts the electrical

substation in which the two youngsters were electrocuted. A high barbed-wired wall,

surrounded by warning signs, obscures the view onto the industrial compound. The

second shot pans in the opposite direction, from right to left, and it captures the close

proximity between the substation and an adjacent building that belongs to a low-income,

social housing complex. Both shots are completely devoid of any human presence. The

audible track features the direct sound from the scene, which includes during most takes

the persistent barking of a dog. Each segment ends with the superimposition of video

titles that bring the second shot to a conclusion and that mark the transitions in-between

the five segments. These titles read: "Gas chamber, electric chair."
 128

Without attempting a direct representation of neither the incident nor its

aftermath, Straub-Huillet re-construct the relations of power that made the incident

possible in the form of the concrete architectural and geographical conditions that are

present at the crime scene. In so doing, Europa 2005 documents in the most direct way

the discursive structures that inform contemporary class relations in France – and in

Europe – at the beginning of the twenty-first century. First of all, by way of the slow

panning movements, each shot produces a connection between the project-housing

conditions and the industrial compound, underscoring their joint location at the margins

of contemporary European society. The death of the two boys is, in this light, not simply

an accident, but rather a necessary outcome of the economic and social relations the

video renders visible. These relations of power are, above all, based "on meticulously

repeated scenes of violence," as Michel Foucault calls it.35 These scenes, as Foucault

developed in detail in Discipline and Punish (1975) are not only conditioned by specific

socio-economic relations, but also by specific technologies of disciplinary punishment

that inform not only the executive, legal, or military branches of a society but all other

institutions and social practices as well. The modern disciplinary control regulates, in

other words, not simply relations of power but, more precisely, relations of knowledge

(e.g. in the form of psychological evaluations, medical examinations, academic

regulations, fiscal policies, language rules, or genre conventions).36

Giorgio Agamben has argued – in explicit reference to Foucault – that "the

development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible … without the

disciplinary control …, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak,

created the 'docile bodies' that it needed."37 On the basis of the complete politicization of

life itself (so-called "bare life") and given the fact that modern states – both totalitarian

and liberal-democracies – base their legal status and political sovereignty on a prolonged

state of exception, Agamben identifies the concentration camp "as the hidden matrix and

nomos of the political space in which we are still living."38 Once birth (life) and land
 129

function to give legitimacy to the nation-state, Agamben explains, the state is forced to

police and regulate "the care of the nations biological life as one of its proper tasks."39 In

consequence, the system is "transformed into a lethal machine," a technological

specificity, he argues, shared by both totalitarian systems and liberal democracies

alike.40

It is significant that the camps appear together with new laws on

citizenship and the denationalization of citizens – not only the
Nuremberg laws on citizenship in the Reich but also the laws on
denationalization promulgated by almost all European states,
including France, between 1915 and 1933. …

[It] is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in

all its metamorphoses into the zones d'attentes of our airports and
certain outskirts of our cities.41

The words "gas chamber" and "electric chair" that appear as end-/inter-titles in

Europa 2005 function precisely in this way: from the police brutality that caused Zyed

Benna's and Bouna Traoré's death to the state of emergency and its subsequent

regulations in immigrant policies, the disciplinary apparatus responsible for the treatment

of France's interior border relations operates upon similar principles than the ones

outlined by Foucault and Agamben. Despite of their respective formal distinctions, they

structure also the relations of power and coercion that informed e.g. the military draft in

postwar France and West Germany in the fifties and sixties as well as the enforcement of

the German language during the Prussian and Nazi occupations of France.

Figurations of borderlines in Straub-Huillet's work aim at disclosing such shared

principles and common characteristics that structure the relations of power within modern

state apparatuses on diverse levels; on the level of politics, culture, and aesthetics. In

doing so, Straub-Huillet neither root for a borderless world, nor for clear-cut definitions

of inside and outside. With their insistence on a borderline that should not be eliminated,

but that is yet permanently in a state of transition, Straub-Huillet call for a position at the

border that is "neither this nor that," an experience that "is perhaps what all of Europe,
 130

and not just its 'margins', 'marches' or 'outskirts' must imagine today," Balibar

concludes.42 By directing our view continuously and consistently toward such a position,

Straub-Huillet's films refuse to dwell in transnational harmony by including, for instance,

an expatriate perspective into a familiar landscape or by speaking a native language in a

foreign tongue.
 131

Notes

1 For examples of border poetical or border theoretical approaches, see e.g. Johan
Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, eds., Border Poetics De-limited (Hannover: Wehrhahn,
2007); Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, eds., Border Theory: the Limits of
Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
2 For a detailed account of Derrida's systematic representation as apolitical see
Herman Rapaport, The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001).
3 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992),
79-80.
4 Ibid., 81.

5 Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1993), 17.
6 Ibid. 23.

7 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9.
8 Derrida, Truth, 54.

9 Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/play: Derrida and Film Theory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 90-137.
10 Ibid., 105.

11 Etienne Balibar, "Europe as Borderland," Environment and Plannng D: Society

and Space 27 (2009): 192 (italics in the original text).
12 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones (London: Verso,
2002), 81.
13 See Heberle and Funke Stern, "Das Feuer im Innern des Berges," Frauen und
Film 32 (1982): 10.
14 Straub quoted in Richard Roud, Jean-Marie Straub (New York: Viking Press,
1972), 29.
15 Andi Engel, "Andi Engel Talks to Jean-Marie Straub," Cinemantics 1 (1970),
17.
 132

16 Michel Delahaye, "Entretien Avec Jean-Marie Straub," Cahiers du Cinéma

180 (July 1966), 54 (my translation).
17 Heinrich Böll, ""Bonn Diary"," in Stories, Political Writings, and
Autobiographical Works, ed. Heinrich Böll and Martin Black, trans. Leila Vennevitz, 54-
62 (New York: Continuum, 2006), 58.
18 Lesley Stern, "Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things," Critical
Inquiry 28 (2001), 324.
19 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of
Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 21.
20 Foucault, Archaeology, 42.

21 Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in The Foucault Reader, 76-100

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 81.
22 Ibid., 85.

23 Ibid.

24 Marguerite Duras, "Othon, by Jean-Marie Straub," in Outside: Selected

Writings, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 156.
25 Ibid., 157.

26 Ibid., 156.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 157 (my italics).

29 Ibid., 155-156.

30 Jean-Marie Straub in Herzog, Kluge, Straub, eds. Wolfram Schütte and Peter
W. Jansen (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1976), 241.
31 Both Rhine and Moselle run also through the regions Alsace and Lorraine.

32 Originally a term referring to the Nazi-occupied territories in continental

Europe, the expression refers today to the system of the policing of immigrant flows into
the European Union. See e.g. Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., "Migration, Culture and
Representation (Special Issue: Fortress Europe)," Third Text, Vol. 20, No. 6 (November
2006).
33 Balibar, "Europe as Borderland," 193.
 133

34 The video is available online: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-

3238754652290051467.
35 Foucault, "Genealogy," 85.

36 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
37 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3.
38 Ibid., 166 (italics in the original text).

39 Ibid., 175.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, 89.

 134

CHAPTER FOUR:

THE RUINS

"Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe" is the only written commentary Arnold

Schoenberg added to his orchestral piece Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene

(1930). The laconic inscription is unusual for a composer who was known to incorporate

detailed stage directions into his scores, including instructions for choreography and

additional sound effects, in an attempt "to leave as little as possible to the new leaders of

the dramatic arts, the directors."1 His cinematographic scene remains in contrast to this,

un-imaginable (unvorstellbar) and exists only in the form of the accompanying music, as

Jean-Marie Straub points out in the introductory scene to the filmic adaptation

Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene"

(1972).

Outside and beyond all visual representation, captured only by musical

dissonances, Schoenberg gives expression to a "sense of fear, of looming danger and

catastrophe" that "far surpasses the measure of fear conceivable to the average middle-

class individual."2 Thus write Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler for whom

Schoenberg's aesthetic "silence" is intimately related to an epistemological crisis in

modern subjectivity: how to adequately represent the human subject in an age in which it

has become increasingly difficult for modern mankind to recognize and represent (to

himself and to others) the structures that determine its position in the world and its

relationship to others.

The impasse of representation in the age of modernity is often presented in the

form of an oppositional debate between modernism vs. realism.3 Epitomized by Adorno

and Eisler's highlighting of Schönberg's "non-representational" musical dissonances,

modernism is, broadly speaking, defined by techniques of abstraction and fragmentation

in its attempt to critically evoke the alienated structure of modern existence. Realism, on
 135

the other hand, thinks the mimetic quality of the image much stronger in its referential

relationship to an existing reality. Barton Byg has argued convincingly that in "calling

attention to the artificial devices by which film constructs meaning while at the same time

invoking its immediate relations to the reality of the world," Straub-Huillet's work

manages to "reconcile" precisely the opposition within the modernism vs. realism

debate.4 However, the correlation of modernist and realist practices in Straub-Huillet's

work is less determined by conciliatory harmony, than rather by violent confrontation.

This confrontational element presents a much greater problem to audio-visual media due

to their affinity to the real: the attempt to distance the signified as far from the referential

object as possible (a traditionally modernist technique of self-critical abstraction) comes

immediately in conflict with the medium's affinity to a documentary realism that

counteracts any attempts for abstraction. Straub-Huillet's deliberate use of vérité-

techniques complicate this in particular. The struggle between modernist aesthetics and

realist tendencies is, however, not only inherent to Straub-Huillet's specific language of

cinema, but epitomizes, instead, a central dilemma for all avant-garde practices: to

account at once for the necessities and taboos of representation.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche envisions this dilemma in terms of a

reciprocal unfolding. Every negation of the image, he states, must be expressed through

representation as that which escapes representation itself. This kind of negation leads to

an affirmation rather than to the total annihilation of representation. It acknowledges that

every representation contains elements of forgetting, elements that escape it. Nietzsche

describes this paradoxical relationship with the help of two figures: the Greek gods

Apollo and Dionysus. Whereas Apollo represents the appearance of the image, Dionysus

affirms its collapse: "we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which

ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. ... The scene, complete

with the action, was basically and originally thought of merely as a vision; the chorus is

the only 'reality' and generates the vision."5 As a figure of the real, the Dionysian chorus
 136

functions not simply to oppose or to negate the Apollonian world of images, but it also

gives birth to it. The image of ruination evoked here attests therefore to the fact that every

image is born from an innate state of collapse.

Images of ruins appear in Straub-Huillet's work both in form and content. First of

all, most of their films are based on fragmented original works of art (e.g. Schoenberg's

unfinished opera Moses and Aaron, Kafka's unfinished Amerika novel, and Cézanne's

uncompleted portraits). A provisional gesture determines, second, the multiple language-

versions that exist of "one and the same" Straub-Huillet film. Third, stemming from a

formal practice of quotation and recital, which dismantles and re-assembles the original

texts, Straub-Huillet's films are built on the ruins of original works of art. Images of ruins

play, in addition, not only a prominent part in the mise-en-scène of many Straub-Huillet

films, but are, in fact, filmed on original sites of ruination (e.g. the antique amphitheater

in Antigone, the Palatine Hill in Othon, and the anonymous ruins in the French

countryside in Too Early, Too Late and Lothringen!).

However, the figure of the ruin-image depends on more than merely the

fragmentary structure of the film-texts or ruins as pro-filmic referents. In its

cinematographic form, this image appears with unprecedented force in the cinema of the

immediate post-WWII era. However, as a philosophical and aesthetic figure, the ruin-

image is part of a larger genealogical trajectory in Western philosophy, art history, and

criticism, from Kant and Nietzsche to the Frankfurt School to the postmodern writings of

Jean-Francois Lyotard. The ruin-image has an equally important impact on the film

theorists that approach film after the Second World War from a so-called realist

perspective, namely Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin and, by extension, Gilles

Deleuze. By no means interchangeable, each of these thinkers shares, nevertheless, a

common tendency of formulating a critique of representation in light of an

epistemological crisis. The cinematographic ruin-image that appears in Straub-Huillet's

films derives from this genealogical groundwork.

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Straub-Huillet's ruin-image shares with many traditional and non-cinematic forms

of ruin figurations the following basic tendency: the epistemological crisis pictured in the

ruin-image generates a call for a new form of historical knowledge. This search for a new

historical subject can be traced back to the beginnings of film-historical ruin-images,

from early newsreel disaster footage to a postwar mise-en-scène of entire cityscapes in

rubble. Based on these origins, the ruin-image goes through a specific historical trajectory

that can be traced, paradigmatically, throughout Straub-Huillet's work: a) Walter

Benjamin's allegorical ruins are incorporated in the form of archival ruins into the films

Not Reconciled (1964/5) and Introduction to Schoenberg (1972); b) Moses and Aaron

(1974) addresses Theodor W. Adorno's "image-taboo" and counters it with the Bazinian

"image-fact;" c) Gilles Deleuze argues further that this "image-fact" solicits the spectator

as reader because it remains undecipherable; and d) Straub-Huillet's Fortini/Cani

exemplifies how the "unrepresentable" must be produced over and over via a profusion of

"invisible" ruin-images, as suggested by both Siegfried Kracauer and Jean-Francois

Lyotard.

Straub-Huillet's films incorporate, in other words, specific kinds of

cinematographic ruin-images whose function it is precisely to testify to the limits of

representation while maintaining, at the same time, an obligation to write, to show, and to

picture. Whereas the figure of the border functioned to highlight differences within the

text and thus deconstructed totalizing structures of power and identity, the ruins point to a

realm that defines an event not in relation to its other but "in relation to a wholly non-

opposable, other" as Jacques Derrida puts it.6 By assuming, thus, a representational

function that lies "outside" (i.e., not in opposition to) representation, the ruins obtain the

impossible function to formalize something that never existed in the first place and that

has, therefore, not (yet) been given form. The political dilemma – as well as task – is to

envision a future political body outside of traditional systems of thought and knowledge.

What I am, thus, calling the "ruin-image," is an image that attests to a phenomenological
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crisis in subjectivity that derives from the horror of being confronted not simply with

"one's own" non-existence, but rather with a form of "existence" to which concepts of

knowledge or memory do not apply. Inscribed into this horror-scenario lies, however, the

ruin-image's innermost ability to produce radical change: in attesting to the irretrievable

event of the Forgotten, one comes as close as possible to the invention of a form and

body of political action that has not been formalized yet, that is yet to come.

Modernism vs. Realism

As much as the debates between modernism and realism dominated the fields of

art and literary criticism, they equally defined the stakes of the film theoretical canon.7

On the basis of cinema's technological specificity, critics distinguished between so-called

formalist/structuralist theories, on the one hand, and realist tendencies, on the other.

Whereas the former understand film as a structural system that produces meaning through

signs and codes like a language, the latter is primarily concerned with the medium's

ontological relationship to a pro-filmic reality. But more important here: the

modernist/realist bifurcation also dissects the critical response to Straub-Huillet's work.

First, within the historical context of post-'68 European avant-garde cinema, the

couple's films became, as said, representative for a (political) modernist strain of

filmmaking. The fact that Straub-Huillet engaged predominantly with original works that
are largely considered part of the modernist art canon contributed further to associating

the couple with a modernist strain. And yet, as seen earlier, Straub-Huillet formative

years begin in the mid-fifties and their artistic practice is as much infused with techniques

that borrow both from prewar French realism and from postwar vérité documentary

realism. In effect, Straub-Huillet's work became central to critics like Deleuze or Daney

who were notably influenced by Bazinian realism.

Straub-Huillet's approach to realism is, perhaps, best described in reference to

their peculiar choice of using the exterior ruins of an antique amphitheater as a principal
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shooting location for their 1974-opera adaptation Moses and Aaron. The location of the

old Greek amphitheater of Alba Fucense in Sicily must be understood as a direct response

to earlier dramatic treatments of Schoenberg's opera, like the performance in the

Deutsche Oper Berlin that the couple attended in 1959. Straub-Huillet's wish to turn

Moses and Aaron into a film happened apparently in rejection of the stage version's

expressionist-symbolic overtones.8 This meant, among other things, to replace the

abstract, biblical place-names (the Burning Bush, the desert, etc.) with exterior locations

that provided a performance space that did not need to be altered.9

A number of factors made the specific location, the amphitheater of Alba

Fucense, ideal for Straub-Huillet's "realist" interpretation of Schoenberg's modernist

musical text. Aside from its "extraordinary acoustic," the amphitheater was protected

from wind or rain and far enough from the regular tourist paths.10 This was crucial for

the successful use of direct sound recordings, especially the live-recordings of the choir

and the soloists.11 "And why from the beginning had we wanted Italy?" Huillet asks

further. "Because Schoenberg was Viennese, his music eminently European, even if there

are constantly intuitions of an astonishing realism which one discovers in going to the

Orient ..., and so we wanted a European country which would be a bridge between

Europe and Asia/Africa."12 Straub-Huillet's realism goes here well beyond the
conventional parameters of a vérité filmmaking practice. For instance, their choice of

location is not only subject to technical requirements or spatial conveniences.

Demarcating the border between Africa/Asia and Europe, the Sicilian ruins

function as a spatial marker of a modernist-realist intercourse. The ruined location does

not simply add a realist interpretation to Schoenberg's work, but rather highlights specific

aspects of realism that are already an element of the original text. Inasmuch as the ruins

of the amphitheater are understood as the remains of the ancient, Eastern past of Western

civilization, they also figure as the realist roots in Schoenberg's musical modernist text.
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Straub-Huillet employ here a definition of realism they take directly from Brecht:

"to uncover the truth from under the debris of the prevailing view of things."13 Straub-

Huillet cite Franz Kafka's work as an example of such a strategy of realism. "Kafka is at

heart a Realist," they argue, "the first (and until now perhaps the only) writer of the so-

called industrial society. [...] He may not describe the industrial society, but he describes

people who suffer under conditions that are produced by the industrial society."14 In this

light one might assume that what compelled Straub-Huillet to adapt Schoenberg's work

was not only the formal abstractions in his compositions, but rather his work's oblique,

realist underpinnings. The amphitheater in Moses and Aaron foregrounds, in this respect,

the difficulties with which the musical and vocal performances have to struggle in their

encounter with the "hostile" conditions produced by the surrounding environment. A

modernist, abstract space would have smoothed out this struggle by mimicking – rather

than confronting – the musical structure of Schoenberg's dissonances. The overtly

quotidian location manages, in contrast, to produce a confrontation between the abstract

and the real without eradicating either paradigm. The documentary realism inscribed into

the scene maintains its distance from the "anti-illusionist" performance without

surrendering its own documentary quality. The critique of modernism projected in Moses

and Aaron derives thus not from opposing modernism, but rather from picturing anti-

illusionist principles in correlation and conflict with realist tendencies.

Allegorical Ruins

While dealing at the outset with the seventeenth-century baroque drama, Walter

Benjamin's Trauerspiel essay (1936) presents an implicit critique of contemporary

modernist art and literature; Weimar expressionism, in particular. Benjamin's critique

parallels Straub-Huillet's own critique of modernism not only because it pertains to the

very aesthetic period that produced Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron but much more

importantly, because it is equally structured around figurations of ruins. Expressionism,

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according to Benjamin resembles the Baroque drama of the seventeenth-century in that it

considers art as a form of "supreme reality" isolated from any social or historical

realm."15 Modernism reinforces, in other words, an ultimate separation between an

(already) alienated subject and the world in its concrete social and political conditions. In

doing so, any attempt of producing radical change in the world becomes futile. Cut off

from outer reality the subject lacks not only the ability but also the imagination to create

change. "Conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment," writes Benjamin, this

alienated mode of existence translates on the level of art and language into "the spirit of

allegory:

Evil as such … exists only in allegory, is nothing other than

allegory, and means something different from what it is. … It
means precisely the non-existence of what it presents. The absolute
vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers, are allegories. They
are not real, and that which they represent, they possess only in the
subjective view of melancholy. … By its allegorical form evil as
such reveals itself to be a subjective phenomenon.16

It is, in other words, the function of allegory to annihilate the connection between the

subject and the realm of history or objective reality. History, Benjamin explains further,

"does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible

decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm

of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things."17

In its allegorical fragmentation, Baroque art differs even from the seemingly

fragmentary, melancholic world-view of Romanticism. Both are informed by an

epistemological experience of not knowing, yet, in contrast to the Baroque, the Romantic

ruins imagine by no means a nihilistic universe. Knowledge exists, but it lies with God

alone and it is precisely the melancholic world-view and the notion of decay that function

as necessary prerequisites for man's final resurrection. Baroque drama, in contrast,

mimics a classical appreciation of ruins by trying to decode and reconstruct the ruins
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aesthetic and epistemological ideal. Yet, condemned to a melancholic gaze of decay,

Baroque art constructs the new instead as a ruin.

For Benjamin, allegorical ruins share the conditions of alienation that structure the

experience of modern(ist) subjectivity. Benjamin emphasizes this motive of alienation in

his essay "The Storyteller" (1936), where the epistemological crisis of the modern subject

takes place on the grounds of the historical ruins of the First World War.

Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from
the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in
communicable experience? ... And there is nothing remarkable
about that. For never has experience been contradicted more
thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic
experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare,
moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to
school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in
a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the
clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive
torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.18

Benjamin presents the horror, here, not directly as a result of the atrocities of war, but

stresses rather the social and economic fabric that conditioned the war as the basis for

modern man's epistemological breakdown: on the ruins of the battlefield, the modern

subject encounters a world that is no longer known and recognizable to him.

Quite crucially, Benjamin turns here the allegorical function of ruins inside out.

As allegories of warfare the ruins are no longer simply empty ciphers, but also direct

expression of the socio-economic conditions in modern capitalist society. In Benjamin's

writing, the ruins become, thus, more than merely empty or abstract expressions for a

state of alienation. Since the ruins are the material residues of industrial warfare, they

maintain a concrete material relationship to the conditions in the physical world that is

represented in this image. Benjamin's ruin-allegory mimics, in this regard, the specific

nature of the cinematographic ruin-image: this image inherits, on the one hand, the

allegorical structure of the Baroque melancholic worldview, albeit with a twist: God is

replaced with the authority of modern mass technology. But since it is a fragment of
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modern industrial mass technology in its own right, the cinematographic ruins gain, on

the other hand, a much more ambiguous and potentially even redemptive function.19

Moses and Aaron (1974) stages, as said earlier, abstract performances within a

field of ruins that maintains concrete aspects of a documentary realism. This encounter

between modernist historionic and realist quotidian principles is, however, not subject to

a hierarchy of authenticity. In fact, both aspects maintain an equal quality of significance

or truthfulness. The epistemological crisis derives precisely from this point of

indeterminacy: the disorientation of the ruins emphasizes that traditional notions of

reality and fiction no longer apply in a modern construction of objective reality and

history.

Both Introduction to Schoenberg and Not Reconciled epitomize this phenomenon

by incorporating cinematographic ruin-images that are explicitly coded as archival

newsreel footage (i.e., as doubly reproduced images). In Introduction to Schoenberg

Straub-Huillet seem to follow, at first, Adorno and Eisler's suggestion to read

Schoenberg's composition as part of an uncanny historical foresight. The short film

focuses on two letters, written by Schoenberg in the early 1920s to his long-term friend

and former collaborator, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Schoenberg accuses Kandinksy

of being a political opportunist and anti-Semite and rejects his offer of further

professional collaboration. The letters to Kandinsky mark a decisive shift in Schoenberg's

understanding of himself as an artist and in his personal life. His reconversion to Judaism

and his exile to the U.S. are mirrored by his words that are filled with doubts about a

successful Jewish integration into German (even, European) society and by his attentive

analysis of the political consequences of an increasing National Socialism in Germany.

His political insight and disillusionment are not coincidentally formed under the

impression that it is, among all people, his yearlong professional ally Kandinsky, who is

the author of the anti-Jewish remarks. Schoenberg's artistic affinities are, in other words,

fundamentally challenged by political realities. In consequence, Schoenberg decides not

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only to sever all ties to Kandinsky, but he is no longer convinced that artistic form and

political action share any common grounds. From now on, Schoenberg argues for "a total

separation" between arts and politics.20

Schoenberg's aforementioned "silence," that is, his refusal to accompany his

musical score with any figural illustrations or directions must be understood in this

context. Straub-Huillet's adaptation of Accompaniment suggests this in the following

way: the reading of the letters becomes the main form of dramatic action in the film. In

two long segments, two men, the Straub-Huillet collaborators Günter Peter Straschek and

Peter Nestler read selected passages from the letters. These scenes are preceded by a

number of photographs and paintings that all depict Schoenberg during various stages of

his life. Some of them self-portraits, the paintings are expressions of Schoenberg's own

intensive engagement with the pictorial arts, some during a period of intense

collaboration with Kandinsky in Berlin.

Schoenberg's musical score sets in only in the second half of the film. But once

again, Straub-Huillet accompany the musical score with another overflow of visual and

pictorial imagery: a series of archival images that depict, among others, the bombing of

Northern Vietnamese rice fields, a field of ruins in the making, shown from the aerial

perspective of the plane. Straub-Huillet undercut, so to say, Schoenberg's (as well as

Adorno and Eisler's) proscription of images with an excess of mise-en-scène and, more

importantly, with film images that are doubly encoded as cinematographic images (a film

in the film). The newsreel footage adds to Schoenberg's modernist abstraction the

element of an overt documentary "realism." But within the context of the filmic structure,

the fragmentary views of documentary images mimic also the dissonances in

Schoenberg's composition. These images resemble Benjamin's allegorical ruins insofar as

they pretend, on the one hand, to depict the real, while remaining, on the other hand,

devoid of any specific context. In this regard, an opposition between modernist

abstraction and realist convention (or authenticity) does not apply to these ruin-images.
 145

Despite their distinct structure and material quality, both Schoenberg's "non-

representational" musical structure and Straub-Huillet's visual excess in the newsreel

footage produce images that share the gravity of a conceptual meltdown, a sense of loss

and disintegration. Thus, while the film does not offer an overt causal link between

Schoenberg's historical foresight of the Second World War and the Vietnam War, it

presents both "images" side by side as different kinds of ciphers of twentieth-century

industrial warfare. By themselves, each image remains fragmentary, has no more than a

conventional, if not, cliché meaning. But in relation (or collaboration), they begin to

indicate that they belong to a common set of material conditions.

Another scene in the film emphasizes this and functions, at the same time, as an

explicit counter-image to the allegorical formation of the archival ruins. Huillet is filmed,

sitting in the living room of the couple's apartment in Rome. Looking straight into the

camera, she recites a passage from Brecht's talk to the 1935 Paris Congress of

Intellectuals Against Fascism. It is futile to be against fascism, Huillet quotes Brecht, if

one is not at the same time against capitalism. By disclosing the socio-economic

organization as an essential aspect of the Nazi regime, Straub-Huillet (and Brecht)

demystify the Nazi atrocities as an abstract form of evil. The horror that eludes

representation (the mass murder of millions and the attempted total annihilation of the

Jews) is here explicitly not conveyed by way of an allegorical spectacle, e.g. a newsreel

or documentary image, but by a "non-representational" form of speaking directly into the

camera. By identifying the words she speaks explicitly as the words of Brecht, Huillet

removes the image she produces further from any form of illusionist performance.

Significant is, furthermore, what she says. By defining fascism in its concrete socio-

economic affinities to a capitalist system she evokes fascism in its specific material,

socio-economic structures and capital interests, rather than as an allegory of evil.

A critique of allegorical ruin-images occurs also in the earlier Not Reconciled

(1964), Straub-Huillet's second short film, but here the critique is stronger oriented
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toward revealing that, in the encounter with the rest of the film, it becomes impossible to

determine what determines an authentic and what determines a fake image. Not

Reconciled is based on Heinrich Böll's postwar novel Billiards at Half-past Nine (1959)

which follows the story of a German bourgeois family from 1910 to the early 1960s.21

The film reshuffles the novel's narrative events into an extremely non-linear plot

structure. The insertion of archival newsreel images not only adds to the narrative

confusion but also destroys any form of historical continuity. "Far from being a puzzle,"

Straub explains, "Not Reconciled is better described as a 'lacunary film'."22 Thus, instead

of reconstructing a historical narrative in the form of a linear cause-effect structure,

history is presented as a series of fragmentary situations, presented out of order.

The newsreel footage appears during a narrative timeframe that occurs shortly

before the outbreak of the First World War. Heinrich Fähmel, the patriarch of the family,

has just won his first competition as an architect. He is commissioned to design the new

Abbey of St. Anthony, a building with which he establishes himself professionally and

socially in the city of Cologne. "The unforeseen struck me hard," Heinrich proclaims in

the voice-over. His words are followed by ten shots depicting what are apparently the

remains of a massive church or monastery estate after heavy bombardment. These are

newsreel images of the ruins of Monte Cassino, a place in Italy where in 1944 one of the

most deadly and violent confrontations between allied and German troupes during the

Second World War took place. Following the Monte Cassino footage, a series of archival

images depict the mobilization of soldiers during the time of the First World War. Thus,

the entire newsreel sequence bridges geographical as well as temporal boundaries: from

the Second to the First World War, from Germany to Italy. In doing so, Heinrich's remark

that the unforeseen struck him hard obtains two distinct meanings. His remark pertains,

on the one hand, to the outbreak of the First World War and functions, on the other hand,

as a narrative flash-forward to an incident that occurs later in the story: during the Second

World War, Heinrich's son Robert works as a demolition expert for the German army.
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Eventually he blows up the abbey his father had build, as an act of "protest against the

hypocrisy which preserved the Cathedral in Cologne [...] from bombs while thousands

were killed." Directed, at the outset, against the hidden interests that govern decisions in

modern warfare, Robert's destructive act attacks also the economic foundations on which

his family's name and fortune is built on.

Robert's act of demolition seeks to reveal, in a sense, the genealogical connections

(between fascism and capitalism; between culture and politics) that are raised by Huillet's

Brecht-quotation in Introduction to Schoenberg. The act of ruination is an attempt to

destroy the material base that helped to construct and sustain both the familial and

national patrimony. It is, however, an act of terrorism that comes too late, since the

catastrophe has already happened. It resembles allegory, because it is an empty gesture,

without any real effects, a "frustration of violence," as Straub calls "the theme" that runs

through the history of the German people "who had muffed their 1848 revolution, who

had not succeeded in freeing themselves from Fascism."23 This theme of revolt and

frustration is also established in the inter-textual insertion of the newsreel footage.

Similar to Introduction to Schoenberg, the newsreel clips in Not Reconciled introduce an

element of allegorical excess into the film, due to their material codification as

documentary images. As fragmentary views from different historical times and contexts,

these images fail to fabricate a linear causal structure of either narrative or historical

continuity.

The archival footage's alien existence in the film is further highlighted by Straub-

Huillet's specific use of rear projection technology. During the last shot of the Monte

Cassino segment, two fictional characters are presented in the foregrounds, while a shot

of the newsreel footage appears in a rear-projection in the background. Filmed on crisp,

high-contrast b/w film stock, the figures of the actors in the front form a sharp outline

against the washed-out gray of the rear-projected newsreel footage, thus, emphasizing the

incompatibility and construction of this scene. What is important here, is that any clear
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notion of past and present, and more importantly, of "real" and "fake" collapses at this

point. As an archival image the ruin footage claims a certain degree of historical truth and

reality. However, presented in the form of a rear-projected backdrop, this marker of

authenticity loses reliability. In its stead, the histrionic performance that occurs in front of

this backdrop assumes its own form of authenticity, based on its real-time performance

and because it is a direct quotation from Böll's text. In fact, both images – the narrative

and the newsreel footage – are simultaneously inscribed with markers of documentary

realism and with formal abstraction. These images resemble, in fact, Bazin's "fact-image"

not so much because they collapse notions of fiction and authenticity, but rather because

they render visible that these two paradigms no longer apply. The ruins, as figurations,

bring out this "power of the false," as Deleuze calls the movement of "continually passing

the frontier between the real and the fictional," a phenomenon he detects in particular in

the (European) cinema of the post-WWII aftermath.24

The Phenomenology of the Cinematographic Ruin-Image

Postwar cinema depicts this epistemological crisis, more specifically, in terms of

a perceptual breakdown that finds a direct form of expression in the cinematographic

ruin-image. Deleuze attests to this perceptual breakdown "a purely optical [...] seeing

function" that produces "at once fantasy and report, criticism and compassion."25

Classical categories such as fact and fiction, fragmentary view or the whole truth exist

side-by-side in an image that is "authored" by the confused vision of a stranded witness,

instead of being directed by the point of view of a subject who controls the gaze and the

action.

A purely optical and sound situation does not extend into action
[...]. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something
intolerable and unbearable. Not a brutality as nervous aggression,
[nor] is it a matter of scenes of terror, although there are sometimes
corpses or blood. It is a matter of something too powerful, or too
unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth
outstrips our sensory-motor capacities.26
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Indeed, both the archival ruins of Monte Cassino and the aerial view onto the

carpet-bombing of Northern Vietnamese rice fields are informed by such a confused

vision. This is a form of documenting or witnessing gaze in which the act of looking has

lost direction, appears de-centered, out of control. "What tends to collapse, or at least to

lose its position," especially in the cinema after the Second World War, "is the sensory-

motor schema which constitutes the action-image of the old cinema."27 In contrast to the

action-oriented image in classical cinema, postwar modern cinema displays a

proliferation of images that attest to the fact that "we no longer know how to react to, in

spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These [are] 'any spaces whatever,'

deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste grounds, cities in the course of

demolition or reconstruction."28

Profilmic referents of ruins alone cannot project this specific phenomenology of

the cinematographic ruin-image. A specific cinematographic performance is, in addition,

necessary in order to produce the epistemological crisis, pictured above by Walter

Benjamin, as a cinematic experience, as exemplified by Straub-Huillet's use of archival

newsreel footage. Such a spectacle has its roots in the history of newsreel

cinematography, from the turn of the century on, to documentations of the Second World

War and its aftermath. On the basis of this tradition, the ruin-image as the spectacle of an

epistemological breakdown enters Straub-Huillet's films in the early sixties.

Whereas classical ruins embody the effect of a prolonged process of decay, the

modern ruin-image is usually the product of a sudden and relatively recent blow of

destruction. In fact, what ruins of mass destruction share with cinematographic or

photographic images is the motif of a sudden blow or shock, an act of chance and

contingency. "Photography and film," Mary Ann Doane writes in reference to Benjamin,

"have a special relation to shock and, in the case of film, a potentially redemptive one.

The snapping of the camera shares with other modern technologies the drive to condense

time, the aspiration of instantaneity."29 Produced at a singular moment in time, both the
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ruins of mass destruction and the cinematographic image provide records of an

aftermath, rather than a glimpse of the event itself. Alienated from their original

circumstances, both the ruins and the cinematographic image survive in a state of

fragmentation and, most of all, both are industrial products of mass technology. As such,

they are not only man-made, but they remind the viewer of the impact of human progress

in the age of modernity, including its negative, collateral, or uncontrollable effects. Thus,

even if modern ruins have their origins in natural disasters, it is rather common for a

discussion afterward to focus on the human, if not humanitarian, aspects of the disaster.30

The archival footage that captures the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco

earthquake depicts, accordingly, not so much an image of nature's power gone awry, than

rather its effect on a modern, urban topography. As one of the first filmic representations

of ruin-images, this film footage depicts, for the most part, the skeletal remains of entire

city blocks. In short, the central theme of the San Francisco earthquake footage is to attest

to the magnitude of urban destruction, a sight that exceeds, evidently, the confinements of

the filmic frame. For this very reason, the film footage contains an unusual amount of

mobile framing for a time in which elaborate camera movements were, due to technical

limitations, extremely rare in the cinema.

The few exceptions of mobile images during the early cinema period are, in

contrast, types of films structured explicitly around the mimetic experience of "traveling

through a landscape," usually by train (e.g. travelogue pictures or Hale's tours). At first

glance, "rubble films," especially those produced in the aftermath of the Second World

War, pick up on this "traveling" motive of early travel films, since they often introduce

the ruins via a point of view (taken out of a car, train, or airplane) of a specific character

who is explicitly connoted as a foreigner (a foreign journalist or member of the allied

forces, a refugee, a returning soldier or prisoner, etc.). Yet, in sharp contrast to the

organized view onto landscapes that structures Hale's tours or travelogues, postwar

rubble films depict a landscape that resembles a disorganized, alien territory.

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The unfamiliarity of the "ruin-image" derives from a disorienting view that is

usually produced by a series of long-take panning or tracking shots (often taken from a

driving vehicle) that move alongside or across the vast sites of destruction. This kind of a

slowly and continuously moving camera that seems to embody the gaze of a reporting

eye or witness on the scene (often the scene of a violent or criminal aftermath) designates

the most fundamental formal aspect of the cinematic ruin-image and distinguishes it

markedly from all other visual representations of ruins. Ruin-image are, furthermore,

often filmed from low or high angles in an attempt to capture as much as possible of the

magnitude of destruction. Another important element is scanning the scenery with the

help of circular movements, sometimes circumscribing complete 360-degree pans. It

appears, in fact, as if the profilmic situation itself, e.g., the ruinous aftermath of the San

Francisco earthquake, compels the camera to continuously track alongside or circle

around, in order to capture the entire scope of destruction. The cinematographer, as

Siegfried Kracauer once put it, is compelled "to do what his camera permits him to do

better than" any other medium; that is to say: to respond to a scenery that defies, by way

of its expansive nature, to be captured within an image, to be framed within a view.31

Cinematographic ruin-images inherit, in this regard, something from the sublime

ruins of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a mind-blowing intensity, something

that affects the viewer, but which exceeds yet his comprehensive faculties.32 These

images differ, however, from the organized picturesque view of British romantic ruins,

since the movement inscribed into the cinematic ruin-image counteracts the act of

framing at every point, replacing it with an image of utter disorientation. This impulse of

cinematographic motion in response to a site of rubble is so forceful that it can even

inhabit the medium of still photography, as suggested in the following description of the

documentary efforts undertaken in post-Atomic Nagasaki. While cinematographers

"simply panned and panned, often in complete circles, [...] still photographers stitched

their frames together into atomic 'cinemascope'," writes Marcus Nornes.33

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Unable to focus their lenses at a singular object, both photographers and

cinematographers appear to be entrapped within an endless spin that emphasizes nothing

else but that which has become impossible: to produce a, that is, any view of the ruins. In

the midst of an atomic wasteland, it has become impossible to frame an image, which

means, to give it perspective and meaning. In its vastness, the magnitude of ruination, the

catastrophe in its full scope, can neither be grasped nor captured, because large parts of

the rubble lie always beyond and outside of the frame. Hence, the perpetual tracking and

panning of the camera. Moreover, since everything is reduced to a more or less

indiscernible field of rubble, the cameraman/viewer is given no means to orient himself.

The only thing rendered visible is therefore the failure itself to focus the gaze, thus, to

grasp, control, and respond to the situation. It appears, thus, as if the ruins have taken

control over the image, rather than the other way around. However, despite of depicting a

panorama of utter disorientation, the ruin-image remains anchored in a specific urban

topography with unmistakable roots in a contemporary historical and social setting. The

horror produced by the ruins derives partially from the realization that a survivor or

returnee is no longer able to recognize his former home or neighborhood. The subject's

own social space is, thus, coded as an undifferentiated, alien landscape – a paradox that

gives the ruin-images their uncanny dimension.

This image appears in unprecedented numbers in the aftermath of the Second

World War as many postwar filmmakers incorporate the war rubble into their filmic

mise-en-scène. Moreover, ruin-images are no longer mainly part of newsreel journalism

or actuality footage. Aided by new technological innovations that facilitated the shooting

on (exterior) locations (e.g. faster film stock, lighter camera equipment, and soon after:

new sound recording technologies), they appear increasingly in narrative fiction films as

well as feature-length documentary films, especially in Europe and Japan. The

phenomenon is spearheaded by Italian neo-realism. "The Italian camera retains

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something of the human quality of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera," writes the

French critic André Bazin in 1948.34

A projection of hand and eye, almost a living part of the operator,

instantly in tune with his awareness. [...] Traveling and panning
shots do not have the same god-like character that the Hollywood
camera crane has bestowed on them. Everything is shot from eye-
level or from a concrete point of view, such as a roof top or
window.35

Bazin attests to the documentary or quotidian perspective that inscribes these images with

a new form of perceptual experience: the spectator's view is framed and limited, yet

assumes the role of a witness. Bazin defines this quotidian view explicitly in terms of a

moving camera. In fact, Bazin proposes a paradoxical tension between the mobile frame

and the "concrete" point of view established by the window frame. The Bazinian window

depicts, in this respect, a world in constant transition. This destabilizes a traditional

organization of the gaze. The viewer is unable to gain aesthetic control of the objects

depicted in the frame. Bazin describes this peculiar form of de-framing explicitly in terms

of a severe perceptual and epistemological crisis, for instance in this scene from Alberto

Lattuada's Il Bandito (1948), in which "a prisoner, returning from Germany, finds his

house in ruins:"

The camera shows us the man's face. Then, following the

movement of his eyes, it travels through a 360-degree turn which
gives us the whole spectacle. … The speed of the panning shot …
starts with a long slide, then it comes almost to a halt, slowly
studies the burned and shattered walls with the same rhythm of the
man's watching eye, as if directly impelled by his concentration. …
During the traveling shot we become identified with him to the
point of feeling surprised when … we return to his face with its
expression of utter horror.36

In contrast to the mode of mobile de-framing that occurred in the newsreel or

documentary footage, the inability to control the gaze is, here, explicitly staged in regard

to a fictional character's look. The man's point of view disintegrates in the course of the

continuous traveling shot. Instead of composing the character's point of view

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conventionally, that is, in two separate shots (a point-glance and a point-object shot), the

point of view shot falls within one singular shot. Starting out from the original point-

glance perspective of the man looking into the offscreen space behind the camera, the

shot transforms temporarily into a point-object shot (depicting the object being looked-at:

the house in ruins) only to return in the end into the original point-glance position.

Lattuada's violation of classical cinematic convention causes two disturbances: first, it

collapses the subject/object formation in this scene, since the man transforms instantly

from looking subject (controller of the gaze) to object being looked at; second, while

turning its gaze onto the man, the image grants the ruins control of the gaze. The point-

of-view belongs temporarily to the ruined facade, as if the ruins are returning the gaze

onto the character who is now the object of perception. These images render a stable

phenomenological center as indiscernible.

Thus, the horror Bazin identifies in Lattuada's scene is not produced by the ruined

structure of the house alone nor is it affected by the actor's facial expression at the end of

the shot. Horror results rather from the instantaneous, unpredictable experience of being

confined to the state of a perpetual looking situation that remains, however, unresolved.

This reminds of the melancholic view that was earlier described in regard to the Baroque

drama and to twentieth-century modernism. Indeed, as Ian Aitken has pointed out,

Bazin's critical universe is inflected by a strange dichotomy of melancholia and

materialism. "The belief that humanity was profoundly marked by an existential

condition of transient mortality, and was also oppressed within modernity, led Bazin, to

adopt what was, at one level, a bleak conception of the human condition."37 Bazin's neo-

realist image draws its melancholic mood strictly from the material conditions it

encounters at an actual, profilmic scene. But unable to decipher, i.e., to frame, and thus to

ultimately make sense of the ruinous environment, the subject perceives "his own" world

(his home) as a foreign territory, an "any-space-whatever." The horror derives, in other

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words, from a fractured epistemological condition that circulates insoluble in-between

unrecognizability and the recognizable.

Yet, out of the ruins Bazin proposes the birth of an entirely new form of

knowledge and subjectivity, one that replaces the traditional human subject (e.g. the

subject of "psychological realism" of the 19th-century novel or the "spiritual" subject of

post-renaissance painting) with a "human quality" produced by the technological

apparatus. Viewed through the camera lens (objectif), a new subject occupies a new

world. Rendered by way of its objective faculties, the cinematic medium is able "to give

expression to this world both concretely and in its essence," he writes.38 This is a pre-

Hegelian world, the world of early Romanticism, before the separation between a human

(i.e. social, historical) world and the world of nature. But instead of returning man to

nature, Bazin proposes a world in which nature and the social have become

indistinguishable. "For the same reason," he explains, "the actors will take care never to

dissociate their performance from the decor or from the performance of their fellow

actors. Man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride of place should be

given a priori."39 Bazin calls this new image, the "image-fact." And this image-fact

indicates a groundbreaking shift in the theory of cinematic representation: as real and

fantasy have become indiscernible, a building is able to look (back) at a viewer and

motion can be used as a framing device. As image becomes fact and fact image, the

image exists no longer simply in reference to an outside reality (e.g. in an indexical

relationship). The image becomes, rather, its own presentation of objective reality. Like

Bazin's photographic image, the film image "is the object itself;" it shares the ontology of

"the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model."40

Political Action after Auschwitz

In the historical climate after the systematic attempt to annihilate not only

millions of individuals but entire collective subjects, philosophical and aesthetic inquiries
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about the structure and purpose of modern subjectivity gained new momentum. If the

Lisbon earthquake of 1755 "revealed how remote the world is from humans," writes

Susan Neiman, "Auschwitz revealed the remoteness of humans from themselves."41 One

of the most important critics to discuss representation in this context was without a doubt

critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, culminating in his rigorous dictum: "to write poetry

after Auschwitz is barbaric."42 Often misunderstood as an ethical imperative, Adorno's

image-taboo is not a plea for reverence or good taste, but simply states the fact of what

constitutes, according to him, fundamental conditions in modern society and culture after

the Second World War. After the industrially-planned and executed extermination of

millions marked the ultimate objectification and commodification of human experience,

Adorno writes, not only politics, but art and culture alike are "faced with the final stage

of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. [...] Neutralized and ready-made," Adorno

concludes, "traditional culture has become worthless today."43 After the catastrophe,

Adorno considers a new form of subjectivity inconceivable:

For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in

its present state consists so far only in the dissolution of the
subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience
necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically
condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The
subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated
to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the
form of subjectivity itself.44

In direct opposition to Bazin's optimistic endeavor of molding an entirely new

form of subjectivity out of the "objective" properties of the cinematic medium, Adorno's

prospects for a postwar individual as well as collective subject remain irredeemable.

Since every single aspect of modern life exists in reified form, no possibilities remains to

even envision and formulate radical political change, let alone to successfully organize

and achieve it. Adorno's only solution is what critics of modernism, like Benjamin and

Lukacs rejected as the subject's ultimate alienation from all social functions and practices.

Both theorists considered this solution as problematic because it seems to render

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automatically all forms of political resistance as ineffective. This points to the crux of the

relationship between politics and aesthetics: the separation between art and politics helps

not only to rescue art from being co-opted by dominant political structures; but politics

requires an aesthetic and representational framework if it wants to address the masses and

induce political action.

The failure of producing a successful model of collective action resembles the

missing audience in Avant-garde cinema, as Deleuze has pointed out: "The people no

longer exist, or not yet ... the people are missing,"45 he identifies a central problem for a

modern, political cinema that is "constructed on the ruins of the sensory-motor schema or

of the action image."46 Deleuze's words provide a link between film aesthetics and film

as a social practice. In turn, the absence of acting bodies on-screen illustrates also the

disappearance of the people in the world. Following this, political cinema after the

Second World War faces the problem: how to represent a people that is missing, while

contributing, simultaneously, "to the invention of a people," the formation of a (political)

collective body whose shape is yet unknown.47 Moses and Aaron emphasizes this

dilemma by developing the postwar ruin-image further. The film's ruin-images attest not

only to the collapse of a stable subject formation, but they produce, in addition, a ruinous

view vis-à-vis a landscape that is no longer filled with actual ruins. Devoid of an actual

looking-subject and ruin-object, Straub-Huillet's films give, paradoxically, rise to a view

that pictures the world as a field of ruins.48

In the original, unfinished operatic text of Moses and Aaron, Schoenberg

discusses the separation between arts and politics via the figure of the two biblical

brothers: Moses, who insists on the unrepresentability of God's word, and his brother

Aaron, who transmits the divine message to the people in emblematic pictures and

language. Schoenberg's opera, Richard Begam has suggested, participates "in the broader

challenge modernism mounted against a mimesis" during a time when the first signs of a

fascist cooption of imagery "had begun to assume negative, even nightmarish, political
 158

implications."49 However, Begam argues, Schoenberg does not completely subscribe to

Moses's rigorous proscription of images, for he knows that in order to form a political

body, that is, to free the Jewish people from oppression and slavery, the efficacy of

political rhetoric is indispensible: "Moses’s allegiance to Jewish law and thought is

admirable, but his obsession with doctrinal purity is ultimately destructive, a point

Schoenberg emphasizes not only in his drama but also in his political writings."50 Thus,

even though Schoenberg argued repeatedly for the separation of arts and politics, in

Moses and Aaron he recognizes the intricate kinship between them by going back and

forth between the affirmation and the proscription of representational strategies. The

question is, then, not if but how and where to find adequate forms of representation at a

time in which every image is an intrinsic part of the dominant production process and, as

such, prefigured, already known. The difficulty of imagining a new people is intimately

related to this difficulty of inventing a "minor language," to borrow another term from

Deleuze, "the impossibility of writing differently."51

Similar to Introduction to Schoenberg, Straub-Huillet confront the ruinous

structure of Schoenberg's musical modernism in Moses and Aaron with the ruin-images

of cinematic documentary realism. Yet this time, the ruin-image emerges from the pro-

filmic, exterior shooting location itself. The two filmmakers, Barton Byg points out,

"have consistently stressed that each of their films begins with a place, a location, and is

built from there."52 Based on a remark by the French director Jean Renoir, Straub-Huillet

define "film" alternatively as "the encounter with a place, theater, and life."53 The crucial

aspect of "filming" occurs, in other words, in those moments in which the cinematic

medium encounters a pro-filmic environment (place) that is itself ambiguously defined:

as dramatic/histrionic space at which a rehearsed and planned-out performance takes

place (theater) and as an unaltered, "artless" quotidian scenery (life). However, as seen in

regard to the "ruin-image," what matters is to a great extent how the cinematic apparatus

engages with and performs during its encounter with a particular pro-filmic scene.
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Moses and Aaron, Barton Byg argues, performs the separation between spectacle

and image-taboo by distinguishing clearly between two kinds of cinematographic space:

Aaron and the Jewish people (represented by the choir) are exclusively shown within the

interior walls of the amphitheater, the spatial signifier of the historical and dramatic

narrative. The character of Moses embodies, in contrast, two performance styles that defy

the dramatic/operatic spectacle: first, Moses does not sing, but only "speaks" in a

recitative chant, Sprechgesang. Second, his performances are captured by mostly

cinematographic techniques of expression, which means, the camera frees itself from the

theatrical/historical space of the amphitheater (i.e. from Aaron and the people-choir) in

order to expresses: "the unrepresentable God, the idea of freedom, the negation of reality,

otherness. The ultimate expression of this freedom occurs in the film when the cinematic

apparatus leaves the realm of narrative representations to suggest something beyond

them."54 This happens, for instance, when the camera "escapes" the space of the

amphitheater and scans the mountains that surround the location in long panning

movements or when "the destruction of the Golden Calf [...] is achieved by the fade to

white offered only by cinematic technique."55 Byg distinguishes here between images he

defines as "purely" cinematic techniques (e.g. the black or white screen, the sweeping pan

shots) and film-images with a "purely" representational function, in this case the

recording of the dramatic spectacle that unfolds in the amphitheater. Byg associates the

former technique with the unrepresentable, and the latter with the naturalist or realist

spectacle of conventional drama and cinema.

Straub-Huillet's usage of the above mentioned techniques is, however, much less

formalized and clear-cut as Byg assumes. Moreover, Byg treats these images as purely

formal categories, which gives the meaning of these images an almost eternal value. But

techniques like the long-take tracking shot or the insertion of black leader were, already

in the mid-seventies, cinematic clichés, i.e. standard techniques within the formal canon

of avant-garde cinema. Besides, even though produced by "purely" cinematographic

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techniques, the long-take pan shot, the insertion of black leader, or the fade-to-white,

each one constitutes, in the end, a cinematographic image. Not even a Straub-Huillet

film, Gertrud Koch writes in this regard, can escape the paradox "that even in their most

reduced form, figural signs constitute a form of narration and, in doing so, play a part in

the figuration (Verbildlichung) of the non-figural."56In effect, argues Koch, Moses and

Aaron contains images that counteract their initial "anti-representational" function.

Koch cites as examples two pan shots across the river Nile, taken from the

Egyptian riverbank. This is the only image in the film in which dramatic action does not

coincide with the pro-filmic location. The voices of the choir (singing on location in the

amphitheater) are heard off-screen, while the camera films on location in Egypt. The two

pan shots across the river undermine, according to Koch, the Nile's initial figurative

representation; in the biblical text Aaron represented the Nile by using water in a jar.

"The unreal beauty of the long take shots of the real Nile," in Straub-Huillet's Moses and

Aaron, writes Koch, "evoke instead not only an expression of the sublime, but they also

collapse, within one image, a vision of the Promised Land [...] with the [biblical]

Pharaoh's Nile."57 This means, on the one hand, Straub-Huillet adhere to the image-

taboo, since the Nile, viewed from the Egyptian side, is not the Promised Land. But, on

the other hand, the scene allows a utopian image to materialize: the Promised Land in all

its political-biographical, Zionist connotations of pure nature, as Koch argues.

Koch's critique against Straub-Huillet's Moses and Aaron means in sum: despite

the filmmakers' alleged goal to create images without any presupposed meaning, they

create, inadvertently, images that contain a surplus of aesthetic and political rhetoric.

Responsible for this failure is, according to Koch, a Bazinian existentialist presence

within Straub-Huillet's work that seems to counteract (or undermine) the couple's

modernist tendencies of minimalist reduction and Brechtian distanciation. Koch speaks,

in this regard, of Straub-Huillet's "fantastical materialism" (echoing Adorno, who defined

Kracauer as a "fantastical realist;" wunderlicher Realist).58

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What Koch defines as unintentional ambiguity is, however, in contrast a

deliberate factor in Straub-Huillet's adaptation process and serves precisely the function

to articulate the filmmakers' own critique of representation. Straub-Huillet's commitment

to the image-taboo, that is, their anti-illusionist techniques, derives, as said, from their

treatment of the original material as text. Schoenberg's score provides the script (for

words, music, and narrative action) and determines the editing process: "The text

receives, in this regard, the status of being its own object [Gegenstand] in the film," as

Koch describes.59

In order to achieve this transformation, Straub-Huillet confront the original

material (the other text) with the specific temporal and topographical conditions of a

place and time. In doing so, they confront the "timeless presence" of the original text with

a concrete situation of contingency and singularity. One of theses moments is inscribed

into the final film-text. Straub-Huillet highlight this cinematographic moment, especially

when using techniques like the panning movement, the long take, or the insertion of black

leader. The significance lies here in the mode of inscription, a practice of cinematic

writing, not in the formal qualities of the finished product. This is, then, not about the

failure or the successful achievement of "representing the unrepresentable" with the

means of the cinema. The unrepresentable is rather an intrinsic element that evades and

engenders the dissemination of images in Moses and Aaron including its panoramic

spectacles. Structured around cinematic inscriptions of ruins, Moses and Aaron

exemplifies how Straub-Huillet compose their films in order to give an expression to the

fact that every production of an image grows out of what constitutes the ultimate effect of

writing (or filming): to produce something that prevents being captured in an image.

Straub-Huillet's filmmaking practice is grounded in this contradictory mode of

expression: the creation of a scene through an overabundance of writing and seeing, an

act that is yet constantly defined by its own collapse and limitations. The camera

encounters the ruins as objects present at the pro-filmic scene. In this case, the antique
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ruins represent not the remainders of a sudden blow, as in the case of war rubble, but

rather the physical markers of a prolonged and slow process of decay. Byg is insofar

correct to link this specific architectural site of ruination to the historical sphere, since the

ruined structure provides here, indeed, a visible recording or inscription of time passing.

The first shot filmed on location in the amphitheater depicts Moses in a high-

angle close-up. Taken slightly from behind his left-side shoulder, his face is turned away

from the camera, directed towards the left frame side. Moses speaks to God, who he

addresses off-frame. The shot is held still for about four minutes until the camera begins

to crane up diagonally to the left, following the direction of Moses's POV. Thus, partially

impelled by Moses's concentration, Moses is transformed from object to partial-subject.

Moreover, the movement connects the character with the environment around him, which

reminds instantly of the scene Bazin described in Lattuada's film. Slowly the camera

tracks across the outer limits of the theater ruins, but moving further up, leaves the

ancient stones behind and first tracks then pans across a row of stone formations across

the trees and the vegetation that is part of the surrounding mountains. Engaging in a full

circular movement, the shot captures in addition the sky behind the mountains, until it

comes to rest at a view that depicts two mountaintops that appear further in the distance.

The ten-minute shot ends with an immobile view in this position.

Inscribed within one continuous movement, this first shot draws an explicit

connection between the two spatial planes that Byg distinguishes in his analysis: the inner

circle of the amphitheater (the space of dramatic representation) and the outer space of

"unrepresentability." Yet the uninterrupted, instantaneous transition from the ancient

ruins to the natural rocks emphasizes, on the contrary, that both planes – the

cultural/historical space (the amphitheater) and the natural landscape around it – are

depicted in the same manner. Both geographical planes establish, in other words, not so

much separate entities, than two aspects of one and the same view.
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These images resemble, at first sight, the genealogical traces evoked by the

border-function discussed earlier. However, in contrast to the border's purpose to

deconstruct totalizing formations by installing contradictory viewpoints into one and the

same image, the ruin-image is more concerned with those aspects that never enter

representation in the first place, those elements that remain forgotten and that can,

therefore, only be uncovered by affirming their very unrepresentability in a

representational gesture, like this cinematographic pan shot. Connected by one singular

cinematographic gesture to the ancient ruins, the landscape shots in Moses and Aaron

become ruin-images by extension, which means: in order to depict a world in ruins it is

no longer necessary to show a landscape filled with actual ruins.

Without the ruins, the ruin-image depicts, strictly speaking, what Deleuze calls an

"any-space-whatever." The reason it is important for the camera in Moses and Aaron to

point beyond the space outside of the amphitheater's architectural borders is, then, not in

order to form a counter-image to the dramatic and historical space represented by the

antique ruins, but rather in order to emphasize that the so-called natural landscape is

shaped by as many historical traces and remainders of human presence as the

amphitheater. The ancient Greek stones and the Sicilian landscape surrounding them do

not occupy different spaces or planes, but inhabit the very same territory. In this sense,

they are image-facts, in the Bazinian sense. Side by side and, in fact, overlapping, they

each can be understood as expressions of the very unfolding and function of

representation; whereas the amphitheater represents human history in an overt, symbolic

fashion, the landscape around it contains what is inadvertently buried and forgotten. The

visible ruins of the amphitheater of Alba Fucense are, thus, built on top and in the midst

of layers of invisible ruins.

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The Invisible Ruins

Adorno's writing taboo, Jean-Francois Lyotard has suggested, reaches a blind spot

insofar as it involves a critical theory that "builds on an architectonics of reasons" and,

thus, depends itself on the old, 'historically condemned' subject.60 Yet even Adorno

knows that "it is impossible to build anything whatsoever from or on this debris. All one

can do is thread one's way through it, slip and slide through the ruins, listen to the

complaints that emanate from them. ... Philosophy as architecture is ruined, but a writing

of the ruins, micrologies, graffiti can still be done," Lyotard writes, and concludes, that

even Adorno turns, in the end, to a form of "Benjaminian writing."61

The process of unfolding a visible, readable image from that which utterly

escapes visibility and decipherability demands – paradoxically – an insistence on

representation. The ruin-image functions precisely to attest to this process, a process that

remains in itself unrepresentable. More importantly, the ruin-image is not really a formal

technique or a matter of formal composition. Not every long-take pan shot is, in other

words, a ruin-image. The significance of a ruin-image lies, instead, in the very gesture of

inscribing a scene with a cinematic view, cinematographically, while highlighting, at the

same time, that this view presents the encounter between "a viewer" and "a location" –

both no longer clearly defined as either subject or object.

If the panoramic," as Jacques Aumont suggests, "serves as a metaphor for a gaze

even when it does not signify a given subjectivity," Moses and Aaron pushes [this

metaphorical value] to the limit."62 This happens for the following reasons: due to their

disorienting quality, these ruin-images are based on the collapse of knowledge and

readability. As a consequence, the panning shots or the illegible black leader impel the

viewer to see and, at the same time, to read: based on "a systematic use of false continuity

or a continuity shot at 180-degree, "it is as if the shots are themselves turning, or 'turning

round', and grasping them 'requires a considerable effort of memory and imagination, in

other words, a reading'."63 Deleuze develops this idea of a reading practice that is
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devoted to (something in) an image that resists being read or being known (the unthought

in thought) out of the Bazinian fact-image. But Deleuze's notion to treat the cinema as a

privileged apparatus at which the unthought in thought manifests itself, reminds much

stronger of another postwar thinker of the cinema: Siegfried Kracauer.

A Jewish exile and survivor of the Holocaust, Kracauer wrote three major books

in the aftermath of the Second World War that are each notably infused with ruin-

images.64 Moreover, heavily influenced by the philosophical models of his former friend

and colleague Walter Benjamin, Kracauer's postwar writings are works of mourning that

are oriented toward the invention of a new historical subject. 65

After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Kracauer agrees with most other postwar

thinkers, former models of reason and knowledge are no longer able to adequately

represent man's relations in and to the world. "The world we live in," he writes in Theory

of Film, "is cluttered with debris, all attempts at new syntheses notwithstanding. There

are no wholes in the world; rather, it consists of bits of chance events whose flow

substitutes for meaningful continuity" (297). By making visible the fleeting moments and

fragmentary components of everyday life, the cinema is one of the few forms of

expression to render visible these new conditions of modern experience.

Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not,
see before its advent. It effectively assists us in discovering the
material world with its psychophysical correspondences. We
literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of
virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the
camera. And we are free to experience it because we are
fragmentized. The cinema can be defined as a medium particularly
equipped to promote the redemption of physical reality. Its
imagery permits us, for the first time, to take away with us the
objects and occurrences that comprise the flow of material life.
(300, my italics)

This is where Kracauer differs markedly from Bazin. For the latter, the cinema

itself functions as an entirely new form of being. But for Kracauer, the cinema is a device

that is able to produce an image of modern life, based on its structural affinity with
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industrial modes of production. To put it differently, Bazin's cinematic apparatus steps in

to replace a corrupted form of human existence and develops, in the process, a new form

of "human quality," on the basis of an automated, mechanical process that remains

indifferent and unconnected to existing material conditions. Uncorrupted by these

conditions, cinema's intrinsic vital power is what defeats corruption and horror.

Kracauer, in contrast to this, bestows the cinema with a double-bind power: the

cinematic medium defeats horror by making it visible in the first place. Kracauer

compares the cinematic apparatus, in this regard, to Perseus' shield, which allowed the

Greek hero to face Medusa's atrocious features and to cut-off her head: "The images on

the shield or screen ... enable – or, by extension, induce – the spectator to behead the

horror they mirror," Kracauer writes. (305) While this process will not likely lead to a

complete eradication of horror itself, as Kracauer immediately admits (since "Athena, we

are told, fastened the terrible head to her aegis so as to throw a scare in her enemies") it

obtains nevertheless the crucial function of urging us to "overcome [our] fears and look at

[horror's] reflection in the shield" (305).

The mirror reflections of horror [...] beckon the spectator to take

them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of
things too dreadful to be beheld in reality. In experiencing the rows
of calves' heads [in Franju's Le Sang des Bêtes] or the litter of
tortured human bodies in the films made of the Nazi concentration
camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of
panic and imagination. And this experience is liberating in as much
as it removes the most powerful taboo. (306)

For Kracauer, horror is, in other words, an intrinsic part of the world. As the term

"barbarism" for Adorno, "horror" signifies a general condition of alienation,

objectification, and dehumanization. And to face (i.e. to lay bare) the reality of this

alienating principle is the only liberation from this scene of horror. Kracauer's concept of

redemption offers no utopian release, promises, in other words, no paradise after a world

of suffering. All that mankind can hope for, instead, is to gain some form of

understanding which is as close as it gets to the real face of things too dreadful to be
 167

beheld in reality. But in contrast to the neo-Marxist, structuralist-materialist critiques of

ideology, Kracauer pursues, in addition, an "understanding" that is based on accounting

for events that fall outside of knowledge and representation. Outside means here not: in

opposition. In fact, as the workings of the ruin-image in Straub-Huillet's films epitomize,

the paradigms of oppositional structures do not apply here. Thus, outside means here a

radical form of the other, not simply an absence.

This is where Kracauer's definition of history as "a science with a difference" (29-

30) meets Deleuze's "unthought in thought." Nietzsche expresses something similar with

his conception of a Dionysian ruin image that gives birth to the "divine" Apollonian

image world. In fact, Kracauer enters into a relationship with both Deleuze and Nietzsche

insofar as he proposes a genealogical project on the basis of history's structural affinity

with film and photography. "History resembles photography," he states, "in that it is,

among other things, a means of alienation" (5). Since traditional models of science and

reason have become incapable to grasp life under the concrete social and historical

effects of capitalism, Kracauer pursues a historiography that sifts through the ruins and

that reminds of Nietzsche's genealogy.

My interest lies with the nascent state of great ideological

movements that period when they were not yet institutionalized but
still competed with other ideas for supremacy. And it centers not
so much on the course followed by the triumphant ideologies in the
process as on the issues in dispute at the time of their emergence. I
should even say that it revolves primarily around the disputes
themselves, with the emphasis on those possibilities which history
did not see fit to explore. (6)

Like the cinema, "history is also the realm of contingencies, of new beginnings.

All regularities discovered in it, or read into it, are of limited range" (31). Kracauer

argues at this point to understand history as "a story-telling medium" (43). The historian

must tell a story, not simply to account for that which is forgotten, but in order to

"remember" those "irreducible entities" that never enter the material register in the first
 168

place, yet which "mark the emergence of something new, something beyond the

jurisdiction of nature" (32).

Jean-Francois Lyotard points to psychoanalysis in an attempt to define this

phenomenon of an original trauma that leaves, however, no material (or bodily) impact,

but whose effects can, nevertheless, be felt as an aftermath. Freud calls it either the

uncanny or Nachträglichkeit, Lyotard explains whereas Kant refers to it as the sublime,

something that cannot be grasped or synthesized, but that urges and moves the mind to

sense (or feel) something. Lyotard evokes "the jews" – as a figure – of "the Forgotten" in

Western thought. "the jews" represent, on the level of history and politics what lies

irredeemably buried under the deepest layers of Western thought in the form of "an

unconscious affect of which the Occident does not want any knowledge."66 Straub-

Huillet's Fortini/Cani (1976) explores the theme of the Forgotten similarly in direct

reference to the aftermath of the Holocaust and its impact on both national and global

politics after the Second World War.

Fortini/Cani is based on a personal memoir, Franco Fortini's autobiographical

novel The Dogs of Sinai (1967). Aside from remembering his childhood as the son of a

Jewish father and of a Christian mother during Mussolini's regime and under German

occupation, Fortini deals also with the effects of fascism and the Holocaust on postwar

Italian society. He does so, by focusing on the more recent reactions in Italian society to

the 1967 Arab-Israeli "Six Day" War. The almost unequivocal support for the Zionist

cause, Fortini argues, must be understood on the grounds of the country's failure to

address and deal with its own past: "The Israeli war unleashed in the new Italian petty

bourgeoisie the wish to be on the right side ... and to free itself from fascist guilt,"

Fortini's states in the film's voice-over monologue.67 The current political discourse is, in

other words, an after-effect of the nation's historical culpability that remains buried

within the country's collective memory.

 169

Straub-Huillet's filmic adaptation renders visible that which lies hidden, forgotten,

and buried through the cinematographic representation of a number of landscapes that

remain the only traces of certain historical events that happened there during the war. In

doing so, Straub-Huillet follow Kracauer's call for a new form of historical knowledge,

grounded, on the one hand, in the material conditions at hand (physical reality as it

reveals itself through a fragmentary lens) but that is, on the other hand, the result of a

creative leap, instigated by that which falls outside of the material register, that which

cannot be represented, that which is already forgotten.

The film is, for the most part, structured around a series of landscape shots, filmed

in different rural mountain areas of Italy. All of these shots are long takes and captured in

the form of slow, extended panning movements. In many of these shots, the camera

describes entire 360-degree circles, sometimes multiple times. The first of these

panoramic scenes begins with a long shot, panning from left to right to follow along the

crests of the Appuan Alps. The shot then tilts down to reveal the village of S. Anna di

Stazzema and its surroundings. In his voice-over monologue, Fortini provides a historical

context for this place: in these hills one of the most notorious Nazi massacres of Italian

civilians took place. At a later point, the camera captures the village of Marzabotto, the

site of another mass murder committed by German National Socialist troupes.

Fortini/Cani features at least eight different villages, in addition to an urban community,

the city of Florence. The places are, in most cases, not exactly identified. But in

conjunction with Fortini's audible narration, the panoramic views identify the historical

sites as gravesites, despite of the fact that they remain anonymous and often in lieu of a

visible monument that could function as an explicit form of identification. While Fortini

reads on the audible level, the ruin-images engage in an act of writing that is also an act

of reading, despite of the images' indecipherability.

A sign that something has happened here is not given by the referent depicted in

the image, but in conjunction with the cinematographic gesture that gives rise to the
 170

image. Instead of reconnecting the viewer with a distant past, these images return the

viewer "to the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms," as Deleuze

writes on Straub-Huillet's landscape panoramas.68 During some shots in Fortini/Cani, the

camera tilts or pans from an official memorial stone to nearby agricultural fields or

buildings, thus producing an explicit link between the official memorialization of

historical violence to a landscape that bears no signs of it.

As ruin-images without ruins, these cinematographic shots constitute an intrinsic

part of avant-garde filming, a kind of writing practice that aims at "marking on its body

the 'presence' of that which has not left a mark," as Lyotard puts it.69 This form of

writing and filming remains an imperative in order "to remember" the forgotten, because

only in the act of writing is one able to create also an act of forgetting (since every

writing must miss something). And because writing creates and, at the same time, misses

the process of its own forgetting, it preserves "the forgotten that one has tried to forget by

killing it."70 This quasi-impossible condition is not an impasse but demarcates a

conceptual blind spot: the exact point where every act of creative imagination must fail to

attain its promise of realization. This is, paradoxically, the point at which the political in

Straub-Huillet's filmmaking practice becomes realized. In creating an image by

circulating relentlessly around a topography of invisible ruins, Straub-Huillet resume a

creative activity that recalls also the gestures of continuously re-writing, reciting, and

recording, that inform the filmmakers' creative practice. In doing so, the two filmmakers

(re-)create not only concrete social conditions and relations that occur at a specific place

in time, but also those events that never registered in the first place. And precisely by

engaging in this task of testifying to the Forgotten, Straub-Huillet create "real" conditions

that make it possible to imagine relations not only among people that are gone, but that

have not been there yet: a people that is still missing, a people buried in a future to come.
 171

Notes

1 Straub quoting Schoenberg in the opening scene of Introduction to Schoenberg.

2 Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London:
Continuum, 2007), 24.
3 See András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-
1980 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Ivone Margulies, ed., Rites
of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
4 Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet
and Jean Marie Straub (Berkeley: California, 1995), 27.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy," in Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1-144 (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 64-65.
6 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1993), 18.
7 This trend begins in the mid-seventies with Dudley J. Andrew's The Major Film
Theories: An Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 1976). See also: Francesco
Casetti, Theories of Cinema: 1945-1995 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999); The
Major Film Theories; Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical
Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Philip Simpson and Karen J.
Shepherdson, eds., Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies
(London: Routledge, 2004); Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden:
Blackwell, 2000); Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
8 Gertrud Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1992), 32-33.
9 See Jacques Aumont, "The Invention of Place: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie
Straub's Moses and Aaron," in Landscape and Film, trans. Kevin Shelton and Martin
Lefebvre, 1-18 (New York : Routledge, 2006).
10 Aumont, 3-4; Daniele Huillet, "Notes to Gregory's Work Journal," in
Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, 147-231 (New York: Tanam
Press, 1980), 157.
11 While all singing voices were recorded live on-location, the orchestral part had
been taped beforehand in a recording studio.
12 Huillet, "Notes to Gregory's Work Journal," 159.
 172

13 Straub in Wolfram Schütte, "Gespräch mit Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie

Straub," in Klassenverhältnisse: Von D. Huillet und J.M. Straub nach dem Roman "Der
Verschollene" von Franz Kafka (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1984), 39 (my translation). Straub
quotes here freely from Brecht's "Popularity and Realism."
14 Huillet and Straub in Schütte, "Gespräch," 38; 39-40.

15 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London: Verso, 1998), 55.
16 Ibid., 233.

17 Ibid., 172.

18 Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov," In

Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000, ed. Dorothy Hale (Malden:
Blackwell, 2006), 362.
19 Benjamin points to the ambiguous, that is, either productive or disastrous
potential of film in his Artwork Essay (1936). See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn, 217-252 (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).
20 Schoenberg quoted in Martin Walsh, "Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's
'Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene': Straub/Huillet: Brecht: Schoenberg,"
Camera Obscura, 1977: 37.
21 Heinrich Böll, Billards at Half-Past Nine, trans. Patrick Bowles (Brooklyn:
Melville House Publishing, 2010).
22 Straub quoted in Richard Roud, Jean-Marie Straub (New York: Viking Press,
1972), 41.
23 Ibid., 40.

24 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 153.
25 Ibid., 19.

26 Ibid., 18.

27 Ibid., xi.

28 Ibid (my italics).

29 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,

Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 14.
 173

30 What begins in the aftermath of the eighteenth-century Lisbon earthquake of

1755 sets itself forth in disasters like, e.g. the responses following the Great Chicago Fire
of 1871 or the discourse around Hurricane "Katrina" in 2005.
31 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton:
Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1995), 54.
32 See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the
Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London:
Penguin Books, 1998); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard
(Mineola: Dover Publications, 2005). On the picturesque see Christopher Woodward, In
Ruins (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), Chapter 6.
33 Markus Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through
Hiroshima (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 191.
34 André Bazin, "An Aesthetic of Reality," in What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans.
Hugh Gray, 16-40 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 33.
35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 32.

37 Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 182.
38 André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What is Cinema?
Vol. 1, 9-16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 11.
39 Bazin, "Aesthetic of Reality," 38.

40 André Bazin, "Ontology," 14. For readings of Bazin that insist that image and
model share an ontology, see Louis-Georges Schwartz's essay, "Deconstruction avant la
lettre: Jacques Derrida before Andre Bazin," in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and
its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew, 95-141 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
41 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 240.
42 Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in The Adorno Reader,
ed. Brian O'Connor, 195-210 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 210.
43 Ibid.

44 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans.

E.F.N Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 15-16 (my italics).
 174

45 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 216
46 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 198.

47 Ibid., 217.

48 The term "Straubian sequence shot" was coined by Serge Daney in "Un
tombeau pour l'oeil (pédagogie straubienne)," Cahiers du Cinéma 258-259 (1975): 27-35.
49 Richard Begam, "Modernism as Degeneracy: Schoenberg's Moses and Aron,"
Modernist Cultures 3, no. 1 (October 2007): 34.
50 Begam, 41.

51 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 217. See also Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Language, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
52 Byg, Landscapes, 20.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 151.

55 Ibid.

56 Gertrud Koch, Die Einstellung, op. cit., 50.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., 49.

59 Ibid., 51.

60 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews" (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1990), 43.
61 Lyotard, Heidegger, 43 (my italics).

62 Jacques Aumont, "The Invention of Place," 12.

63 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 245 (italics mine).

64 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the

German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), originally published in 1947;
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), originally published in 1960; Siegfried Kracauer,
History: The Last Things Before the Last, op. cit., published posthumously in 1969.
 175

65 Both Miriam Hansen and David Rodowick discuss Benjamin's influence on

Kracauer in detail. See Hansen, "Introduction" to Theory of Film; D. N. Rodowick, "The
Last Things Before the Last: Kracauer and History," New German Critique 41 (Spring-
Summer 1987): 109-139.
66 Lyotard, Heidegger, 21.

67 Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, "Fortini/Cani: Script," Screen 19, no. 2
(1978): 11.
68 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 244.

69 Lyotard, Heidegger, 33.

70 Ibid., 43.
 176

CONCLUSION:

THE OLD AND THE NEW

When Danièle Huillet's passed away in the fall of 2006 her death appeared to put

an inevitable end to a body of work she had created together with Jean-Marie Straub,

beginning with the couple's joint writing of the Bach script more than fifty years earlier in

Paris of 1954. Yet in the past five years eight new films have been coproduced under the

production label "Straub-Huillet," indicating that the creative oeuvre of the filmmaking

duo remains fragmentary, is still a work in progress. Based on the fact that Straub-

Huillet's creative practice is inherently indebted to the vital contribution of non-living

artists it is not a stretch to say that Straub realized these latest films in collaboration with

Huillet.

Indeed, many of these eight films are continuations of former Straub-Huillet

projects. For instance, in 2007 and 2008 Straub returned to Buti to film two additions to

the Cesare Pavese cycle, Artemis' Knee (Il Ginochhio di Artemide, Italy, 2007) and The

Witches (Le Streghe, France / Italy, 2008). Like The Return of the Prodigal Son and

These Encounters of Theirs, the two films were based on Pavese's novels and, prior to

shooting, performed live on stage at the Teatro Francesco di Bartolo in Buti. In 2010,

Straub returned to the Alsace region to film the second half of Lothringen!. Also based on

Maurice Barrès' novel, the film is entitled An Heir (L'Héritier, France / South Korea,

2011) and features Straub also as an actor. Shot on DigiBeta format, An Heir was co-

financed with the help of an award Straub received in 2011 from the Jeonju Digital

Project, an annual funding initiative organized by the Jeonju International Film Festival

in South Korea.

The award signals, first of all, that Straub-Huillet's work has entered the digital

age. Already the final project Huillet and Straub were able to complete together, Europa

2005, was shot on digital video (DV Pal). Since then, Straub directed five short films in
 177

the past three years that were either shot with DigiBeta or with HD cameras. The

increasing use of digital technology offers perhaps one explanation for the remarkable

proliferation of film and theater productions the filmmaker, who is now in his late

seventies, was able to accomplish in such a short period of time.

Straub's recent efforts in filmmaking occur noticeably on the grounds of his

previous work with Huillet. He resumes the couple's prior engagements with specific

authors (e.g. Pavese, Corneille, and Brecht), revisits old locations (e.g. Buti and Alsace-

Lorraine), and returns, most importantly, to the formal techniques and work practices that

characterize a "typical" Straub-Huillet film: O Somma Luce (France, 2010), an adaptation

of a poem by Dante Aligheri, and the two most recent films L'Inconsolable (France,

2011) and Schakale und Araber (Switzerland, 2011) are all shot on either the Italian or

French countryside. An Heir includes, in addition, a return to the ruins in the form of an

ancient site, the so-called "Pagan Wall" near Metz. Moreover, Corneille-Brecht (France,

2009), O Somma Luce, and the Pavese adaptations focus on the performance and recital

of poetic or literary texts by actors who are mostly arranged in front of objects that

resemble the figurations of borderlines in earlier films. Thus, the principle motifs and

techniques that characterized Straub-Huillet's distinct practice of filmmaking throughout

the years remain vital and current. In addition to this, Straub continues long-time

collaborations, e.g. with the ensemble of the Teatro Francesco di Bartolo or with the

cinematographers Irina Lubtchansky and (until his death in 2010) husband William

Lubtchansky.

In November and December 2009, an exhibition of Straub-Huillet's work took

place in Antwerp, Belgium. Curated by Annett Busch and Florian Schneider, the

exhibition had the goal to explore the aesthetic and political significance of Straub-

Huillet's work as a form of "contemporary image production." Aside from screenings of

Straub-Huillet's films and a selection of archival sources (scripts, photographs, etc.), the

exhibition included talks and workshops with contributions by a variety of Straub-Huillet

 178

critics and collaborators from France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the U.S., including

film scholars Barton Byg and Sally Shafto, filmmaker Chantal Akerman, visual artist

Manon de Boer, (assistant) director Giulio Bursi, and actor Romano Guelfi.

It may have been the freezing temperatures and the ice-covered metal scaffolding

that led up to the sixth floor of an old factory building (where the exhibition space was

located) that contributed to the fact that the Antwerp retrospective lacked further public

attendance, aside from the guest lecturers, the co-organizers, and myself (at least not on

the two nights I visited the exhibition in the second week of December). The image of a

dozen Straub-Huillet-enthusiasts debating a familiar body of work while failing to recruit

new attention from the outside epitomizes Deleuze's figure of the missing spectator.

Attesting, at the outset, to the ultimate death of radical formal practices and

politics, the missing audience is yet not only a figure of bereavement, but also one of

hope. The few that gathered in Antwerp testify, in this sense, to the fact that certain

discourses and practices are not as passé as it seems. The Antwerp exhibition provided a

concrete platform for "an assemblage," as Deleuze would put it, by bringing "real parties

together in order to make them produce collective utterances as the prefiguration of the

people who are missing (and, as Klee says, 'we can do no more')."1 It is the latter

understanding, the organizers had in mind when titling the retrospective Of a People Who

Are Missing. The Antwerp retrospective redirects the critical attention away from criteria

such as attendance numbers or popularity issues that have come to dominate film

criticism in its current focus on cinema as a social and historical practice. The exhibition

attests, instead, to the struggle and difficulties of networking at the margins of the

"privileged" discourse called European avant-garde cinema. Straub-Huillet's work falls

rarely in line with the principles that constituted this discourse in the past.

The Antwerp exhibition shares with Straub-Huillet's own creative practice a mode

of expression that emerges in relation with other texts, collaborators, and events: the

retrospective continues to draw worldwide attention to this day, through an ongoing

 179

Internet platform, where most of the presentations are archived and can be accessed for

free.2 The Antwerp exhibition is, furthermore, connected to a long-term project dedicated

to Straub-Huillet's work that is co-organized by a transnational research team involving

members of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Hamburg, Germany, and the Jan

van Eyk Akademie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The research project involves setting

up an open-access web-archive that collects scholarly articles, primary research material,

and video footage in connection with Straub-Huillet's body of work, a collection that is

consistently growing.3

Both the Antwerp exhibition and the research project are part of a renewed

interest in Straub-Huillet's work that followed Huillet's sudden death in 2006. This is

reflected in an increasing number of critical articles on the couple's work in recent years,

some of which are written by longtime Straub-Huillet-supporters such as Tag Gallagher,

Jonathan Rosenbaum, or Dominique Païni, yet most of them come from critics that were

born after 1968.4 Many of these newer writings deal explicitly with the much lesser

known Italian and French films that the couple made in the second half of its

collaboration.5 These recent developments of a renewed critical engagement with Straub-

Huillet's work results partially also from recent releases of Straub-Huillet's films on

digital recording devices and with subtitles, especially in Japan, Germany, and France.

I consider a further and continuous critical engagement with Straub-Huillet's work

for two reasons crucial. As seen throughout this dissertation, the couple's oeuvre fits less

seamlessly into established historical and formal categories than often assumed. This

calls not simply for a rehistoricization of Straub-Huillet's work, but it challenges,

ultimately, the validity of established critical canons like national cinema, political

modernism, or European auteurism.

Not all filmic images produced under similar historical and institutional

conditions are the same. The political impacts a film not only from the outside, but there

is also a politics of the image. For instance, the long-take tracking shot is a cliché formal
 180

technique within European avant-garde filmmaking. Yet, not all tracking shots produce

the same meaning which is why the French critic Serge Daney coined the term plan

Straubian, in order to emphasize that Straub-Huillet's tracking shots create a meaning

that differs dramatically from, lets say, Godard's or Kluge's extended tracking shots.

More precisely, by way of a very specific use of quotations, recital modes, and

elements of repetition, Straub-Huillet's work process epitomizes that the politics of the

image are part of a genealogical trajectory that may cut across historical, national, or

institutional frameworks. Straub-Huillet's self-proclaimed affinity with John Ford is less a

polemical statement, than a way to emphasize that the ideological properties in Ford's

images are structured similar to Straub-Huillet's own cinematic discourses, despite of the

films' different historical, national, and institutional contexts. Straub-Huillet's approach to

an original text, their work with the performers, and their handling of the material in the

editing lab, aims at the creation of conditions that make the arrival of an unknown, of the

radically new, possible. This differs from the political rhetoric of "lecturing" to an

audience that is already in agreement with the political message, practiced by many

European political filmmakers, especially the auteurs of the New German Cinema.

Moreover, the couple's concept of collaborative authorship is much stronger informed by

Truffaut's initial definition of auteurism and by Bazin's notion of ontological realism.

Straub-Huillet's personal and professional affiliations in 1950s Paris challenges the

historical canonization of their work. One must conclude, instead, that the pair's work

begins already in 1954 in Paris (not 1962 in West Germany), with the writing of the Bach

script.

The politics that structure Straub-Huillet's filmic images derive, in contrast, from

concrete, material relationships that are based on a radical impulse of treating the other

text/author/collaborator as an other. Straub-Huillet enter into this relationship without

eradicating the other's difference, thus, inviting the other to intervene during the writing

(or filming) of a cinematic text. This is more than a matter of "having an idea in cinema"
 181

than rather a matter of sharing ideas in cinema, to extend Deleuze's dictum. Across

historical, national, and institutional boundaries, the couple shares a position in a certain

politics of the image with such diverse figures as Jean Rouch, Peter Nestler, Francois

Truffaut, or John Ford.

Here lies the second significance of Straub-Huillet's work as a political form of

filmmaking: instead of proposing a redefinition or rehistoricization of specific historical

and theoretical canons, Straub-Huillet's work contests rather the foundational criteria that

constitute these categories and discourses in the first place, replacing them with concepts

that are structured around aporetic "uncertainties" and radical notions of difference. What

is at stake is, in other word, the system of values applied by film historical canons and

film critical discourses. This can be seen in the uneven reception of early 1960s West

German film criticism toward Straub-Huillet's early films or in the Kluge-Straub

comparison.

Straub-Huillet's politics of the image are neither structured around an active

refusal to treat the text/author/work as a totalizing entity nor in terms of a dialectical

opposition (as it is the case in most classical materialist and structuralist approaches).

Straub-Huillet's work refutes also a cultural studies-approach in its emphasis on identity

politics. Even though sharing political modernism's belief in the class struggle and in the

indispensability of revolutionary change, Straub-Huillet's work is consistent in its refusal

to promote (false) certainties and judgment calls in order to avoid, as much as possible,

the production of new totalizing structures.

This dissertation analyzes the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of this

filmic approach. This is crucial for a contemporary model of film scholarship in its

attempt to not only reflect on larger social and cultural issues, but also in its responsibility

to analyze and produce new theories in response to these conditions. Political struggles

and models must be addressed on all fronts, i.e., also in the university, in the classroom,

within critical discourses, and in the cinema. As filmmakers Straub-Huillet participate in

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this debate, not only by employing production modes of avant-garde filmmaking that

operate at the margins of industrial cinema, but also by producing a concept of the

political by way of their cinematic images in order to formulate an answer to questions

such as: how does a politics of the future, a politics of fundamental change, look like?

Each chapter in this dissertation examined this concept from a different angle. Following

a largely deconstructionist reading practice that conceives of the political as a politics of,

and towards, the other, each chapter proposed new ways to engage with canonical

categories, like authorship, materialist practices, national cinema, and (cinematic)

representation, respectively. The first chapter discussed this double-bind condition

through principles of resistance and affinity, defined by the couple's approach of

collaboration and authorship as an elective affinity; chapter two focused on labor

relations constituted by elements of repetition, resulting in an intervention of the

unexpected; the border poetics in the third chapter epitomized Straub-Huillet's refusal to

retreat to a position of identity politics by inhabiting, instead, a position at the margins,

which gave rise to the creation of a genealogical understanding of history; the final

chapter's ruin-image pictures a contemporary landscape of (invisible) ruins in order to

account for those elements that never enter representation proper. On this deserted and

ruined landscape, Straub-Huillet envision the formation of a future people, of a new

collective body whose features are yet to be sketched out.

The urgency to reevaluate the use and function of older film critical canons and

categories results not only in light of the steady transformations of audio-visual imagery

in the digital age, but also in response to a current lack in adequate representations of new

political models, especially after the fall of European state-communism in the late 1980s.

Contemporary avant-garde filmmakers face the particular challenge of envisioning new

images in a time in which every image is instantly absorbed and re-appropriated by the

mainstream. All these difficulties force filmmakers and film theorists more than ever to

search for new images elsewhere, outside of familiar structures of knowledge.

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This differs radically from former models of political modernism (and Brechtian

approaches in particular) that focused on the task of educating the historical (physically

present) spectator by revealing social injustices and economic relations within the filmic

discourse. Knowledge and recognition became for most avant-gardes, from the twenties

onward, a guiding principle on the road to political change. Recognizing his own

relationship within these structures, the historical spectator was supposed to leap into

revolutionary action. As seen, Straub-Huillet considered this strategy of a "lecturing"

position from the start as a confirmation, not disruption, of established power relations.

Verfremdung means in the context of this work practice, instead, a technique that derives

from the tripartite dynamics of repetition, negation, and difference, as shown in detail in

chapter two. The filmmakers' responded, thus, already in the early sixties to a dilemma

that became most evident for the current historical condition: critical knowledge about

class relations and political structures alone, does not automatically produce an active

spectator in pursuit of fundamental revolutionary change. Responding, in a sense, to

political modernism's failure to mobilize the masses, Straub-Huillet produce a concept of

the political that is no longer based on binary oppositions and separations, but structured,

instead, around an insoluble conflict, an aporetic quandary whose politics lie precisely in

the resistance of falling for either one or another totalizing entity.

Moreover, aware of the limitations and necessities of epistemological formations,

Straub-Huillet's work offers a distinct response to the difficulties of producing novel and

current images of radical, political and social change within the larger structures of

global, corporate capitalism. The novelty of the image can no longer be defined in terms

of a shot's form or technique, but requires instead the intervention of a foreign or

invisible element into the scene, an element that is no longer simply present in the image,

but that lies at once outside and inside of it. The invisible ruins in Fortini/Cani, the

border figurations in Lothringen! and Othon, and the "hidden smile" in Sicilia! are

examples of this phenomenon. In doing so, Straub-Huillet's work gives form to an image
 184

of the political that highlights the central double-bind of the political avant-garde: to

critique finite modes of formalization while acknowledging, at the same time, their

indispensability. A political body requires representation in order to address a people and

formulate a political agenda. In this regard, Straub-Huillet keep modernist and realist

paradigms in constant suspense rather than solving or combining them. The aporetic

function assumes here a radical notion of politics by pointing on the one hand to a realm

that suspends power and knowledge (as epitomized by the figure of the border and its

function to constitutes a subject in relation to its other). The ruin-image pertains, on the

other hand, to a paradoxical state of accounting for that which never enters representation

in the first place by way of representation (since every act of creation must miss, must

forget, something). This image accounts not only for the other in relation to a subject but

rather to the other as other, as otherness in its radical unattainability. This does not mean

to succumb to a politics of nihilism. Straub-Huillet's work demonstrates, in contrast, that

the notion of radical difference emerges always from a confrontation (rather than

combination) of materialism and difference. In other words, any relationship to a future

unknown is inextricably determined by a historical setting, cannot deny its material roots

and relations to the past. This defines the radical return that structures the relationship of

the old and the new in Straub-Huillet's concept of the political. Actively engaged in a

constant mode of deferral, all these double-bind processes constitute attempts towards the

creation of a new kind of epistemology.

The invention of new images requires in Straub-Huillet's case a conscious return

to the past. This means that in order to create and affirm a future event, Straub-Huillet

return relentlessly back toward an already existing classical legacy. The two filmmakers

reveal at all times that their work is constructed on the foundational premise of a distinct

genealogy and tradition, epitomized by Straub-Huillet's repeated use of classical and

canonical authors. The motif of repetition and reproduction that informs the couple's

labor practice demonstrates this modus of a constant return further: in the specific
 185

confrontation with the classical text, the performer creates a distance between himself

and the (old) text. The act of revisiting the text, over and over, opens the text up to the

intervention of an unanticipated, unknown event, like "the hidden smile" Huillet

discovers during the editing process. The filmic image records and produces in this

moment the fleeting image of revolutionary change.

This specific idea of the old and the new can be equally found in the writings of

Siegfried Kracauer a thinker whose affinity to Straub-Huillet's work is largely

overlooked. Reason for this is most likely Kracauer's distance from politics, let alone

revolutionary change. Yet Kracauer's critical move toward a new kind of epistemology

that lies outside of the conventional structures of knowledge expresses, similar to Straub-

Huillet's work, a concept of "radicalism" that must be understood in the literal sense of

the word: to call for the creation of a new (historical) narrative, a history of the future, by

returning to the genealogical roots of the past.

My own return to an investigation of political avant-garde cinema and film theory

is informed by a similar idea. Kracauer does not demand to simply abandon old

narratives and terms but argues rather for their structural re-evaluation, a process that

also echoes Straub-Huillet's theory of a politics that is based on aporetic relationships,

rather than on established institutional, national, or historical canons. Kracauer calls for

an understanding of history that is no longer based on the idea of "how things actually

were" but that relies instead on a practice of "storytelling," an act of creative invention

that is conceived outside of any conventional disciplinary boundaries.6

This relationship between the old and the new informs my own reevaluate

approach certain canonical and seemingly familiar texts by returning them to their radical

origins: e.g., returning the politics to both Truffaut's article "A Certain Tendency in the

French Cinema" and to Kracauer's later writings, or redefining Straub-Huillet's "high

modernism" in it radical realist underpinnings. In relation, the old and the new provide

not only a powerful dynamic for a contemporary form of political and creative practices,
 186

but also suggest re-addressing and reinvestigating some of the discourses and

methodologies that have been considered passé. What should count above all else are

ideas instead of institutional politics and affiliations. This means, for instance, to resist

reading a text through a critical lens that is clouded by current political and institutional

biases. It means to engage in a reading that remains "faithful," as Truffaut termed it, to

the original author and text; to return the text, in other words, to its radical origins, in the

sense in which Straub-Huillet resurrected Corneille's Othon in its original meaning: as an

anti-authoritarian text. This form of radical re-working is what contemporary film

criticism can learn from Straub-Huillet's approach to cinematic adaptation.

 187

Notes

1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, 224.

2Of a People Who Are Missing, curated by Annett Busch and Florian Schneider,
http://ofapeoplewhoaremissing.net/.
3 Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Hamburg and Jan van Eyk Akademie,
Maastricht, Straub/Huillet. http://straub-huillet.net/. Busch and Schneider, the curators of
the Antwerp exhibit are also members of each respective research team.
4 Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Intense Materialism: Too Soon, Too Late ." Senses of
Cinema, no. 6 (May 2000); http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/6/soon/; Tag Gallagher
"Lacrimae Rerum Materialized," Senses of Cinema 37 (2005),
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/feature-articles/straubs/; Louis Séguin, "La Sacrée
Faim De l'Or: Sur Le Retour Du Fils prodigue/Humiliés De Straub-Huillet," Cahiers Du
Cinéma 588 (2004): 84-87; Dominic Païni, "Straub, Hölderlin, Cézanne," Senses of
Cinema 39 (May 2006): no pp, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/39/straub_
holderlin_cezanne/; Tag Gallagher "Straub Anti-Straub." Senses of Cinema 43 (2007).
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/costa-straub-huillet/; Sally Shafto,
"On Straub-Huillet's Une Visite au Louvre," Senses of Cinema 53 (December 2009): no
pp, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/feature-articles/on-straub-huillets-une-visite-
au-louvre-1/; Daniel Fairfax, "Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet," Senses of Cinema
52 (September 2009), no pp, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/52/jean-marie-straub-
and-daniele-huillet/. There is, in addition, a two-part collection of critical writings
dedicated to Straub-Huillet and affiliated directors or approaches that is published in
French by Jean-Louis Raymond and Christian Morin, eds. LEUCOTHEA: Revue en ligne,
vol. 1 (April 2009) and vol. 2 (April 2010).
5 Marino Guida, "Resisting Performance: Straub/Huillet's Filming of Kafka's Der
Verschollene," In Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies, eds.
Carolin Duttlinger, Lucia Ruprecht and Andrew Webber, 121-135 (Bern: Peter Lang,
2003); Burlin Barr, "Too Close, Too Far: Cultural Composition in Straub and Huillet's
Too Early, Too Late," Camera Obscura 52, no. 1 (2003): 1-24; Michael Girke, "In
Duisburg: 'Ein Besuch Im Louvre' Von Straub/Huillet." Film Dienst 57, no. 25 (2004):
42-43.
6 Siegfried Kracauer, History, The Last Things Before the Last (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1969), 49. Kracauer takes the concept of storytelling from
Walter Benjamin who uses it, similarly, as a counter figure to the dominant narrative
genre of the 19th century novel. See "The Storyteller."
 188

APPENDIX A:

FIGURES

Figure 1 The Letters of Venice (2006)

Source: Andy Rector, ed., Kino Slang (September 13, 2006)

http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/.

Figure 2 Truffaut and Straub, November 1954

Source: Jean Douchet, ed., The French New Wave, trans. Robert Bonnono (New York:
D.A.P., 1998), 47.
 189

Figure 3 Straub's Letter to Kluge (1976)

Source: Filmkritik 241 (January 1977): no pp.

Figure 4 Handwritten manuscripts in The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967)

 190

Figure 5 The first draft of the script for Class Relations (1983)

Figure 6 The second draft of the script for Class Relations (1983)

Source: new filmkritik (September 10, 2007), no pp., http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-

10/klassenverhaltnisse-drehbuch-faksimiles/.
 191

Figure 7 Repetitions: Sicilia! (1994) (top), These Encounters of Theirs (2005) (bottom)

Figure 8 Nature and Text: Workers, Peasants (2000)

 192

Figure 9 Machorka-Muff (1962): Views across the Rhine. Machorka-Muff's POV (left)
and the Rhine viewed from the Petersberg Hotel (right).

Figure 10 The Border in Othon (1969)

 193

Figure 11 The Border in Lothringen! (1994)

Figure 12 The "German Corner" in Lothringen! (1994)

 194

APPENDIX B:

STRAUB-HUILLET – WORK / ADAPTATION

The Films, 1962-2006

This filmography is organized according to the following format: Year of production,

English release title/domestic release title (if different), country(s) of production.
Information about adapted source: title (orig. title, year) and author.

1962, Machorka-Muff (W. Germany). Based on the short story Bonn Diary (Hauptstadt
Journal, 1958) by Heinrich Böll.

1964/65, Not Reconciled, or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules / Nicht Versöhnt
oder es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht (W. Germany). Based on the novel
Billiard at Half-Past Nine (Billiard um Halbzehn, 1959) by Heinrich Böll.

1967, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach / Die Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach
(W. Germany/Italy). Based on letters by Johann Sebastian Bach and Philip
Emmanuel Bach.

1968, The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp / Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin
und der Zuhälter. (W. Germany). Based on the play Krankeit der Jugend (1928)
by Ferdinand Bruckner.

1969, Othon / Othon, ou les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer ou peut-etre
qu'un jour Rome se permettra de choisir a son tour (W. Germany/Italy). Based on
the play Othon (1664) by Pierre Corneille.

1972, History Lessons / Geschichtsunterricht (Italy/W. Germany). Based on the novel

The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar (Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius
Caesar, 1937-39) by Bertolt Brecht.

1972, Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic

Scene" / Einleitung zu Arnold Schönberg's "Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene
(W. Germany). Based on Schoenberg's composition Begleitmusik zu einer
Lichtspielszene.

1974, Moses and Aaron / Moses und Aron (Austria/W. Germany/ France/Italy). Based on
the opera Moses und Aron (1930/32) by Arnold Schoenberg.

1976, Fortini/Cani (Italy). Based on the autobiographical novel The Dogs from Sinai (I
Cani del Sinai, 1967) by Franco Fortini.

1977, Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice / Toute Révolution est un coup de dés
(France). Based on the poem A throw of the dice will never abolish chance (Un
coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897) by Stéphane Mallarmé.

1978, From the Cloud to the Resistance / Dalla Nuba alla Resistenza (W Germany/Italy).
Based on the novels Dialogues with Leucò (Dialoghi con Leucò, 1947) and The
Moon and the Bonfires (La Luna e i Faló, 1949) by Cesare Pavese.
 195

1981, Too Early, Too Late / Trop Tôt, Trop Tard (France/Egypt). Based on Die
Bauernfrage in Frankreich und Deutschland (1894) Letter to Karl Kautsky (1889)
by Friedrich Engles; Class Struggles in Egypt (1969) by Mahmoud Hussein.

1982, En Rachachant (France). Based on the short story Ah! Ernesto! (1971) by
Marguerite Duras.

1983, Class Relations / Klassenverhältnisse (W. Germany/France). Based on the novel

Amerika: The Missing Person (Der Verschollene, 1912-14) by Franz Kafka.

1986, The Death of Empedocles / Der Tod des Empedokles; Oder: wenn dann der Erde
Grün von neuem euch erglänzt (W. Germany/France). Based on the first version
of the play The Death of Empedocles (Der Tod des Empedokles, 1798) by
Friedrich Hölderlin.

1988, Black Sin / Schwarze Sünde, (W. Germany). Based on the third version of the play
The Death of Empedocles (Der Tod des Empedokles, 1798) by Friedrich
Hölderlin.

1989, Paul Cézanne, Conversation with Joachim Gasquet / Paul Cézanne im Gespräch
mit Joachim Gasquet (W. Germany/France). Based on the memoir Cézanne: A
Memoir With Conversations (Cézanne: Ce qu'il m'a dit, 1921) by Joachim
Gasquet.

1991, Antigone / Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für
die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht 1948 (Suhrkamp Verlag) (Germany/France).
Based on the play Antigone by Sophocles and its adaptations by Friedrich
Hölderlin and Bertolt Brecht.

1994, Lothringen! / Lorraine! (Germany/France). Based on the novella Collette

Baudoche: History of a Young Girl from Metz (Colette Baudoche: Histoire d’une
jeune fille de Metz, 1909) by Maurice Barres.

1996, From Today to Tomorrow / Von Heute auf Morgen (Germany/France). Based on
the opera Von Heute auf Morgen (1929) by Arnold Schoenberg.

1998, Sicilia! (France/Italy). Based on the novel Conversations in Sicily (Conversazione

in Sicilia, 1937-38) by Elio Vittorini.

2000, Workers, Peasants / Operai, Contadini (Italy/France). Based on Women of Messina

(Les Donne di Messina, 1946-64) by Elio Vittorini.

2001/03, The Return of the Prodigal Son / Il Ritorno del Figlio Prodigo - Umiliati
(Italy/France). Based on Women of Messina (Les Donne di Messina, 1946-64) by
Elio Vittorini.

2004, A Visit to the Louvre / Une Visite au Louvre (France/Germany). Based on the
memoir Cézanne: A Memoir With Conversations (Cézanne: Ce qu'il m'a dit,
1921) by Joachim Gasquet.

2006 These Encounters of Theirs / Quei Loro Incontri (Italy/Germany). Based on the
novel Dialogues with Leucò (Dialoghi con Leucò, 1947) by Cesare Pavese.

2006, Europa 2005, 27 October / Europa 2005, 27 Octobre (France).

 196

Selected Scripts and Special Editions of Adapted Works

Straub, Jean-Marie, and Danièle Huillet. Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach. Frankfurt
am Main: Verlag Filmkritik, 1969.

Straub, Jean-Marie, and Danièle Huillet "Leçcons d'historire." Trans. Straub/Huillet,

Cahiers du cinéma 241 (September/October 1972).

Corneille, Piere. Othon. Trans. Herbert Linder, Daniele Huillet, and Jean-Marie Straub.
New York: [privately issued]. 1974).

Fortini, Franco, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Les chiens du Sinaï-Fortini/Cani.
Paris: Dossiers Cahiers du cinéma, 1979.

Straub, Jean-Marie, and Danièle Huillet. "Fortini/Cani: Script." Screen 19, no. 2 (1978):
11-40.

Straub, Jean-Marie, and Danièle Huillet. Klassenverhältnisse: nach dem Amerika-Roman

"Der Verschollene" von Franz Kafka. Ed. Wolfram Schütte. Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1984.

Straub, Jean-Marie, and Danièle Huillet. Moïse et Aron. Trans. Straub/Huillet. Toulouse:
Editions Ombres, 1990.

Straub, Jean-Marie, and Danièle Huillet. Empedocle sur Etna. Toulouse: Editions
Ombres, 1990.

Straub, Jean-Marie, and Danièle Huillet. Antigone. Sophocle. Hölderlin. Brecht. Huillet.
Straub. Toulouse: Editions Ombres, 1992.
 197

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