Andy Rector

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

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

Cyril Neyrat: What is the origin of In Vanda’s Room? 

Pedro Costa: Considering the film as it is now, the form it has, it can only come from things like tiredness and disgust. Not from a search. Nor from a rupture, in the sense of a film that you make by saying to yourself: “I’ve got an idea, I’m going to make a film with this form, in this environment.” It surely comes from the years before cinema, from something other than cinema. It doesn’t come from childhood but surely from adolescence, in other words from the bedroom.