Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub

10.01.2024
A COLLECTION OF 12 texts, 55 film pages, 1 news item
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Danièle Huillet (1936-2006) and Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) were a French duo of filmmakers who made about twenty films together between 1963 and 2006. Their partnership resulted in a beautiful and demanding oeuvre, which deeply affected the history of cinema. The work of Straub and Huillet is characterised by a rigorous and uncompromising form, which often involved long takes, minimalistic aesthetics, and a focus on text and performance. They were deeply influenced by the works of Bertolt Brecht and sought to create a non-reconciling form of “political cinema” engaged with pressing social and historical issues. “A political film must remind people that we don’t live in the best possible world,” said Straub, “and that the present, denied us in the name of progress, simply continues and is irreplaceable… That human feelings are being plundered in the same way that the earth is being plundered… That the price that people must pay, whether it be for progress or welfare, is much too high and is unjustifiable.”1

Often grounded in literary texts or musical scores, those of authors such as Brecht, Cesare Pavese, Heinrich Böll, Friedrich Hölderlin or Franz Kafka, their work answers to an ethical as well as an aesthetic principle, reducing the means of staging to their strictest necessity, devoting meticulous attention to detail, particularly in the realms of editing and sound design. Their films often foreground the matter “as such,” whether it’s the chosen text or location, or by working only with direct sound (no dubbing: “Dubbing is not just a technique, it is also an ideology. In a dubbed film, there is not the slightest relationship between what you see and what you hear. Dubbed cinema is a cinema of lies, mental laziness, and violence, because it gives no space to the viewer and makes him increasingly deaf and more insensitive.”2 [Straub]), working with non-professional actors – often chosen for the language, dialect, and place to which they belong, and with natural light which they don’t interfere with.3

Serge Daney, discussing the filmmakers’ pedagogy, contends that non-reconciliation is the foundation from which they crafted their cinema. Instead of simply accepting everything presented in a film, our relationship as spectators and listeners should involve questioning what we observe and hear, pondering its significance and constantly reflecting on its deeper meaning. Their work, Daney continues, relies on “the stubborn refusal of all the forces of homogenization. It has led Straub and Huillet to what might be called a ‘generalized practice of disjunction.’ … Films: the bed where what is disjoint, unreconciled, not reconcilable, ‘plays’, simulates, suspends unity. Not an (easy) art of décalage but the simultaneous head and tail of the one and the same piece, never played, always revived, inscribed on one side (the tables of the Law, Moses), stated on the other (miracles, Aaron).”4

Their best-known films include Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), Moses and Aaron (1975), Dalla nube alla resistenza (1979), Trop tot/trop tard (1982), Paul Cézanne im Gespräch mit Joachim Gasquet (1989) and Sicilia! (1999). Following Huillet’s death in 2006, Straub continued to collaborate on Pavese adaptations with the Tuscan theatre group Teatro Francesco di Bartolo in Buti, moved to Switzerland and realized projects already planned with Huillet.

This collection provides an overview of the available texts on Sabzian on the work of Straub and Huillet as well as a complete annotated filmography.5

  • 1“Sickle and Hammer, Cannons, Cannons, Dynamite! Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub in Conversation with François Albera,” in Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, ed. Ted Fendt (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 2016).
  • 2“Intervista con Jean Maroe [sic] Straub e Danielle [sic] Huillet,” Gong; Il mensile di musica e cultura progressiva, Milano, 2 (February 1975), in Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Writings, ed. Sally Shafto (New York: Sequence Press, 2016), 156.
  • 3See the article ‘What Is a Political Film? On Straub-Huillet’s Poetics of Hylomorphism’ by Bojana Cvejić, Sabzian, 24 July 2019.
  • 4Serge Daney, “A Tomb for the Eye (Straubian Pedagogy),” trans. Stoffel Debuysere, Diagonal Thoughts, May 25, 2013. Originally published as “Un tombeau pour l’oeil (En marge de ‘L’Introduction à la musique d’accompagnement pour une scène de film d’Arnold Schoenberg’ de J.-M. Straub),” Cahiers du Cinéma 258-259, July-August 1975).
  • 5This collection is indebted to an issue of the film magazine Balthazar, dedicated to the work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, and includes new interview and texts, and a fully annotated filmography. The complete PDF is freely accessible on the website of Balthazar. With thanks to Oscar Pedersen, Viktor Retoft, Balthazar and the authors.

Texts

On Straub-Huillet’s Poetics of Hylomorphism

Bojana Cvejić, 2019
ARTICLE
24.07.2019
NL EN

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

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, 1969, 1984
CORRESPONDENCE
25.10.2023
EN

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

A Conversation with Jean-Charles Fitoussi

Oscar Pedersen, 2023
CONVERSATION
25.10.2023
EN

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

Daniel Fairfax, 2023
ARTICLE
25.10.2023
EN

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

Ming Tsao, 2023
ARTICLE
25.10.2023
EN

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

Elke Marhöfer, 2023
ARTICLE
25.10.2023
EN

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

Antoine Thirion, 2023
ARTICLE
25.10.2023
EN

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

Andy Rector, 2023
ARTICLE
25.10.2023
EN

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.

Rastko Novakovic, 2023
ARTICLE
04.10.2023
EN

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

Andy Rector, 2024
ARTICLE
10.01.2024
EN

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.

Nicole Brenez, 2023
ARTICLE
25.10.2023
EN

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

Karel Pletinck, 2024
PASSAGE
10.01.2024
NL FR EN

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

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