![]() ![]() The tributes are all original to this piece, save for Bressane’s, which was originally published in longer form in his book Fotodrama (2005) and which appears here in English for the first time with his consent. Those by Júlio Bressane and Julián d’Angiolillo were translated by me into English from Portuguese and from Spanish, respectively. The tributes by Freddy Buache and Luc Moullet were graciously translated from French into English by Ted Fendt, himself a filmmaker who has helped subtitle several of Straub’s recent films. It contains words from older and younger filmmakers working both in narrative and in experimental traditions, as well as from others who have known Straub-Huillet and their work. The body of tributes found below can be considered as both a continuation and an expansion of that Brooklyn Magazine piece. How many of us, if any, can say that about our work?”Īt the time of the MoMA screenings last year, I gathered tributes to Straub-Huillet from filmmakers, programmers, teachers, and writers who had, in various ways, been inspired by them. ![]() In an essay in Fendt’s volume, the filmmaker, teacher, and curator John Gianvito writes of Straub-Huillet’s work that “One comes away with the distinct impression that across their entire body of work there isn’t a frame out of place, or a decision in pre-production, production, or post-production that wasn’t thoroughly considered or that they now regret. To my mind, what the filmmakers are often really being punished for with such criticisms is their politics-not just their offscreen defenses of terrorism against State apparatuses, but their entire steadfast willingness to remain outside of the contemporary mainstream, including a constant, absolute refusal to capitulate to commercial filmmaking standards and resources at the expense of their practice. What has occurred to me instead is that the deliberate, rigorous precision that the filmmakers demand from every element in their films (whether it be a simple piece of clothing, an uninflected delivery of a line of dialogue, or a clean cut from one sunlit outdoor locale to another), at its best, provokes a lightness of spirit. In the recent short film For Renato (2015)-whose origins are to be found, half a century earlier, in the fellow Rome-set film Othon (1969)-director Jean-Marie Straub recites a birthday message for the great cinematographer Renato Berta over a photograph taken on the set of their first collaboration.Ĭritics have often blamed Straub-Huillet for their films’ lack of exposure by deriding the works as needlessly dense. In History Lessons (1972) – an adaptation of an unfinished novel by Bertolt Brecht-interviews with actors playing ancient Roman leaders are interspersed with drives taken through a congested modern-day city, suggesting, centuries later, what the legacy of Rome has become. In The Death of Empedocles (1986) and Black Sin (1988), performers dressed in ancient Greek garb stand in sunlit fields reciting the playwright Friedrich Hölderlin’s words of hope for achieving a communist utopia. ![]() In Fortini/Cani (1976), the Italian author Franco Fortini sits outside his central Italian home and reads aloud from his memoir while the camera pans across hillsides imbued with memories of war. This is partly because the films speak for themselves. It is with pleasure that I sit down to write about Straub-Huillet’s films with the sensation that I have nothing to say. ![]()
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