Los Angeles viaduct photographed by F.W. Murnau
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Article 0
An old man might say he's sick of life, he might complain that it's time to die, that his rheumatism is killing him and his eyes are failing; but just listen to the gusto with which he lets loose with a string of curses, and hear how he lets fly the choicest obscenities and ornate turns of phrase as he composes intricate incantations against fevers. And if he happens to be literate, he just cannot seem to stifle the urge to resist the temptation to scratch with his fingernails a dirty word into a latrine wall.
— Chekov
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MAY DAY
for Huillet...
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Question: The idea of modernity can only be associated with barbarism?
Danièle Huillet: If it is handled by the bourgeoisie, certainly...
--In May, 2003, Huillet sent a letter to the Brussels Cinematek (here), replying to their interest in including Straub and her films in a themed program called Paysages. "The theme 'Landscape' is madness," she wrote, and listed the films of others that could be shown:
TROUBLE WITH HARRY (Hitchcock)
UNE NOUVELLE AVENTURE DE BILLY THE KID (Moullet)
DIE NORD KALOTTE (Peter Nestler)
and Nestler's latest film on the VAL D'AOSTE.
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ANIMALS
Contemporary with Erich von Stroheim's THE MERRY WIDOW (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), John Ford directed KENTUCKY PRIDE in 1925 for Fox (6597 feet).
Ford made four films in 1925: LIGHTNIN', KENTUCKY PRIDE, THE FIGHTING HEART, and THANK YOU.
KENTUCKY PRIDE is the story of a horse through a horse menaced by money, exploitation, and physical injury--which of course can mean death for a horse at the hands of man--and loved by stableboys and life's gamblers, to the point of fame.
KENTUCKY PRIDE was a popular film. It played at the Seattle, Washington, Pantages Theater preceded by the short "Hungry Hounds", a Pathe newsreel, and a Vaudeville musical program; at the Majestic Theater in Houston, Texas, with "Aesop's Fables" (Pathe) cartoons...
For no particular reason KENTUCKY PRIDE is one of the rarest, least screened of Ford's films, though MoMA New York holds a fine print...
The following is an English translation of an excerpt from an interview with Huillet and Straub entirely on John Ford from the Ford Cahiers du cinémahors serie from 1995.
Huillet and Straub on
John Ford's KENTUCKY PRIDE
STRAUB: In Ford there is an absolutely insane social acuity with every character. After having seen KENTUCKY PRIDE and LIGHTNIN', both equally magnificent, I finally understood the question I'd asked myself for a long time about Ford. While there is a story, a fiction, a narrative that proves itself more and more rich as the film progresses, this does not prevent Ford from beginning in an extremely documentary manner, poor at the level of story, as if there weren't going to be any narration -- one also finds this in DR. BULL. Take a look at KENTUCKY PRIDE: for how long do we see the horses? (In the film we see many shots of horses before their "professional" life --Ed.) And it's even more amazing with the text on the screen, and to think of what Bresson said to us when we visited him in 1954 and told him about our project CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH. We talked a little and he let fly: "It is the word which creates the image." Danièle started getting pissed off. These horses, they're there and they tell a different story.
HUILLET: Ford, in his shots, doesn't tell the story that's in the text of the intertitles. We have the shots and understand what's going on between the characters.
STRAUB: One understands a silent Ford with Czech intertitles better than a Mizoguchi without subtitles.
HUILLET: He doesn't try to mimic something about horses that would correspond to the text. Ford and his horses, that was the technique of the miracles in MOSES UND ARON. That was Fordian, indeed.
STRAUB: It wasn't me who said it (laughs. Silence). He filmed his horses as we filmed the snake.
HUILLET: And Ford, who didn't love camera movement, here, because of the horses, moves a lot. Just as we did with the snake. It forced us to move.
STRAUB: We had planned a fixed shot with a snake crossing the frame, but that doesn't exist. We filmed 985 feet times three with a constantly moving camera. With horses it's the same. Incidentally there's no narration, just the documentary, a film begins. Slowly, the narrative becomes richer and it never kills the documentary, it doesn't vampirize it. With Ford, the fiction is never pretentious, it's not a parasite that kills the tree of cinema, an acid that eats everything, a smoke that gets in your eyes, but a thing set at the level of children's stories while still being extremely rich, with the full weight of reality.
HUILLET: That was the whole problem posed by MOSES UND ARON, namely, that one must not let the images block the imagination; it's like that with Ford from the very beginning, that's the way he breathes. Ford doesn't saturate the imagination or reality with anything he shows or tells, and that is extraordinary.
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Past May Day Commemorations of Danièle Huillet on Kino Slang
2007 - Examine Caesars
2008 - Song of Two Humans, But...!
2009 - This Land is Mine
2010 - Men Without Women
2011 - Freedom
2012 - Small Grasses
2013 - That's Just What We Intend
2014 - The Lizards
2015 - (no post -- misery)
2016 - Free Horse
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I kill the living...
and I save the dead.
It is written for everyone to die.
It makes no difference.
Yes. Except for that little
matter of when, and for what.
Bitter Victory (1957)
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Article 1
A MASSACRE IN SEQUENCE
by Alexandre Astruc
Originally published in Paris-Match, 1139 (6 mars 1971)
as "Un Massacre par sequence: Rio Lobo de Howard Hawks
As he gets older, Howard Hawks--he must be something like seventy-five years old now--seems to take a mischievous pleasure in multiplying the number of corpses which litter his films' fertile-green carpet, scattered with cow-dung.
To kill, to shoot, to cool off, to disembowel one's fellow creature by firing at him point-blank with one or another popgun stuffed up to the muzzle with avenging gunpowder was, until now, a pleasure reserved for a small, privileged elite.
It was like a lord's occupation, a profession carefully protected by a a kind of closed group. Lords and masters delightfully abandon themselves, romping joyously in the tall grass, searching for two-legged game, while a small group of non-violent people, slaves and concubines, cook and make tortillas while raking or hoeing rutabagas or manioc.
Alas, alas! This division of labor may have seen its last days. In the latest film of Howard Hawks, Rio Lobo, with the long-lasting John Wayne, everybody, absolutely everybody, without differentiation of age, sex, or race, everybody able to move forward while brandishing a harquebus or a catapult, joins the shooting gallery.
Don't let all that keep you from immediately flocking to Rio Lobo, which is an excellent and marvelous film at the same time as a wonderful example of what a narration of pure cinematographic action can be.
Unlike so many young people whom we know only too well, this old, super-silvered fox, Howard Hawks, is not going to permit his action to slow down and spoil our pleasure under the pretext of philosophizing or of making crocodile tears flow by lingering on rows of corpses which are barely cold and which he just lined up.
Oh no! It's useless to stock up on Kleenex. One hardly has the time or the leisure to slow down in Howard Hawks' films, in Rio Lobo in particular, where gunpowder talks rather quickly and clearly.
In short, in this film, as the captain of Jacques le Fataliste by Diderot says: "Every bullet that leaves a rifle has its mark."
All of this is rather inebriating and exciting for the soul, but it risks not being an especially recommendable spectacle for cardiacs. I greatly fear that I can't advise going elsewhere to all those heart specialists and psychological analysts, who seek in the Western only a new approach in the broadening of the knowledge of man.
In Rio Bravo, indeed in El Dorado, between two performances of shooting and a drinking bout, Mr. John Wayne, tired as he was, still found time to exchange some condescending off-hand remarks with his partners, Mr. Dean Martin or Mr. Robert Mitchum. It's useless for you to flatter yourself because you are hearing anything other than the sputtering of blazing lead in so many voices coming out of so many mouths of fire.
Psychology, lyricism, photography, explanations: Hawks, this time, has thrown everything overboard, including musical filler. Only a thin and dry guitar underscores, with a few Jansenist chords, a straight-lined production.
There seems to be nothing else on the screen. Nothing more than a fantastically played action, served by a black, ferocious humor, nothing more than the broken wire of a spring which expands and vibrates in the blue-gray sky of the forest.
Nothing more. Nothingness, that's what. That is, nothingness successively and in the same film and the same breath: the attack of an armored train by Southern forces in flight, with anti-railroad terrorist commandos, bombardment with wasp-filled bags, train on the loose, pursuit in the branches and the marshes, bloody corpses thrown in the ballast, capture of John Wayne, ambush, John Wayne delivered by the yellow scarves, War of Secession continued and concluded. Camps of prisoners, search for the traitor, murder of a mountebank, arrival of a distressed orphan girl, reconciliation of John Wayne and the Southern son of Robert Mitchum, the orphan's assassination attempt, filling the four killers full of lead by the pair Wayne-Jim Mitchum (Robert's son), Rio Lobo in the hands of a sadistic and extortionist sheriff, love affair of the orphan and Mitchum's son, a ranch attack, occupation of the sheriff's office, sequestration, ransom, final explanation, splash in the water. Whew! Stop. John Wayne triumphs. No kisses. Nothingness, as I have the honor of telling you. Nothing: next to nothing. Nothing but great, admirable cinema.
The only question which still has to be asked concerning this marvelous film, the only mystery left unsolved, is the appearance of John Wayne.
Thick, weighing at least a ton of bones and beef, heavy as an ox lost in the middle of a robbery of thoroughbred horses, a preeminent paunch, bags under the eyes, one wonders how he is able to hoist himself into the saddle, then be able to stay there... Not at all. A good shot of whiskey, then he is off again, dashing and lively. It's because he doesn't want to unleash the old man to give all these young people a chance. He stays in the spotlight. He hangs on, climbing the stairs four at a time like an ex-football player to keep in shape, and sleeping with his boots on.
Burt Lancaster, with his young fifty-nine years, can talk about rest and think retirement.
As for John Wayne, he will leave as the brave do, those shooting-off-at-the-mouths, the veterans.
He will enter the grave as he always lived.
On horse.
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THE SHERIFF
by Alexandre Astruc
Originally published in Paris-Match, 1108 (1 août 1970) as "'Le Shérif': Alexandre Astruc fait rendre justice à Howard Hawks". Translated by Dorothea Hoekzema.
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A fascist is, as everyone knows, someone who despises men, believes only in relationships of force, manifests a pronounced taste for quarrels, considers women as subproletarian, privileged by the fact that they are given the pleasure of washing the dishes and wiping the kids.
Besides, since American directors, and Howard Hawks in particular, are evidently, in so far as they are authors of Westerns, a heap of reactionary riff-raff, of rednecks, of cops, and of militarists, Rio Bravo, a sublime film, merits, without a doubt, the label of fascist. Moreover, Hawks is an old airman, and he must have the mentality of a general. His best pal was the racist Faulkner. Everything fits the pattern: we are at the height of a reactionary period!... Faulkner had an enormous admiration for Hawks, not just because he was his best friend and fought in the war with him. He adapted the war for him. He adapted for him the screenplay of To Have and To Have Not from a novella by this Hemingway who couldn't hold a candle to him. But the greater one is, the humbler he is. The same Faulkner (still for Howard Hawks) adapted detective dramas (like The Big Sleep). Don't be surprised if this The Big Sleep is equally sublime. Let's get back to Rio Bravo, which just came out, to tell--but everything fits the pattern--the profound raison d'être of this film. We are in 1955, and Zinnemann, a so-called leftist, a humanist, and a detestable director, just brought to the screen with Gary Cooper one of these traditional Westerns which permit armchair progressives, especially, to defend a genre which is counter-revolutionary.
This very bad film is called High Noon. In this film in the best tradition, the sheriff Gary Cooper, who is engaged to the Quaker virgin, symbol of the American woman's purity, played by Grace Kelly, future princess of Monaco, makes his exit, his job finished, on the exact day when a killer, whom he had arrested, is going to come back.
Racking his brains, Cooper, just married to his Quaker in a nice wedding, is in the process of leaving. In the end, duty is stronger. He goes back to the city and tries to find someone to help him keep the dangerous bandit from killing him: naturally, as in all humanist films, men are too cowardly and, because of fear, are ready to collaborate with the killer. Which is normal, all humanism having as its first principle good personal conscience and contempt for the unfortunates who do not have the happiness of being visited by divine inspiration: the classic history of the saved.
Cooper, finding no one, performs, against his wishes, his role as hero, and, to really show his disgust, before leaving, throws his sheriff's badge on the ground--what admirable audacity of Zinnemann! We are at the height of moralizing, of the traditional, hypocritical, and so-called progressive kind.
The fascist Hawks is so disgusted with this film that he decides to do a remake of it with his friend Dean Martin. This is Rio Bravo.
The only differences are:
1) The role of Grace Kelly is replaced by that of the barmaid Angie Dickinson. She performs honestly her woman's work, which is to love John Wayne.
2) Put in the same circumstances as Gary Cooper, John Wayne doesn't ask for anyone's help. He has a job to do: he is sheriff; he is paid for that. He locks himself in his office, gets his guns ready and, with the help of a sixty-year-old man who acts as his assistant, awaits with determination the killer's brother, who promised to break into said office.
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3) Stroke of genius. There is a human wreck, a drunk, an alcoholic: Dean Martin. Dean Martin, it is evident, inasmuch as he is a drunkard, does not have a sense of honor, and the function of sheriffs is to despise alcoholics. Well, Wayne protects Dean Martin who, in an admirable scene (I even had tears in my eyes), drunk as he is--but it is well known that Hawks despises the man; he is not like Zinneman, the liberal--finds in himself the moral strength to refuse to pick out from a spittoon money tossed there by the killer. Then, he arrives at the sheriff's and offers to help him. He can't, his hands tremble, he sobers up a little, he succumbs and again touches the accursed bottle. Then John Wayne does this admirable thing: he smacks him in the face, proof of the greatest respect; one doesn't fight with someone he despises--but, evidently, this is again the fascist moral. Rio Bravo is only a Western: a Western is not enriching. This is not like the erotic and avant-garde films of Robbe-Grillet; this is nothing but two tired heroes of forty to fifty years, who criticize each other and drink whisky.
But it is impossible to leave Rio Bravo (like El Dorado, another film of Hawks, which resembles it like a brother) without feeling proud of being a man. The people who make these films are not hacks, they are not manufacturers; they are moralists, in the true sense of the word. The films of Hawks, even the comedies that he made, like Man's Favorite Sport, go much further in the knowledge of man than the so-called Underground analyses and studies do. Why? Because Hawks knows what a man is, and that is why he can make films. One cannot make films if he does not like life, if he does not believe, above all, that the physical manifestations are privileged. The body does not lie, nor does the human face: this is the strength of the cinema and its health as opposed to literature.
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A supplementary reason for the glory of Hawks: he made comedies as well as tragedies. Bringing Up Baby as well as Red River and The Big Sky.
A new reason, naturally, not to take him seriously. It is not serious to make people laugh; it is even shameful. Pagnol and Moliere are an evident proof. Moreover, people who cause laughter are reactionaries; it's well known: American comedy is fascist.
You will excuse me this one time for having retold the plot of the film, which is not my habit. I did it purposely; I did it because it is simply a question of truth, of this truth which is seen as it is filmed.
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by Alexandre Astruc
Originally published in Paris-Match, 1108 (1 août 1970) as "'Le Shérif': Alexandre Astruc fait rendre justice à Howard Hawks". Translated by Dorothea Hoekzema.
A fascist is, as everyone knows, someone who despises men, believes only in relationships of force, manifests a pronounced taste for quarrels, considers women as subproletarian, privileged by the fact that they are given the pleasure of washing the dishes and wiping the kids.
Besides, since American directors, and Howard Hawks in particular, are evidently, in so far as they are authors of Westerns, a heap of reactionary riff-raff, of rednecks, of cops, and of militarists, Rio Bravo, a sublime film, merits, without a doubt, the label of fascist. Moreover, Hawks is an old airman, and he must have the mentality of a general. His best pal was the racist Faulkner. Everything fits the pattern: we are at the height of a reactionary period!... Faulkner had an enormous admiration for Hawks, not just because he was his best friend and fought in the war with him. He adapted the war for him. He adapted for him the screenplay of To Have and To Have Not from a novella by this Hemingway who couldn't hold a candle to him. But the greater one is, the humbler he is. The same Faulkner (still for Howard Hawks) adapted detective dramas (like The Big Sleep). Don't be surprised if this The Big Sleep is equally sublime. Let's get back to Rio Bravo, which just came out, to tell--but everything fits the pattern--the profound raison d'être of this film. We are in 1955, and Zinnemann, a so-called leftist, a humanist, and a detestable director, just brought to the screen with Gary Cooper one of these traditional Westerns which permit armchair progressives, especially, to defend a genre which is counter-revolutionary.
This very bad film is called High Noon. In this film in the best tradition, the sheriff Gary Cooper, who is engaged to the Quaker virgin, symbol of the American woman's purity, played by Grace Kelly, future princess of Monaco, makes his exit, his job finished, on the exact day when a killer, whom he had arrested, is going to come back.
Racking his brains, Cooper, just married to his Quaker in a nice wedding, is in the process of leaving. In the end, duty is stronger. He goes back to the city and tries to find someone to help him keep the dangerous bandit from killing him: naturally, as in all humanist films, men are too cowardly and, because of fear, are ready to collaborate with the killer. Which is normal, all humanism having as its first principle good personal conscience and contempt for the unfortunates who do not have the happiness of being visited by divine inspiration: the classic history of the saved.
Cooper, finding no one, performs, against his wishes, his role as hero, and, to really show his disgust, before leaving, throws his sheriff's badge on the ground--what admirable audacity of Zinnemann! We are at the height of moralizing, of the traditional, hypocritical, and so-called progressive kind.
The fascist Hawks is so disgusted with this film that he decides to do a remake of it with his friend Dean Martin. This is Rio Bravo.
The only differences are:
1) The role of Grace Kelly is replaced by that of the barmaid Angie Dickinson. She performs honestly her woman's work, which is to love John Wayne.
2) Put in the same circumstances as Gary Cooper, John Wayne doesn't ask for anyone's help. He has a job to do: he is sheriff; he is paid for that. He locks himself in his office, gets his guns ready and, with the help of a sixty-year-old man who acts as his assistant, awaits with determination the killer's brother, who promised to break into said office.
3) Stroke of genius. There is a human wreck, a drunk, an alcoholic: Dean Martin. Dean Martin, it is evident, inasmuch as he is a drunkard, does not have a sense of honor, and the function of sheriffs is to despise alcoholics. Well, Wayne protects Dean Martin who, in an admirable scene (I even had tears in my eyes), drunk as he is--but it is well known that Hawks despises the man; he is not like Zinneman, the liberal--finds in himself the moral strength to refuse to pick out from a spittoon money tossed there by the killer. Then, he arrives at the sheriff's and offers to help him. He can't, his hands tremble, he sobers up a little, he succumbs and again touches the accursed bottle. Then John Wayne does this admirable thing: he smacks him in the face, proof of the greatest respect; one doesn't fight with someone he despises--but, evidently, this is again the fascist moral. Rio Bravo is only a Western: a Western is not enriching. This is not like the erotic and avant-garde films of Robbe-Grillet; this is nothing but two tired heroes of forty to fifty years, who criticize each other and drink whisky.
But it is impossible to leave Rio Bravo (like El Dorado, another film of Hawks, which resembles it like a brother) without feeling proud of being a man. The people who make these films are not hacks, they are not manufacturers; they are moralists, in the true sense of the word. The films of Hawks, even the comedies that he made, like Man's Favorite Sport, go much further in the knowledge of man than the so-called Underground analyses and studies do. Why? Because Hawks knows what a man is, and that is why he can make films. One cannot make films if he does not like life, if he does not believe, above all, that the physical manifestations are privileged. The body does not lie, nor does the human face: this is the strength of the cinema and its health as opposed to literature.
A supplementary reason for the glory of Hawks: he made comedies as well as tragedies. Bringing Up Baby as well as Red River and The Big Sky.
A new reason, naturally, not to take him seriously. It is not serious to make people laugh; it is even shameful. Pagnol and Moliere are an evident proof. Moreover, people who cause laughter are reactionaries; it's well known: American comedy is fascist.
You will excuse me this one time for having retold the plot of the film, which is not my habit. I did it purposely; I did it because it is simply a question of truth, of this truth which is seen as it is filmed.
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Article 0
Hulot on Charlot
Laughter is the most difficult of the screen arts . . . and the most varied; there are no two comedians alike. Among the world's few great comedians is the Frenchman, JACQUES TATI, who, in this short interview, tells the basic difference in technique as reflected by CHARLIE CHAPLIN's 'Tramp' and Tati's 'M. Hulot'.
THIS is a very delicate comparison. First, because Chaplin has made (and made well) over fifty films while I made (and failed) with two short films, and almost succeeded with two long films. So you see, it is difficult for me to speak of Chaplin; and moreover I believe it is too easy to mention Chaplin as soon as comic films are mentioned. Before Chaplin there was Max Linder, and before him Little Tich. I believe everyone has the right to make a funny film. I am sure that tomorrow a young man with other conceptions than mine will undertake to present the visual effects of the gag.
What I wanted to present with the character of Hulot was a man you can meet in the street, not a music-hall character—and I know what a music-hall character is, since I have been in the music-hall. For instance, if you invite Chaplin to a dinner you would be certain to have a genial clown who would turn to his wonderful tricks—after eating. With Hulot it is dif-ferent. You may or may not wish to invite him for dinner, because he is a person. He does not wear a label saying: "I am a funny man." He is at the same level as the other people in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot: and besides, he does not know he is being funny.
Some Do Not Laugh
Hulot is not necessarily funny to every-body. Some spectators do not laugh at him. Chaplin, from the start, presents himself as a funny character. He finds his gags directly. Suppose Chaplin wants to fight a man much stronger than himself, If this man is unloading a very full lorry, Chaplin will wait until everything is unloaded, when the man is very tired; then he will start to fight him. In Hulot's case, he will never wait until the man has unloaded his lorry, he will not think of waiting until the other man is tired before he starts fighting. That is why I do not think there can be a comparison.
The problem for the comedian is always to find gags, and Chaplin has found some excellent ones; and I hope others will find other very good ones. As far as the construction of the story is concerned, Chaplin takes the responsibility of the story on his shoulders. He takes over the script. Hulot does not do this at all, he passes, he closes a door, you cannot see him, it is for you to find him, it is for you to decide whether he is your friend or just someone you would not care to invite into your house.
Inanimate Objects
When a comedian builds a gag, the ability to use inanimate objects gives the greater possibilities. For instance, recently my wife was ill, she had a piece of pipe to put in her nose—it did not cure her, incidentally—and it looked like a sausage. If this had happened in a Chaplin film, trying to make the pipe work, he would have taken a piece of bread and pretended to eat the pipe. Hulot could not do such a thing. He does not know things, they come to him. He is a fly-paper, he does not look for things. . . . Take, for instance, the scene in the cemetery, the wreath with the dead leaves. Hulot just wanted to take out his car tire, and without his doing anything about it, the leaves stick to it and it makes a wreath. If this had happened to Chaplin he would have deliberately put the laves on the tire, in order to transform it into a wreath and thus be able to decently leave the cemetery. Hulot does not get out, he stays until the end, shakes hands with everybody. The gag as presented by Chaplin might have had a more intelligent value, the idea is the same; but Hulot is not a doer, he is perhaps more childish . .. he does not dare.
Films and Filming,
Charles Chaplin Number,
August 1957...
August 1957...
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Article 1
Spanky and Our Gang:
Jean- Pierre Gorin's MY CRASY LIFE
by
BARBARA OSBORN
(from The Independent, November 1992, Vol. 15, No. 9)
My Crasy Life (the "s" mimics Latino English) is about a Samoan Crip gang in Long Beach known as the Sons of Samoa (SOS). Most scenes were developed, scripted, and acted by the SOS gangsters or gangbangers, as they're commonly called. The script evolved through a series of meetings with the gang. Gorin brought in a laptop computer, they told him stories about their lives, and he started mapping out scenes. Gorin would later come back with scenes written down to check for accuracy and get suggestions for revisions.
"A great deal of this film was about listening to what these guys had to say and translating that into a cinematic strategy that would impact the film," Gorin says. The gang had very clear ideas about how they wanted to be portrayed. They were intent on including material about their Samoan heritage. The film contains scenes where they discuss Samoan ghosts, and one gang member is filmed taking a trip to Samoa—their mythic paradise lost—to visit relatives. The boyz adamantly refused to be depicted as victims or as a symptom of social disease. They were most concerned with a fidelity to the details of their lives and with portraying some of the joy and empowerment of gangbanging.
The film was produced for $260,000. Gorin and crew shot for 15 days in Long Beach with additional filming in Samoa and Hawaii. As they shot, Gorin showed the gang "video dailies" but, he says, the gangsters were less interested in watching than in doing. They came to the editing room only once. But during the shooting, they were fully engaged, yelling "action" and "cut" and debating continuity questions. Gorin offered to pay the gang for their work, but the boyz preferred that Gorin and his producers, Cameron Allen and Daniel Marks, pay for a recording session instead. The film includes the scene in which the gangsters go to the studio to record their raps.
Documentary sequences are interwoven throughout the film. (The terms "documentary" and "fiction" are used here in a narrow sense simply to describe degrees of preparation and set up.) Among the documentary elements are a series of unscripted talking head interviews that probe gangster experience. Under the knowing questioning of an older gangbanger named Bullet, the boyz speak openly about why they joined the gang and when they'll quit; their identity as Samoans and Crips ("If you had take out a Samoan or a Crip, who would you kill?"); their experience with family, drugs, crime, jail, and getting even (Joker recalls getting stabbed and the homeys "taking care of what needed to be taken care of ").
Gorin's documentary camera also follows Sergeant Jerry Kaono on patrol. The police car searchlight cuts the nocturnal stillness of the Long Beach alleys, slithering over doorways and into garages, searching out illegal activity. But Kaono's patrol is uneventful. Like concentric circles, the police presence surrounds gang turf, but the two worlds rarely touch. The most unorthodox and conspicuous of the film's fictional devices is a voice that emanates from the sergeant's squad-car computer. It is just one of many "trip wires," as Gorin calls them—dozens of moments in which viewers are jostled from a complacent reading of the film and reminded that what they are seeing is neither cinema vérité nor Hollywood drama. Gorin resists the temptation to make the voice a source of authority or analysis, although it starts out that way in the film. But the computer's commentary becomes discursive and inconsistent. The patrol car voice taunts the officer's efforts to help the gangsters ("Why don't you give it up, Sergeant?"), coos seductively ("Do you think of me as your companion, Jerry?"), and ruminates on the incomprehensibility of gangster life ("These gangsters, Jerry, do they hold as much mystery for you as they do for me?"). As Gorin explained to an audience at Sundance, the computer's authority degenerates: "It's the voice of God with a Ph.D in Sociology. Then it's Hal. Then it's not Big Brother, but Little Brother, like a faithful dog. So the information is less up here [in the computer] and more coming out of the gangsters themselves."
Gorin's mix of "fiction" and "documentary" wasn't meant to dupe the audience into mistaking one for the other. In fact, Gorin is incredulous when viewers don't catch the fiction. "There's a mugging scene with three changes of camera angle!" he sputters. "A gangster comes out of the Samoan jungle and says 'Fuck Margaret Mead' and people think it's documentary!"
The film takes for granted the irrelevance of which strategy gets closer to "the truth" of the gangsters' lives and self-image. In an interview, Gorin offered an example of how documentary and fiction blended during the filmmaking process. (Gorin prefers the term "documentation," a word that offers a sense of the process of accumulating layers of information and the drama inherent in that process.) In one instance, they had developed a scene around a routine event in the 'hood: Someone comes to buy drugs. Initial filming was interrupted by a real-life dope deal. They waited and started over. Meanwhile, the gangster who was supposed to transact the fictional deal suggested that he put a "jack move" (mug) on the buyer, played by the film's white intern. Gorin agreed, but didn't tell the intern about the change of plans. The scene, says Gorin, is "close to the ground and, at the same time, it is a pure, fictional construct."
Arguably the film's most radical aspect is not its play between fictional and dramatic sequences, but its relation to its subject. Gorin did not want the film to be about the Sons of Samoa, at least not in the sense that a documentary normally has a subject and the filmmaker, sitting in judgment, takes a position outside it. (Gorin, who can be witheringly direct and passionately opinionated, remarked at the Sundance panel Truth In Documentary that, "the pandering voyeurism" of a film like Paris Is Burning was the opposite of what he wanted to do.) Gorin began making documentaries because dramatic filmmaking was formally "locked up." But now he's convinced that documentary is just as entrenched in its own constraining codes of subject-object positioning and melodramatic stories in which conflicts must be resolved. Gorin worked with Godard making films as part of the Dziga Vertov collective in the late sixties. Since coming to the U.S. 15 years ago, he has made two other documentaries: Poto and Cabengo and Routine Pleasures. In discussing My Crasy Life, Gorin repeatedly mentions not a documentary but Luis Buñuel's fiction film Los Olvidados as a touchstone. That film is about Mexico City street kids and was based on stories Buñuel drew from reform school records. Los Olvidados is a film that Buñuel argued had a social argument but made no moral judgments.
Likewise My Crasy Life departs from moral grandstanding. There are no good guys or bad guys. In this sense, the film is closer to how gangsters think about their own lives. "They think tragedy," says Gorin, "we think melodrama, with morality. They don't judge their lives or indict the system; they just live them. I want a fiction disengaged from melodrama."
Daniel Marks, one of the film's producers and an anthropologist, adds that people never realize how normal gangster life is for gangsters. And yet despite the film's absence of melodramatic framing, the film is not dispassionate. Says Gorin, "When you're on the inside, you feel the warmth, the community. You don't feel the violence." But there is violence aplenty, as the film indicates through its inclusion of police homicide photos showing some bloody hits. "The film avoids violence," Gorin noted at Sundance, "yet it gets to 99 percent of what their lives are about—which is young men talking like old guys who see the end of their lives coming up. 'How old was so-and-so when he died?''Fourteen'; That's the tragedy."
While challenging cinematic forms, My Crasy Life tries simultaneously to challenge public discourse surrounding gangs. In Southern California, gangs are a subject of daily, almost obsessive, discussion in the press. Some 375 gang-related homicides took place in Los Angeles last year. Despite the endless coverage, the gangs virtually never have a chance to speak for themselves. (It took three days of rioting in Los Angeles before it occurred to any news operation, in this case, Nightline, that they might actually talk to gang members.) "We did not produce a film that replicates bastardized social analysis," says Marks. Gorin agrees that they wanted to change the discourse, and thus eliminated from the film any interpretation by "experts" from the justice system, the welfare system, and so on.
Lacking such interpretation, the film impresses its audience as much with the subject's ultimate impenetrability as with its depiction of gangster life. If documentaries are meant to bring problems and people within our comprehension, then My Crasy Life deliberately fails; gangster life remains
full of paradox and opaque. "You are as inside the ethos, pathos, and rhetoric of gangster life as you can be," says Gorin, and at the same time, "you get your true distance from it."
Perhaps the clearest example of this is the Gangster Glossary. Gang members take turns standing in front of the camera, defining gangspeak terms. Gorin calls the sequence a "Dadaist poem" in which slang is used to define slang. The list begins with a couple of easy words, terms that, once defined, we understand. We think we're getting someplace. But as the list continues, the rat-a-tat-tat of gangster speech becomes increasingly difficult to follow and we're left reeling in a swirl of meaning that we only half follow:
O.G: Original gangster. A gangster back in the old days.
Baby Gangster: A peewee like me and the rest of the homeys. Young bucks trying to come up.
Golddigger: A bitch who tries to come into the `hood and juice you for your duckets.
Trippin: When a nigger comes out with a swole face.
Low: Like me, Lil Cool. Crazy.
Wolf Ticket: A lyin' ass motherfucka.
207: Motherfuckin' kidnap.
187: Murderer. B.K.
Sissy: A 6-0 from the Westside of L.A. Fuck dem muthafuckers.
Sherm: The stuff they shoot in dead people to make em so they don't smell bad.
Sea Rag: Our color. The color of justice.
Rip: Someone like me. A Crip.
Gauge: A gun. A rifle that you pump. You shoot slobs with.
Anticipating our bewilderment, one of the boyz directly addresses the viewer: "For all you mother-fuckers who don't understand what they saying, as far as you IBM motherfuckers, this is straight from the gangster 'hood. Trey love and we outta here."
Barbara Osborn is a journalist who writes about film, TV, and technology. She has also worked with gang members through the Los Angeles Probation Department.
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Article 0
Yoshikata Yoda
by Judy Stone
by Judy Stone
He spent the next twenty years as the trusted and tormented scriptwriter for the late Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956), one of the master filmmakers of the world. Mizoguchi is known best in this country for Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff but the great body of his work explores the lives of women marked by powers of endurance.
Yoda threw new light on the Japanese director in a series of lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, where an unparalleled retrospective of Mizoguchi's work is being offered by the Pacific Film Archive.
With an all-too-vivid recollection of their fierce creative battles,Yoda is not presenting any hagiographic portrait. "In my dreams, I strangled Mizoguchi many times," he said with indisputable glee.
"We had quarrels like husband and wife. So often, I said, 'I'll be damned if I change this another time!' Then I thought, 'But if I don't, the child will never be born.' It was worth doing work with Mizoguchi. I felt as though I expended every possible effort. Not that I ever enjoyed working with him. He swore at me and called me a hungry devil. That's a Buddhist phrase for a hell where one goes forever hungry. He was a three-clawed fiend, always at me."
Yoda denied that Mizoguchi was a "feminist" director. "Mizoguchi was not comfortable with 'liberated' women or portraying upper-middle-class ladies." In Japan, they say that "stronger women and stronger [nylon] stockings" appeared after World War II, "but Mizoguchi," Yoda noted, drawing a parallel in reference to Women of the Night about prostitutes in postwar Tokyo, "was more comfortable with cotton stockings."
After years of collaboration,Yoda's first real clue to the director's fascination with women came when they were once alone at the public baths, the usual retreat when a scene was not going well. That day, he asked Yoda, "Do you wonder why I always keep my T-shirt on in here?" He removed it, displayed deep scars on his back from wounds inflicted by a rejected geisha when he was in his twenties and his only comment was, "Woman is a dangerous thing."
The two men began their association in 1936 when Mizoguchi was forty with two precedent-breaking realistic films: Osaka Elegy about a young telephone operator who allows the boss to seduce her in order to help her family financially and Sisters of Gion about a "modern" independent geisha and her older sister.
Yoda, then twenty-nine and recovering from serious lung troubles, did not know any geishas and could not afford to visit the first-class tea, houses in Kyoto's Gion quarter. He conducted his research from a kitchen corner in a less expensive house where the geishas were prostitutes.
Government censors who felt the geishas should be depicted as women graciously serving their clientele objected to the bitter realism. "These two films were epoch-making," Yoda explained, "because we revealed for the first time the underpinnings of society"
Whether the films were realistic or as other-worldly as Ugetsu, they were distinguished by the memorable images framed by a director with the eye of an artist. Mizoguchi, son of a poor Tokyo carpenter, had started out to be a painter, but then worked as a reporter in Kobe.
Yoda's own sympathies were shaped by the rice riots he observed in his childhood in Kyoto. As the financial panic deepened, women were sold into prostitution.Yoda's mother ran a small shop after the death of her husband, a silk designer.
Engrossed in the novels of Dostoyevsky and Ibsen,Yoda began writing unusually realistic stories in high school.
A forbidden copy of Feuerbach's Dialectical Materialism"fell upon me like an avalanche," he said. Overnight, he was converted from Christianity to atheism.The violin lessons he had been taking were soon turned to another purpose. In 1929, he began using the violin instrument case to transport leaflets urging the workers of a large spinning mill to organize.The leaflets were traced to the bank where he was a teller, he was arrested, tortured by the special police and imprisoned for a month.
"The studios in those days were filled with riff-raff, everything from bums to vicious criminals," Yoda recalled. He once saw a man shoved into a vat of the blue dye used for night scenes. The cameramen wore daggers to forestall any problems with the actors.
Yoda's initial script, Naniwa Elegy, marked the first portrayal of a juvenile-delinquent girl for a non-sentimental drama. The producers didn't like it, released it without publicity and effectively buried it.
Of the twenty-three films he made with Mizoguchi, Yoda thinks his best scenario was Chikamatsu Monogatari, which deals with the responsibilities and interdependencies of many relationships.
The film that far surpassed his script, Yoda said, was The Life of Oharu, which chronicled a woman's forced descent into degradation.
"There Mizoguchi captured everything I intended," Yoda said. "There is a candid and gritty quality there that is not found in any of his other works. In his last films like Ugetsu, he achieved a total fusion of his realistic and romantic styles. He was constantly concerned with how to create scenes true to life.
"He usually portrayed women in oppressed situations. Does that mean that he had a great deal of sympathy or love for the women?" Yoda asked rhetorically. "I doubt that. His way of looking at things was through the eyes of an egotist. But, did he place his female characters in a position where he took pleasure in their suffering? I also doubt that."
Leonard Schrader, who is translating Yoda's book on Mizoguchi, believes that women served him as a symbol of the artist's suffering in an indifferent society. At the same time, Mizoguchi was tortured by the belief that he was not a great artist. "This man you call Mizoguchi," he would cry in despair, "is nothing but a fool."
Yoda's initial script, Naniwa Elegy, marked the first portrayal of a juvenile-delinquent girl for a non-sentimental drama. The producers didn't like it, released it without publicity and effectively buried it.
Of the twenty-three films he made with Mizoguchi, Yoda thinks his best scenario was Chikamatsu Monogatari, which deals with the responsibilities and interdependencies of many relationships.
The film that far surpassed his script, Yoda said, was The Life of Oharu, which chronicled a woman's forced descent into degradation.
"There Mizoguchi captured everything I intended," Yoda said. "There is a candid and gritty quality there that is not found in any of his other works. In his last films like Ugetsu, he achieved a total fusion of his realistic and romantic styles. He was constantly concerned with how to create scenes true to life.
"He usually portrayed women in oppressed situations. Does that mean that he had a great deal of sympathy or love for the women?" Yoda asked rhetorically. "I doubt that. His way of looking at things was through the eyes of an egotist. But, did he place his female characters in a position where he took pleasure in their suffering? I also doubt that."
Leonard Schrader, who is translating Yoda's book on Mizoguchi, believes that women served him as a symbol of the artist's suffering in an indifferent society. At the same time, Mizoguchi was tortured by the belief that he was not a great artist. "This man you call Mizoguchi," he would cry in despair, "is nothing but a fool."
Judy Stone
5/23/76
from the book
Eye on the World:
Conversations with International Filmmakers,
Silman-James Publishers, 1997.
![]()
from the book
Eye on the World:
Conversations with International Filmmakers,
Silman-James Publishers, 1997.
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Article 0
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TA'ANG (Wang Bing)
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Article 2
He who wears sandals doomed to be hit by men in white pants
As always the little ones watch the winner, the grown-ups the loser.
Behrouz Rae
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Article 1
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Article 0
The role of the artist
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Liberté, la nuit
Emmanuelle Riva 1927-2017
Liberté, la nuit (1983)
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Article 1
Soviet
U.S.
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"There is no ice that lasts." (J.S. Bach)
A
LAST MINUTE ADDITION TO THE
STRAUB/HUILLET
RETROSPECTIVE
IN LOS ANGELES
TO BE HELD AT THE BIJOU THEATER AT
THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS
Friday, February 24th and Saturday, February 25th
7:30pm. Admission: FREE
2 nights, 11 short films, and 2 features
by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub
in French, German, Italian, and Arabic,
with works ranging from 2 minutes to 70 minutes in duration
films either shot on 35mm (most screened on 35mm) or digital video
with texts and music by 27 different authors, composers, poets, and historians:
Mallarmé, Michelet, Schoenberg, Duras, Haydn, Barrès, Varèse, Vittorini, Pasolini, Tasso, Nestler, Rousseau, Corneille, Brecht, Schreiber, Schubert, Mahler, Pavese, Kurtág, Kafka, Eisler, Becher, Malraux, Hussein, Fortini, and Hölderlin
*
INTRODUCTION
Andy Rector
Jean-Marie Straub (b. January 8, 1933, Metz, France ) and Danièle Huillet (b. May 1, 1936, Paris, France) have made 49 films and videos since their first short film, Machorka-Muff, in 1962. Conscientiously objecting to France's role in the Algerian War, Straub and Huillet fled Paris to Germany in 1958. There they scouted locations for a film on Johann Sebastian Bach, already scripted before leaving France. But it took 10 years to find financiers who did not object to their absolute insistence on direct sound, and real musicians, as opposed to dubbed sound, playback, and actors aping the movements of musicians ("what transpires on people's faces when they do nothing more than perform a task is certainly something that is linked to the cinematograph," wrote Straub). During the 10 year period while seeking support for the Bach film they found themselves becoming filmmakers for another purpose: to ring the alarm and make lucid the gravity of Germany’s rearmament after World War II (Machorka-Muff, the satire of a military man exalted by the reinstatement of his Nazi pals, their memories and munitions, written by Heinrich Böll) and to show the brutal continuity of Germany's history – as imperialists, capitalists, fascists, social democrats – in that order and all of a piece (Not Reconciled, also from Böll). At age 33, Straub was not lionizing their new profession in exile but stating an essential fact of film and literary history when he wrote in his 3-page autobiography from 1966: "... it appeals to me to make, as a Frenchman, in Germany, films that no German could have known how to make (just as no German would have known how to make Rossellini's Germany Year Zero or Fear, no American Buñuel's The Young One or Renoir's The Southerner, and no Italian could have written The Charterhouse of Parma.)" An extreme of this unheimlich (literally "un-home-like") practice is Franz Kafka writing Amerika without ever having visited America; the Straubs made a film of Kafka's incomplete novel in 1984, and called it Class Relations. In 1968 the Bach film was finally realized. Straub dedicated a screening of it to the North Vietnamese resistance against U.S. aggression. The film is today considered a classic of cinema, when it is shown.
Still exiles, they moved to Rome in the early 70s. Their work and pleasure with direct sound led to open air films throughout Italy, movies often set entirely outdoors and using preexisting texts –either Italian stories written by the exceptional post-World-War-II Italian communist authors Franco Fortini, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini – or setting German or French texts in the Italian landscape. (To say "landscape" of Huillet/Straub's films seems diminutive to the air, sky, soil, thickets, light, insects and animals one sees very clearly there.) The German of Arnold Schoenberg's biblical-modernist opera Moses and Aaron is blocked in and projected out of a middle-Italy cut-stone Abruzzo amphitheater; Bertolt Brecht's Das Kapital-ization of Julius Caesar's empire is told to a young man who comes to consciousness as he drives through the streets of then-present-day Rome; French tragedian Pierre Corneille's Othon is layered into a strange music of foreign accents, intrigues of love, state, and collapse on ancient Roman ruins while facing modern traffic and commercial buildings; we are in quiet mountains and villages of the Appennines, through precise panning shots with Fortini remembering the massacres there; to the utter south, revelations of country and family in Sicily are sung out from a Vittorini novel; on Mount Etna Friedrich Hölderlin's Empedocles, in thick German, "starts from scratch" and worships the Earth, to the outrage of town authorities; and to the north, down Tuscan slopes and in Buti forests and ravines, nine films based on Pavese (particularly Dialogues with Leuco) and Vittorini (Women of Messina) were made by Huillet and Straub together. After Huillet passed away on October 9, 2006, Straub continued their "cinema of exhilaration" where "a tracking shot can make you cry" (Thom Andersen) and made four more works based on Pavese's Dialogues with Leuco, even some using digital video.
Always going further than themselves, Huillet/Straub also made films outside of this 35-year Italian base, five works of which – with French subjects, authors, and situations – we are showing in our first program: Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice (1977), En rachâchant (1982), Lothringen! (1994), plus two cinetracts made in response to specific cases of brutality and murders by police in France, Europa 2005, 27 Octobre and Joachim Gatti.
The selection of Huillet/Straub films and videos we are screening is not meant to represent all phases of their work – though in a sense any film or video of Huillet/Straub is representative of their cinematographic craft and those of their collaborators: a commitment paid equally to every project, whether a 35mm film or miniDV video, whether a "superproduction" engaging an entire orchestra, conductor, and opera company (Moses and Aaron) or a 7-minute 35mm short film based on a children's book (En rachâchant) – or a short parable from Kafka shot on gritty video with three characters in 5-square feet of a Parisian apartment standing in for an outpost in the desert (Jackals and Arabs).
In their way of production, and within the movies themselves, everything is of equal importance. Huillet has even accused the modern world of separating time and space, where it was once better united, and that cinema could rediscover a little of this unity. When they say "To live means to defend a form," this has less to do with philosophy ("I would have shot Heidegger."–Straub) but is related more to the slow annihilation of peasants and farmers in an industrial society (detailed in their 1983 film Too Early, Too Late), to take just one example.
"Maybe it's not even a movie," Straub wondered aloud in a post-screening talk on one of his later videos, Corneille-Brecht (2009). As a continuation of a "search for degree zero" (Luc Moullet’s phrase, from a recent appreciation) indeed this movie is "just" a woman, Cornelia Geiser, reading a text frontally to the camera in the same corner of Straub's Parisian apartment (once Huillet's mother's) that we will see several times in our program. But the words and their drama and intonation invoke massive friezes, ultimate judgments, conflagrations, the "collective hate" of Rome, “the sole object of my resentment” (Corneille), then goes down even deeper (with a Brecht radio play), down to a Hades where a trial for war crimes is taking place against an imperialist, perhaps the same imperialist, perhaps any imperialist. It would be foolish to call this minimalist, for even if the movie’s sound were turned off one could be fascinated by the changes of color in wardrobe and sunlight, here effected by jump cuts – yet another cinematographic vein Straub tapped for both sudden and gradual excitation. Fascination, magic, and belief are part of their cinema too, occurring amid its total opposite – analysis, critical faculty, and errant thought – and back again. One may feel upon leaving the theater a sharpening of the senses.
Just one of many elements that makes Huillet/Straub’s films special is their use of direct sound, an undying principle of theirs, for the richness of reality it gives, for the language, accents and timbre of voice it records – for its element of chance, its explosion of the off-screen (thus the imagination of the viewer), its wild resistance to the authors' iron framework while shooting (one can’t cut wherever ones likes, but in blocks; Huillet: "Each image has a sound and you're forced to respect it."). Huillet/Straub are realist filmmakers and direct sound is a means against cinema's trickery and artifice (something the Straubs are concerned with, but in the opposite sense that the title of one academic essay on their work epitomized – "The Destruction of Narrative Pleasure"). Their films are for the world and information of every worldly or human intonation ("Dubbing is equivalent to a belief in the duality of the soul," said Jean Renoir, one of their masters). "The artist is only a receptacle of sensations, a brain, a recording machine [...]: The immensity, the torrent of the world in a tiny inch of material," Cézanne is quoted as saying in one of Huillet/Straub’s films about his work. To which Straub added: "... look at a Cézanne canvas, it doesn’t provoke sensations in you, you see there sensations materialized.” And Huillet: "You can't teach people how to think, how to use their eyes and ears – or make effective politics for that matter – they either can or can't – you can pass on a spark of something, show them a concrete operation, but not much more."
ET CETERA
Louis Seguin has written that Huillet and Straub, and by implication many of the people in their films and the characters they play:
“… belong to a non-hierarchical and frontierless clan of rebels, stateless persons and social misfits, and the challenge of their cinema matches this permanent irreducibility.”
Jean-Claude Biette has written that in all of Straub/Huillet’s films:
“… there is an active mixture of two passions, aesthetics and politics: Two kinds of characters or figures exist between these two poles. The positive ones, who are either resistance fighters – characters that are so strong as to not be entirely lucid (the grandmother in Not Reconciled) or that have a lucidity that exceeds reality (Moses) – artists (with a great capacity to resist) – Bach, Schoenberg – or resistance writers – Brecht, Pavese, Fortini ... And the on the other pole, the negative ones – bankers, lawyers, soldiers, men of power, agents of repression and democratic opportunists …”
Thom Andersen, on the occasion of Straub's 80th birthday, wrote:
"In this age that manufactures opinions like widgets and despises conviction, (Straub) is a man of conviction who says, 'I try to have no opinions.' His work, his life are animated by a passion for the real and especially for the natural world. On the occasion of the German television premiere of Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Permit Herself To Choose in Her Turn, he wrote of the empty space, the empty ground shown at the end of each act, 'How sweet this space would be without the tragedy of cynicism, of oppression, of imperialism, of exploitation. Our earth, let us free it!' Introducing The Death of Empedocles at La Fresnoy, he said, 'if we don't want all to perish in nothingness and ruin, there is only one thing that will ever save us: a communist utopia. And not just us but the only precious thing we have, namely the ground we walk upon! Not the ground as such, but the earth and the children of the earth.' You can sense this love of the earth in almost all their films, particularly the later ones. They are the only films I know in which you can feel the force of gravity."
Tag Gallagher, from his article “The Greatest Filmmakers You’ve Never Heard Of”:
“What's wonderful about any Straub-Huillet movie is a style of performance that, real as only art can be, makes so many other movies seem tepid and stale. Once you turn on to it, the style is overpowering. It demands months of practice by the actors – a year and a half in the case of Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles), their 1986 adaptation of Hölderlin's early 19th-century play. Then filming begins, with often a dozen takes of each shot – 48 for one on Sicilia! to find the right way for the grandfather to say, 'Hee!'
It's to Robert Bresson that the Straubs are often likened, because of their stress on the mechanics of performance. But Bresson's people are spirits miserably imprisoned in bodies, whereas the Straubs' are proud exhibitionists, 'show people' like characters in Jean Renoir's or John Ford's pictures. And thus their words onscreen, no matter how trivial on paper, have substance, the intensity of life and its years. Suddenly movies matter.
Then somehow it doesn't matter that, say, Cézanne is speaking with a woman's voice (in their films Cézanne, 1989, and Une Visite au Louvre, 2004), or that the actors in Operai, contadini (Workers, peasants, 2000) are reading from scripts in their hands. They incarnate their characters the way your mother did when reading to you in bed. We believe in these people.
'Be at one with your body,' the Straubs tell their actors. And, putting their bodies into their lines, the actors are at one with the text. Are performers in other movies ever so physical? Does anyone else burst words so bodily as does Astrid Ofner in the Straubs'Antigone (1991)?"
*
PROGRAM NOTES
Except where otherwise attributed, all program notes are adapted and augmented by Andy Rector from those by Joshua Siegel (MoMA)
1
Toute révolution est un coup de dés(Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice). 1977. France. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. With Huillet, Helmut Färber, Michel Delahaye, Georges Goldfayn, Manfred Blank, Marilù Parolini, Aksar Khaled, Andrea Spingler, Dominique Villain. 35mm. In French; English subtitles. 10 min.
In 1977, Straub and Huillet invited friends to recite Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance"—with its astonishing use of verse, syntax, division, caesura and spacing—on a hill alongside the Communards’ Wall in Père Lachaise cemetery, where some 147 men and women of the Paris Commune were executed in 1871.
This is one of the few films in the history of cinema to use a poem, from top to bottom, not as its inspiration but as its source and total formation (oddly this was much more common in the silent cinema!). Just one formal act in relation to the original typography of Mallarmé’s poem, as noted by Jonathan Rosenbaum: “Women read the portions in the lower-case letters while facing screen left, men read portions of in capital letters while facing screen right.”
The title of the film is a line by French historian Jules Michelet on the Commune made contemporaneous to its chances: “Every revolution is a throw of dice.” The last line of the film, thus the Mallarmé poem: “Every thought emits a roll of the dice”. Jean-Marie Straub: “Fidel Castro or someone else said once, ‘The revolution is like God’s grace, it has to be made anew each day, it becomes new every day, a revolution is not made once and for all’. And it’s exactly like that in daily life. There is no division between politics and life, art and politics.”
It’s not hard to understand why these ambitious filmmakers were drawn to Mallarmé’s late-19th-century poem, which as Mallarmé wrote “takes place in the combinations of the Infinite face to face with the Absolute.”
En rachâchant. 1982. France. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. Based on “Ah! Ernesto!,” by Marguerite Duras. With Olivier Straub, Nadette Thinus, Bernard Thinus, Raymond Gérard. 35mm. In French; English subtitles. 7 min. 35mm print.
Beneath the subversive comedy of Marguerite Duras’ 1971 children’s book “Ah! Ernesto!,” about a determined nine-year-old boy who one fine day refuses to go to school, lies a terse and tough rejection of all forms of authority, whether patriarchal family, school, or nation. The title is untranslatable but “onomatopoeically hints at harping on, harking back, buying back, muttering, mumbling, chewing, knowing, fretting, fuming and murdering!” (Gilbert Adair). The film’s “hard-as-granite” black and white cinematography is by Henri Alekan, well known for the argentic Beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau.
Jean-Marie Straub: “We allowed ourselves the luxury of making a 7-minute film (between two bigger feature productions)…”
Huillet: “What you say is terrible. That it is a luxury, that freedom is a luxury.”
Lothringen!1994. Germany/France. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. Based on Colette Baudoche, by Maurice Barrès. With Emmanuelle Straub, André Warynski, Dominique Dosdat. 35mm. In French; English subtitles. 21 min. 35mm print.
In fourteen shots—mostly descriptive panoramas of a region in northeast France many times invaded or annexed by the Germans as “Imperial Territory”— Lothringen! tells the story of an uprooted and humiliated people. “Lothringen” is the German word for Alsace-Lorraine, France, capital Metz. 1870, 1907, 1940—mistreatment, displacement, exodus. “The German flood rose constantly and threatened to overwhelm everything.” “An ordinance has just suppressed the teaching of French in four villages.” This film is based on a novel called Colette Baudoche, Story of a Young Girl in Metz. The fragments of the novel used in the film are those related to history, of which the character Colette is the product (as is Straub, who was born in Metz and grew up under German occupation). A rich and condensed historical chronical where fiction is an apparition of present history, Lothringen! is the Straub/Huillet work that most resembles their favorite film by John Ford, "The Civil War" (1962). As in all Straub/Huillet, Lothringen! sharpens our senses and asks: how is a landscape or place marked by the passage of time or history? How can this be read? And in a film, is this not moving?
Huillet:"Fiction is important for us, because when it is mixed with documentary, or a documentary situation, a contradiction is created and sparks fly. Fiction is very important, in spite of everything, to somehow ignite a fire."Straub:"I think what interests us is to show layers…"Huillet:"Not to eradicate the traces but to build on them."
Il Ritorno del figlio prodigo/Umiliati (The Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliated). 2001–03. Italy/France/Germany. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. Based on Women of Messina, by Elio Vittorini. With Rosalba Curatola, Aldo Fruttuosi, Romano Guelfi. 35mm. In Italian; English subtitles. 64 min. 35mm print.
“In Vittorini’s Women of Messina, a communal village is shown up as nothing but a pipe dream. The happy ending (in Huillet/Straub’s first film of this novel, Workers, Peasants, 2001) is itself a pipe dream – fabricated by the Straubs by stopping in the middle of the novel and by conflating a passing remark about foraging for laurel into a celebration of a New Eden. The true truth is humiliation, as recounted in The Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliation, a film so linear and unrelenting and mocking (even quacking ducks) that it is difficult to believe it is a movie the Straubs “wanted” to make or a humiliation anyone would want to re-live. The truths so bitter that explode the pipe-dream of communist community are capitalist realities proclaimed by an ex-Fascist terrorist who is (the film’s hero) Ventura’s twin – a zombie ironically modelled on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Christ-figure, Johannes Borgen (Preben Lerdorff Rye), in Ordet (1955): the land is owned, they are trespassing (as in John Steinbeck-Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath).
But the truths so bitter are also market realities, Marxist realities, and these are proclaimed by three Communist partisans even more humiliatingly."
(Tag Gallagher, "Lacrimae Rerum Materialized")
“There was a film before this one, called Workers, Peasants (2001), which is about what went on before (in this village). These people tried to reinvent everything: this village, this life, this commune. In that particular film they quarrel, they discuss, they fight, there are some love stories… The Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliation is the sad epilogue. It felt so sad today. But it’s so well done. There are no metaphors here. In films, there are constantly metaphors for everything, but Huillet and Straub are the only artists I know who are beyond metaphor. It’s all crystal clear. It is as sad as – when I think about them in a historical context – the last films of Eisenstein or Vertov, they have the same effect. I see them dying, lying down, giving up, taken down by the forces of progress and power. So it’s a very sad film, but it’s a film that has to be done. It all comes from Italian writers who were very important – Vittorini, Pavese and others. They didn’t give up, but they were forced to stop writing. Pavese ended the way he did (suicide), Vittorini cried for the rest of his life. And we, we are still crying.”
(Pedro Costa, “A Secret to be Shared,” DISSENT! Brussels talk, Feb. 2, 2013)
Dolando. 2002. Italy/France/Germany. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. With Dolando Bernardini. In Italian; English subtitles. 7 min.
After the production of Umiliati, Straub and Huillet gave thanks to the cast and crew in a graceful way: by inviting Dolando Bernardini to sing several stanzas from Torquato Tasso’s 16th-century epic poem Jerusalem Delivered.
Though this short, their first movie shot on digital video, is known as a Straub/Huillet work, it has often been screened as an unsigned, anonymous cine-tract. The “27 Octobre” of the title refers to the day three terrified young boys in Clichy-sous-Bois, outside Paris, were pursued by the police and took refuge in the off-limits area of an electric transformer station. Two of them were killed—Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17—burned alive. Their deaths sparked three weeks of uprisings across France. In five camera pans Straub/Huillet document the dead-end location of this atrocity. The video was commissioned by Enrico Ghezzi of Italian television as a "sequel" to Roberto Rossellini's Europa ’51. Ten years later, in 2015, the two police officers who chased Bouna and Zyed were acquitted in criminal court of the strange charge: “Complicity in these deaths through their inaction” (see Straub’s later cine-tract Joachim Gatti [2009]).
Verteidigung der Zeit (In Defense of Time). 2007. Germany. Dir. Peter Nestler. With Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Ursula Illert. In German, Italian, French; English subtitles. 24 min.
Made for German television not long after Huillet’s death in October 2006, this didactic introduction and portrait of the life and work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet was directed by their friend, the great documentarian Peter Nestler. It offers insight into some of Straub/Huillet’s essential strongholds: time, love, direct sound, reality, anti-fascism, the “tiger’s leap into the past.” It particularly examines one of Straub/Huillet’s Cesare Pavese films, From the Cloud to the Resistance (screening March 7, 2017 at Art Center Pasadena). After Huillet’s passing, many were uncertain if and how Straub would continue to make films; Nestler was certain: the work will continue. The remainder of the Straub works in this program and those that follow are beautiful evidence of that fact.
Corneille-Brecht. 2009. France. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Othon and Horace, by Pierre Corneille, and The Trial of Lucullus, by Bertolt Brecht. With Cornelia Geiser. In French, German; English subtitles. 27 min.
In leaps of physical color, Cornelia Geiser recites verses from Pierre Corneille’s plays Horace and Othon, followed by extended excerpts from Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 radio play The Trial of Lucullus (later turned into an opera by Brecht and Paul Dessau in East Germany), in which a Roman General is summoned to the netherworld to stand trial for the crimes and sufferings he has inflicted on commoners and slaves. Across centuries of Western civilization, Straub and Geiser, in one corner of a small Parisian apartment, address monstrous rulers, those of ancient Rome, the kings of 17th-century France, the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and, by implication, those in power today. Cumulatively, it is not the rulers who are the main characters here, but the collective judgement of the oppressed on the oppressor.
Joachim Gatti. 2009. France. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Narration by Jean-Marie Straub. 2 min.
In July 2009 the young French filmmaker Joachim Gatti, son of poet Armand Gatti, was seriously injured by a police attack during a peaceful demonstration against an eviction in Montreuil, Paris. A police “flash-ball” bullet struck his face and ruptured one of his eyes. A translation of the video's text:(Voice of Straub:) “Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:
'Only the dangers of society as a whole trouble the philosopher's tranquil sleep and tear him from his bed. Someone can slit his counterpart's throat with impunity under his window; He only has to put his hands over his ears and argue with himself a little to prevent nature, which revolts within him, from identifying him with the one who is being assassinated. Savage man does not have this admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and reason he is always seen heedlessly yielding to the first sentiment of humanity. In uprisings and street fights the populace assembles and the prudent man distances himself: the dregs of the people, the women of the markets, separate the combatants and prevent honest people from slitting each other's throats.'
And I Straub, I say to you that it is the police, the police armed by Capital, who kill.”
2
La Guerre d’Algérie!(The Algerian War!). 2014. Switzerland/France. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on a story by Jean Sandretto. With Christophe Clavert, Dimitri Haulet. In French; English subtitles. 2 min.
As a young man Straub deserted to West Germany, refusing to fight for France against the Algerians. Later in life, he returned to this bitter historical experience with a terse noir about “the instinct to heal”…and to murder.
Le Streghe, Femmes entre elles (The Witches, Women among Themselves). 2008. France/Italy. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Dialogues with Leucò, by Cesare Pavese. With Giovanna Giuliani, Giovanna Daddi. 35mm. In Italian; English subtitles. 21 min. 35mm print.
The enchantress Circe recounts to Leucò her attempts to bewitch and bed Odysseus. She talks about men and women, the human and the divine, and the brave hero who chooses to become neither pig nor God. In her adamantine repose, Circe also hints at the monotony of her own immortal fate, and contrasts it with the vibrating currents of life she so dearly craves and envies in Odysseus, with his longing for home, childhood, and love. These women-demigods are frank and sensitive at the same time, like the men of Raoul Walsh’s films, where the communities of male and female are deathly separate, and massive to each other. Walsh made a western, The Tall Men, in 1955. This 2008 Straub-film is its reverse shot.
La madre (The Mother). 2011. Switzerland. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Dialogues with Leucò, by Cesare Pavese. With Giovanna Daddi, Dario Marconcini. In Italian; English subtitles. 20 min.
Gustav Mahler’s 1901 Rückert-Lieder is heard. An English translation:I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!
It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.
I am dead to the world’s tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!
In a sun-dappled Tuscan corner, the boar hunter Meleager, having been murdered by his own mother to avenge the tragic accidental killing of his brother and uncle, engages in a tense and melancholic conversation about fragility, resistance, and love with Hermes, who has taken a wise female form. A villa behind knows not its function in these proceedings. This may be the most beautiful movie ever made using the Canon 5D digital camera.
Schakale und Araber (Jackals and Arabs). 2011. Switzerland. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on a short story by Franz Kafka. With Barbara Ulrich, Giorgio Passerone, Jubarite Semaran. In German; English subtitles. 10 min.
Franz Kafka’s parable, written in 1917, on the eve of the Balfour Declaration—an imperial letter of promise to support Zionism—is, through Straub, a ferocious picture, a hatred of hate. Not unlike Samuel Fuller's White Dog (1982), which was all but banned in the United States. This video asks for not a moment of weakness from the viewer. The players on-screen use muscles never seen in cinema before. As Brecht wrote of a demon mask: "What a strain it is to be evil."
Kommunisten (Communists). 2014. Switzerland/France. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Days of Wrath, by André Malraux. With Arnaud Dommerc, Jubarite Semaran, Gilles Pandel, Barbara Ulrich. In French, Arabic, Italian, German; English subtitles. 70 min.
“Jean-Marie Straub’s newest feature is comprised of 6 sections, one shot recently and 5 selected from earlier Straub-Huillet films. It is a matter here not of Kommunismus (Communism), of something abstract, of an—ism—it is never so in Straub-Huillet’s work. Kommunisten, then—the word translates as communists—which is to say, living and breathing men and women. Even in the most cinetract-like of their films, it is always a question of men and women doing specific things, acting in concrete, material circumstances: Arnold Schoenberg’s letters to Wassily Kandinsky in Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene (1972) or the electric power that killed the two boys in Europa 2005, 27 October (2006) or the philosophers hiding in in their beds in Joachim Gatti (2009) while the “women of the markets” are the ones who stop people from slitting each others throats. Their greatest film, Workers, Peasants (2001), has nearly an entire reel (the 6th) in which the characters, primarily the Widow Biliotti, recite a recipe for ricotta cheese and discuss the best wood to burn for cooking it. The Communists of Kommunisten’s title, then, are not political philosophers but characters, wonderfully brought to life by Straub-Huillet’s brilliant cast of actors, who work day by day to try to realize or reach “the enormous dream of men” even if it kills them (Empedocles, Antigone). No theoretical, waxing poetic, no prescriptive politics, but tangible discussions of imprisonment, survival, sex, work and relationships.”
(Ted Fendt, “The Dream of a Thing: Straub’s Kommunisten”)
*
Programmed by Andy Rector and Mark Bogle (BFA student of film/video
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Museum of Modern Art, Miguel Abreu Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles Filmforum, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Museum of Modern Art, Miguel Abreu Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles Filmforum, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.
Information on upcoming Straub/Huillet programs hosted by Los Angeles Filmforum and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, both in March, can be found here at Los Angeles Filmforum and here at UCLA.
Funded by the CalArts School of Film/Video School of Art School of Critical Studies Aesthetics and Politics
Special thanks to Peter Nestler, Ines Schaber, Alan Longino, Tag Gallagher, Lucas Quigley, Tom Lawson, Barbara Ulrich, James Wiltgen, Thomas Beard, Kathy Gertiz, Leighton Pierce, Amy Basen, Francisco Algarín and all those who have made the general effort of the North American and International Straub/Huillet retrospectives, books and articles, subtitles and projections, a reality.
*
This program is an extension of the Los Angeles leg of the North American retrospective of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet organized by Joshua Siegel, MoMA. UCLA’s portion of the retrospective this past January provided the chance to see the cinema of two filmmakers whose work has too often gone unscreened and unacknowledged. Those screenings thrilled and encouraged us to begin the work of screening the films and videos left out of the Los Angeles leg. The first program begins with films shot on 35mm by Huillet and Straub from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. We are happy to then present a work that has previously not been included in the North American Straub/Huillet retrospective thus far: Vertiedigung der Zeit (In Defense of Time, 2007), directed by Peter Nestler; a moving portrait of the life and work of Huillet and Straub, subtitled in English here for the first time by permission of the filmmaker. The remainder of the program consists of the work Straub made after the passing of Huillet in October 2006. The second program consists entirely of Straub's latest works shot on video, a medium prolifically taken up by the filmmaker beginning in 2009.
*
California Institute of the Arts
24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, CA 91355
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Article 0
venez m'aider
m'aider
mayday
may day
May Day
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Othon, by Jean-Marie Straub
by Marguerite Duras
Let's take the risk of plunging into film without asking permission. Let's invent our own standards and trust only in spontaneous criticism, which does exist. There are quite a few of us who believe in nothing else. Quite a few of us see the names Carl Theodor Dreyer or Jean-Marie Straub on a poster or a flyer and go to see their films. They are filmmakers whose films the professional critics forbid us to see. That alone is reason enough to go and see them.
In 1964 one of the great film masterpieces, Dreyer's Gertrud, was killed and buried by the critics (it played in Paris for one week). Who was responsible? You, who believed the critics. Too late.
Attention! Othon,* the fifth and latest film of Jean-Marie Straub**, opened on 13 January in Paris. You have two weeks to see it. When that time is up, if the box office receipts aren't high enough, Othon will close. Attention! It is difficult to believe that professional critics are capable of judging Othon. Very likely they can neither see nor hear nor perceive in any way the nature of Straub's project and work. This is a kind of film they will not recognize. A text of pure intelligence that they will not recognize. The choice is theirs, and from their judgment there is no appeal. But they shun the freedom they've been given. Don't be stupid, go see Othon.
I am speaking to you, people I don't know. I do not know how you will respond to Straub's film. My only reason for speaking to you about Othon is to do what I can to make sure it won't suffer the same fate as Gertrud.
What I, Marguerite Duras, see is this: 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. Miraculously I see the man from Rouen [Pierre Corneille] in a rage against the authorities as he writes his play. I understand why it was no accident that, between 1682 and 1708, the Comédie Française performed the play only thirty times; I understand that it is a play about power and its internal contradictions. I did not know this. I used to think that Corneille, Shakespeare, and Racine (excepting Planchon's [version of Racine's] Bérénice) slept covered with dust, drowned out by the sempiternal maunder of "culture", so that their voices could no longer be heard, their dramas no longer seen. When I saw Othon, the violence of the play was such that I forgot Corneille and Straub. That's the first time such a thing has happened to me.
To call a work obscure is just as disastrous as to call it a masterpiece of clarity: the text becomes burdened with a prejudice that prevents the reader from relating to it directly. The work is imprisoned. Straub has opened the doors of both prisons. Othon appears liberated from all visions prior to your own. Corneille's spectators are not accustomed to such freedom. Some will mistake it for a difficulty of Straub's work. Here the text is not recited to please the spectator. It is spoken neither well nor badly: it is the inner voice that speaks. Here the versification does not serve to puff up or intoxicate the actors; they do not use the words as mouthwash.
The text is a dialectical development, a respiratory rhythm, a white space. This suggests that theatre is everywhere where there is speech. And that beneath the surface of the political texts that seem least poetic — Saint-Just or Marx, for example — there lies the beat of the Cornelian contrabass. All accents are allowed except that of the Comédie Française, that accent of camouflaged meaning, of authority. The framing here is done by words. The ceremonial inherited from tragedy, the emphatic gestures, have all been eliminated: here there is nothing useless, everything is to the point. The universality of the meaning is recaptured. 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.
In other words, he has restored tragedy's subversive dimension. His work is an extraordinary work of healing, of resurrection. For three centuries Othon has been the victim of a crime. Here is Othon restored to youth. Subversion there is, outside as well as inside. Now that the film is finished, one can see this. On the Palatine hill in Rome in the year 69. This high ground plays a part in space and time. The scenic space is circumscribed by the automobile traffic of contemporary Rome: an imperturbable flow that gradually comes to seem a pure movement, like a river or lava flow. We hear this heavy traffic. Is there any place where one could read the text and not hear it? It would be a mistake not to hear the traffic in parallel with the text. Timeless, sacred space no longer exists. Corneille must be read now or not at all.
The power denounced here exists, just like the automobiles. As Lacus says, as men of government always say: "Let's make ourselves secure and laugh at the rest. There's no public good if things go against us. Let's live only for ourselves and think only of ourselves."
Beneath the leaden mantle of power, one free man has read Corneille: Straub.
* The full title of the film, which is directly inspired by Pierre Corneille's play, is Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer ou Peut-être qu'un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour (Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Permit Herself to Choose in Her Turn).
** Jean-Marie Straub is French. His films (including Chronique d'Anna Magdalena Bach, released in Paris), are German. Because Straub refused to fight in Algeria, he was forced into exile. The army still dogs his footsteps. He is thirty-eight years old. Such is the situation of the man whom many of us regard as today's leading filmmaker.
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m'aider
mayday
may day
May Day
*
 |
| The Witches (Chimera?) / danièle to J.-M. S. / out of friendship for the Cahiers EYES DO NOT WANT TO CLOSE AT ALL TIMES "Don't be stupid, go see Othon" FROM THE DEPTHS OF A SHIPWRECK |
Othon, by Jean-Marie Straub
by Marguerite Duras
Let's take the risk of plunging into film without asking permission. Let's invent our own standards and trust only in spontaneous criticism, which does exist. There are quite a few of us who believe in nothing else. Quite a few of us see the names Carl Theodor Dreyer or Jean-Marie Straub on a poster or a flyer and go to see their films. They are filmmakers whose films the professional critics forbid us to see. That alone is reason enough to go and see them.
In 1964 one of the great film masterpieces, Dreyer's Gertrud, was killed and buried by the critics (it played in Paris for one week). Who was responsible? You, who believed the critics. Too late.
Attention! Othon,* the fifth and latest film of Jean-Marie Straub**, opened on 13 January in Paris. You have two weeks to see it. When that time is up, if the box office receipts aren't high enough, Othon will close. Attention! It is difficult to believe that professional critics are capable of judging Othon. Very likely they can neither see nor hear nor perceive in any way the nature of Straub's project and work. This is a kind of film they will not recognize. A text of pure intelligence that they will not recognize. The choice is theirs, and from their judgment there is no appeal. But they shun the freedom they've been given. Don't be stupid, go see Othon.
I am speaking to you, people I don't know. I do not know how you will respond to Straub's film. My only reason for speaking to you about Othon is to do what I can to make sure it won't suffer the same fate as Gertrud.
What I, Marguerite Duras, see is this: 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. Miraculously I see the man from Rouen [Pierre Corneille] in a rage against the authorities as he writes his play. I understand why it was no accident that, between 1682 and 1708, the Comédie Française performed the play only thirty times; I understand that it is a play about power and its internal contradictions. I did not know this. I used to think that Corneille, Shakespeare, and Racine (excepting Planchon's [version of Racine's] Bérénice) slept covered with dust, drowned out by the sempiternal maunder of "culture", so that their voices could no longer be heard, their dramas no longer seen. When I saw Othon, the violence of the play was such that I forgot Corneille and Straub. That's the first time such a thing has happened to me.
To call a work obscure is just as disastrous as to call it a masterpiece of clarity: the text becomes burdened with a prejudice that prevents the reader from relating to it directly. The work is imprisoned. Straub has opened the doors of both prisons. Othon appears liberated from all visions prior to your own. Corneille's spectators are not accustomed to such freedom. Some will mistake it for a difficulty of Straub's work. Here the text is not recited to please the spectator. It is spoken neither well nor badly: it is the inner voice that speaks. Here the versification does not serve to puff up or intoxicate the actors; they do not use the words as mouthwash.
The text is a dialectical development, a respiratory rhythm, a white space. This suggests that theatre is everywhere where there is speech. And that beneath the surface of the political texts that seem least poetic — Saint-Just or Marx, for example — there lies the beat of the Cornelian contrabass. All accents are allowed except that of the Comédie Française, that accent of camouflaged meaning, of authority. The framing here is done by words. The ceremonial inherited from tragedy, the emphatic gestures, have all been eliminated: here there is nothing useless, everything is to the point. The universality of the meaning is recaptured. 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.
In other words, he has restored tragedy's subversive dimension. His work is an extraordinary work of healing, of resurrection. For three centuries Othon has been the victim of a crime. Here is Othon restored to youth. Subversion there is, outside as well as inside. Now that the film is finished, one can see this. On the Palatine hill in Rome in the year 69. This high ground plays a part in space and time. The scenic space is circumscribed by the automobile traffic of contemporary Rome: an imperturbable flow that gradually comes to seem a pure movement, like a river or lava flow. We hear this heavy traffic. Is there any place where one could read the text and not hear it? It would be a mistake not to hear the traffic in parallel with the text. Timeless, sacred space no longer exists. Corneille must be read now or not at all.
The power denounced here exists, just like the automobiles. As Lacus says, as men of government always say: "Let's make ourselves secure and laugh at the rest. There's no public good if things go against us. Let's live only for ourselves and think only of ourselves."
Beneath the leaden mantle of power, one free man has read Corneille: Straub.
* The full title of the film, which is directly inspired by Pierre Corneille's play, is Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer ou Peut-être qu'un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour (Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Permit Herself to Choose in Her Turn).
** Jean-Marie Straub is French. His films (including Chronique d'Anna Magdalena Bach, released in Paris), are German. Because Straub refused to fight in Algeria, he was forced into exile. The army still dogs his footsteps. He is thirty-eight years old. Such is the situation of the man whom many of us regard as today's leading filmmaker.
Originally published in Politique-Hébdo on January 14, 1971
Translation: Art Goldhammer
*
"What also interests us in the films we make is to leave the various layers, not eliminating anything. This is the contrary of a whole Western artistic tradition, bourgeois of course, which consists in destroying, in effacing the traces and destroying these layers. There are other traditions. Western civilization is only a little drop in the whole. For example the Bible, of which Brecht said when asked what had marked him most: 'Don't laugh, it was the Bible' and he of course meant the Lutheran tradition. It's a question of epochs--instead of taking away one adds; the things written five hundred years earlier are not removed, they're left. In a film what interests us is the stratification, like in geology."
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