Springtime with Straub-Huillet
But first a word about Poor Things
Watching
Poor Things (2023)
I never wrote about Poor Things here because I found it, costumes aside, rather unremarkable. But I do want to dredge up one detail I kept thinking about while working on the second part of this newsletter. About two thirds of the way through the film, child-in-an-adult’s-body Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) waltzes into a Parisian brothel and declares her intent to see what this prostitution business is all about (for anthropological research). In between sex scenes with a variety of louche men, she befriends the one Black girl in the house (Suzy Bemba) and through her discovers a penchant for lesbianism. On one of their breaks from seeing clients, the duo put on their nicest overcoats and head out into the snow to go to a socialist meeting. The arc of the film bends toward Bella’s liberation and so taking up socialist politics must necessarily be a part of that journey, no?1
But when all is said and done and Christopher Abbott’s brain has been traded with a goat’s, Bella ends up withdrawn from the world and the people in it, enjoying private pleasures with her lover and husband (Ramy Youssef) in the garden she inherited from her bourgeois benefactor and foster father (Willem Dafoe). I’ve seen a handful of critics single out the film’s use of socialism as window dressing (pejorative), and while I could be convinced that Poor Things is supposed to be a mocking pastiche of a liberal bildungsroman, I think the critics are on to something insofar as that’s not how the movie is being advertised, or how the people who liked it seem to be receiving it.
Anyway, the point I want to get to here is that, as Poor Things presents it, socialism falls into two by no means mutually exclusive categories: a relic of 19th century enthusiasms, and a badge worn by right-thinkers but otherwise exerting no moral force, compelling no particular actions in the world and certainly not encouraging solidarity with the poor or working class. We wouldn’t want to go giving anybody any ideas, now would we.
Machorka-Muff (1963)
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968)
The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp (1968)
Othon (1970)
History Lessons (1972)
Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (1973)
Moses and Aaron (1975)
Fortini/Cani (1976)
Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice (1977)
From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979)
Too Early / Too Late (1981)
En rachâchant (1982)
Class Relations (1984)
A Proposition in Four Parts (1985)
Antigone (1992)
Lothringen! (1994)
From Today Until Tomorrow (1997)
Il viandante (2001)
Dolando (2002)
A Visit to the Louvre (2004)
Europa 2005 – 27 octobre (2006)
These Encounters of Theirs (2006)
Artemide’s Knee (2008)
L’Inconsolable (2011)
The Algerian War! (2014)
Communists (2014)
People of the Lake (2018)
France Against the Robots (2020)
In search of something with a little more political substance, I spent the last two months watching the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Previously familiar only with their feature debut, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, and 1999’s Sicilia!, I had an inkling of what I was getting myself into when I started my research for this newsletter, but I was truly surprised at just how poorly I understood what I was watching when I got right down to it.
Jean-Marie Straub was born in Metz, in a territory that historically kept changing hands between French and German rule, and met Danièle Huillet in her hometown of Paris in 1954, in a film class. Though neither finished their studies (Huillet protested taking an exam that asked students to analyze a film she found frankly rather terrible), they hovered around the social circles from which the French New Wave would emerge over the next decade. Filmmaking was not primarily their trade in these years, though Straub is credited as an assistant director on one of Jacques Rivette’s early films (Straub claims he did nothing more than shuttle boxes around on set). In 1958, to avoid conscription into the Algerian War, Straub, with Huillet in tow, decamped to Germany; throughout their life together, they would frequently relocate between Germany, France, and Italy.
The first Straub-Huillet2 film, though made in German, is mostly indistinguishable from any other early French New Wave film. Introduced as “a symbolically abstract dream, not a story,” 1963’s Machorka-Muff is adapted from a Heinrich Böll story about the afterlives of Nazi officers in postwar German politics. The movie runs to 18 minutes and boasts stylish black and white photography, a flâneur in the vein of the guy from Rohmer’s Sign of Leo, and organ music–as–jump scare. Right around the midpoint the movie takes a detour (along with the organ), departing from actor-driven narrative and turning into a full two-minute montage of newspaper clippings exemplifying the preponderance of German postwar militarist propaganda. The pairing of threatening sound and onscreen text, leaving no doubt as to how Straub-Huillet want you to interpret the latter, is uncharacteristically direct by comparison to their later works.
The rest of the Straub-Huillet corpus, which spanned the mid-1960s until Huillet’s death in 20063, is defined by some signature touches:
Nonprofessional actors, usually working class people chosen with an ear toward their dialects and enunciation, who come to rehearsals after already having worked a full shift at their day jobs, sometimes practicing lines for months before ever getting in front of a camera.
Dialogue that is “recited” rather than “performed.” (This is not to say that lines are read without emotion.) Oftentimes actors face away from the camera while they recite their lines. Moses and Aaron and From Today Until Tomorrow, both adapted from Schoenberg operas, are heavier on theatricality than is the norm, whereas (Brecht’s) Antigone is drier (though by no means less captivating for it).
Scripts adapted from texts by a stable of favorite writers and composers, including but not limited to Brecht, Kafka, Schoenberg, Engels, Corneille, and Pavese. A Visit to the Louvre is adapted from a journal by painter Paul Cézanne, who it turns out was a petty little queen of an art critic.
Establishing landscape shots where the camera, mounted to a tripod, pans in a fluid arc, usually up to 180° but sometimes completing a full circle. The apotheosis of this flourish occurs in Europa 2005 - 27 octobre, which consists solely of four sets of identical shots of a camera panning to the right of a building, then from a slightly different vantage panning back to the left.
Flattening juxtapositions of the classical and the modern. For example, in History Lessons a man in contemporary dress is lectured at by a variety of men in togas; in Othon, actors in ancient Roman garb recite their lines from a Corneille tragedy by way of Tacitus on the Palatine Hill while no effort is made on Straub-Huillet’s part to conceal or silence the traffic of the Roman streets below.
Subtitling is always overseen by Straub-Huillet. In some cases, dialogue is deliberately left untranslated to draw the viewer’s attention to the expressive qualities of the actors’ voices. Most of the time when this happens it comes in bearable snippets, but in the case of Class Relations, where some 25–30% of all dialogue is unsubtitled, the effect is agonizing. On the other hand, when the sound cut out from the version of These Encounters of Theirs that I had access to, I found it pointless to continue reading the subtitles in silence since the sound of the dialogue was in fact so crucial to the film’s strange power.
Beyond what is seen and heard in the finished products, Straub-Huillet were adamant about adhering to production standards that reflected their leftist political ideals. Quoth Straub on the subject:
Making a film politically means using the lenses you need, the amount of film you need, shooting in the order you need, with the equipment you need. It means paying the crew at least union wage, at the beginning of each week rather than at the end, and not accepting ridiculous budget restrictions at a time when commercial production as a whole is wasting money in incidental expenses and useless stuff.
In effect this meant it could take a very long time for the cameras to start rolling; famously it took 10 years to get Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach off the ground.
Chronicle is essentially a concert film, where the artist in question is Bach, as interpreted by Dutch keyboardist Gustav Leonhardt and an accompanying orchestra in complete period getup. Long takes allow us to enjoy Johann Sebastian’s music mostly unabridged, while in between songs we learn more about his life and process through voiceovers by wife Anna Magdalena. These latter elements shape our experience of the music by constantly reminding us of the historical conditions of Bach’s oeuvre: it’s the product of his labor for various commissions by powerful men in church and state. With the music contextualized thusly, our relationship to it as modern viewers and listeners undergoes a transformation, whereby our alienation from products of the past is attenuated ever so slightly and a proper understanding of their historical significance is restored to us.
Sometimes you must admit defeat in the face of art that resists comprehension. Rewatching Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach was not one of those times, but I did need to rely on outside opinion more than I typically do to make sense of the rest of the Straub-Huillet catalogue. Distraction was not so much the impediment to my comprehension as was density; I can imagine myself getting the films based on more straightforwardly philosophical texts (like Fortini/Cani, narrated by Marxist intellectual Franco Fortini himself) if I could actually sit down with the written texts and take my time with them.
In any event, seeing these films through other critics’ eyes has been immensely helpful for getting a handle on them. For instance, here’s Neil Bahadur on From the Clouds to the Resistance, one of the films that initially eluded my grasp:
From the Clouds begins with a dialogue between myths from pre-Greek antiquity and concludes at some point in the 20th century, after the second World War. Until the final section, we only see 'moments,' but moments of philosophical asides, where people wonder about the nature of their own existence, all consisting of a straight line beginning at the moment a human thinks they can "climb to the top," that they can create myths, that they can separate themselves from the harmony of all things in nature - this is pointed but radical Marxism, all things must work in harmony together, and they would like to show us the whole of history of why things must be this way. […]
Are there gods, or did we create them? This is Marxism - the answer is obviously the latter. The film charts how historical materialism somehow transitioned into mysticism - it's rarely noted upon how anti-religion the Straub-Huillet pictures are. Religion becomes little more than a primary ideological function and tool to turn the masses into uneducated rabble, resigned to their own doom. Yet in-between there are still beautiful moments […] How tragic myth and religion is - because the Straub's [sic] come directly from the perspective that these things are not **truth**, the effect of watching people think and devote their lives to it is devastating. And it's even harder - the world seems upside down by that point, where we reach the 20th century, and the world no longer takes either seriously.
This is a stiffer drink than what most people order when they sit down with a movie. What I like about Bahadur’s reading though is that it sheds light on a statement by Straub from a 2001 interview with critic-historian François Albera: “There is no political film without morality, without theology, there is no political film without mysticism.” As I interpret it, this is to say that even outside of a theistic frame of reference, politics that fails to adequately account for theological questions and their role in human history will always come up short of effecting revolutionary change in the world.4
And what is the change that Straub-Huillet hope for? In contrast to, say, Poor Things, which, whatever degree of sincerity you want to read into its politics, doesn’t present us with much beyond personal liberation for its protagonist, Straub-Huillet have their sights set on collective liberation from tyranny, from exploitation, from state-sponsored violence. Yet their means of communicating this politics are highly unusual by the standards of what many would count as political filmmaking today. Siding with Walter Benjamin, Straub once said that “a political film must remind people that we don’t live in ‘the best of all possible worlds.’” By returning to the past—sometimes the far distant past—dialectically, rather than nostalgically, Straub-Huillet surfaced ideas, images, and even sounds that can help us to see past what is merely fashionable in politics to see more clearly the human condition and how we might rescue it from all that oppresses us.
Or at least I imagine that’s how their thinking went. As Ted Fendt describes exactingly in his essay for the 2016 volume he edited, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, the duo’s movies screened only in limited engagements during their lifetimes, and often with indifferent-to-negative receptions in the press. “Our main problem is, more and more, to get people to see the films we’re making—and this battle becomes always harder and more hopeless,” wrote Huillet after the premiere of From the Clouds to the Resistance at Cannes (out of competition, in Director’s Fortnight).
I think the other obvious problem besetting their films—especially Straub’s later solo works—is their illegibility. By rejecting more recognizable cinematic forms, Straub-Huillet placed a lot of trust in their hypothetical viewer to follow along with their style without any hand-holding. They were at least a little self-aware about this quality of their movies, in 1979 declaring that they made films for “audiences who do not yet exist.” I don’t know if that audience exists yet even today, but I don’t want to discount the possibility that anyone, of any background, confronted with the singular vision of a Straub-Huillet work could suddenly find their world torn asunder.
It’s also the necessary setup for Bella to call herself her own means of production.
Straub-Huillet is the agreed upon way of referring to the pair. Sometimes you’ll see people refer to them as “the Straubs,” which feels rather unfair to Danièle Huillet if you ask me.
Straub, who passed in 2022, would continue to make short films until 2020.
This is neither here nor there but I also recently watched Manoel de Oliveira’s Acto da Primavera (1963), in which a Passion play put on by a Portuguese village is juxtaposed in its closing moments with images of contemporary warfare; Oliveira clearly seems to have been on a similar wavelength here.