2 (Upon "Report #2", for K.V.)

(...) Himmlische nemlich sind

Unwillig, wenn nicht einer sich die Seele schonend

Zusammengenommnen, aber doch er muß; dem

Gleich fehlet die Trauer. 

________

For the Heavenly, When

Someone Has Failed to collect His Soul, to spare it,

Are angry, for he still must; like him

Here mourning is at fault.

Friedrich Hölderlin
Mnemosyne
Third Version
Third Stanza (1806)
trans Michael Hamburger

______________________

Il était une fois une petit cinéaste…petit mais menaçant, à peine cinéaste encore et déjà menaçant, petit et déjà menaçant, petit et cinéaste déjà -

Il n’est encore qu’un cinéaste - qui menace - mais tout de même cinéaste assez pour qu’on ait senti, que l’on sente, qu’on lui ait fait sentir, qu’on lui fasse sentir qu’il est, qu’il était menaçant... avec son cinématographe par son cinématographe; 

qu’il est menaçant son cinématographe, qu’il menaçait, qu’il menace le cinéma avec son cinématographe, par le cinématographe -
que le cinématographe menace le cinéma.

Cinéaste pour qu’on sache que son cinématographe menace le cinéma, que son cinématographe soit menaçant, soit une menace.

1962, Jean-Marie Straub.  

(2006 and onward!)

the soundtrack invented silence

QUEI LORO INCONTRI

HUILLET/STRAUB 2006

QUEI LORO INCONTRI

HUILLET/STRAUB 2006

Young Huillet

Danièle Huillet

Danièle Huillet, one of the world's greatest, most sensitive and demanding filmmakers died last night. She was 70 years old, born on May Day, 1936.

(from her NOTES ON GREGORY'S WORK JOURNAL, 1975 [on the shooting of Moses und Aron, Straub/Huillet, 1974])

at his feet

of the unanimous horizon

that there

prepares itself

is tossed and mingles

with the fist which would grasp it

as one threatens

a destiny and the winds

the one number which cannot

be another

Spirit

to pitch it

into the tempest

refold its division

and pass on proudly

(from Toute révolution est un coup de dés

[Every Revolution is a Throw of Dice]

1977, Straub/Huillet

Danièle Huillet sits at Père-Lachaise Cemetary, with the slain Communards of 1871 underfoot, reciting Mallarmé's poem Coup de dés of 1897:

(...)

de cette conflagration

à ses pieds

de l'horizon unanime

que se

prépare

s'agite et mêle

au poing qui l'étreindrait

comme on menace

un destin et les vents

l'unique Nombre qui ne peut pas

être un autre

Esprit

pour le jeter

dans la tempête

en reployer la division et passer fier

(...)

(Danièle in Schwarze Sünde [Black Sin], 1988, Straub/Huillet)

(Danièle at the Vienna Filmmuseum, 2004)

When I attended the Viennale/Filmmuseum retrospective in 2004, it was my first and only chance to have met Huillet; I failed. I watched her a little in the lobby, she was rather aloof to all the reunions, drinks and commotion of that first night of their arrival. During the panel she interjected with her typical clarity and sobriety, and smiled and laughed when the subject wasn't peasant wars, a bad book on Cézanne by John Rewald, pieds-noir (French colonialists in Algeria), Bush.....She made one of the most trenchant and relevant comments to why the "rules of the game" are such as they are with their films, with their political stakes, with their extreme interest in the films of John Ford. She said:

"Everything has a motive, in the military too. They are not devils or criminals. It's too easy to say Bush is crazy — to understand the thing is the only way to combat it, not to apologize for it. In Bush you know what you're dealing with, with progressives you don't always know."

Several nights later, before either a screening of Dr. Bull (1933, John Ford) or Too Early, Too Late (1978), I saw her quietly buying a copy of JOHN FORD: INTERVIEWS while everyone hobknobbed, holding it between her arm and her chest the rest of the evening.

(Huillet and Straub shooting Il Ritorno del figlio prodigo/Umiliati [Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliation] 2003, Huillet/Straub.)

For me, at this moment, there's no point in trying to delineate what was Huillet and what was Straub in their films. They worked together on every film, including the early ones where only Straub is credited. One look at Pedro Costa's film on Huillet/Straub's work ethic Ou git votre sourire enfoui? (Where Lies Your Hidden Smile?) will show you that while Jean-Marie is a raging current, Danièle also drives the turbines and maintains the power station. Perhaps an industrial metaphor is too crude; as a child Huillet wanted to be a peasant farmer, then a veternarian (Huillet on The General Line: "if you're going to say that tractors are extremely useful you should also mention the damage they cause....You can't help thinking that he [Eisenstein] didn't follow his work to its conclusion." ). In any case, there's no need for the forthcoming obituaries and articles to treat her role as secondary. It's also worth noting that every poster for their films since Antigone (1991) is printed "Film de Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub".

Of course one is interested in the facts about their precise roles in the creation and execution of some of the greatest works of all of cinema, but eternal inaccessability to Huillet/Straub's personal/craft dynamic aside (can one really trace these kinds of dialectics? Or perhaps it's Sam Fuller's "third face"?), maybe we'd do better to remember Huillet's words:

"we are interested in the products not the names"

or even:

"Ultimately, about Pavese himself we couldn't care less by the end of the film. What interests us are the good people who say Pavese's texts, what they do in life, how they say these texts, the problems they have saying what they say – which makes what they say all of sudden no longer belong to Pavese but to the good people who say it – who at the outset had never heard of Pavese. The only interest that the text or what you call the culture has is that the person who wrote it did a certain work, he produced something which touched us and which subsequently has resisted – from which one can judge that he did his work well.”

This weighing of all consquences, be it in their use of a Pavese text and all the reverberations of how, who and why; be it with animals, camera distances, political terms (D: "But one can't use the term “fascist” loosely. It’s a precise term, with a certain historical meaning"); agit-prop films (D: "it's not worth making such films out of anger, either. Rage. Fury."); ultimately one's own subjectivity (D: "Of course we react to circumstances, as individuals. But that's not a good enough reason to insert these individual reactions into a film, for it would bring us back to sentimentatlity." ) -- in all this the work will live. Though at this painful moment this no consolation for the loss of such an artist.

But, too, Danièle Huillet wasn't some provincial puttering old woman in the end, in fact she leaves at least one project up in the air, and two recent finished films sadly unaccompanied. She (along with Straub of course) not only had the new film Quei loro incontri (2006) about to open in Paris, which they planned to accompany, but also planned to shoot yet another film in the coming months, with cast and crew arranged, to be shot in the Loire region of France. Then there's their 12 minute short film EUROPA 2005, 27 OCTOBRE (2006), shot last spring and, though it may be shown as an anonymous cine-tract, it will screen along with 4 of their Italian films at the Villa Medici on October 21st. The film was commisioned by Enrico Ghezzi as a "sequel" to Rossellini's EUROPA '51 and the "27 OCTOBRE" of the title refers to the day two teenagers (Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17) were electrocuted and killed while hiding from the police in an electric station - the event that sparked the uprising in France last year.

Huillet, Straub and two other filmmakers shot the movie on digital video (their first) on the site of the teen deaths, in the suburb Clichy-sous-Bois.

***

oder WENN DANN DER ERDE GRÜN VON NEUEM EUCH ERGLÄNZT!

REPERTORY CINEMA

Cinema is a storehouse, a silo....!

"I was constantly driving my car around the country, especially in the Southwest. "
-Fritz Lang

Above stills taken from Fritz Lang's 16mm film of Tombstone, Arizona. The University of Wisconsin website is carrying twenty clips of Lang's 16mm short films of the Southwest, U.S.A., taken in the years 1938-1953.

Only occasionally do these clips have the character of home movies and some, like the Tombstone clip, are very exacting; one could even speculate that they were intended as inserts for some unknown Lang film. The majority of clips are like landscape films; endless pans, occasional reverse shots...

Several links for more background on recent Straub/Huillet:

--2 beautiful dossiers from NEW FILMKRITIK on QUEI LORO INCONTRI, in German. Includes material on Pavese, Costa, Jean-Marie's "Testament" which he recited to a crowd at the Viennale '04 (a passage from Hölderlin's Der Tod des Empodokles), DALLA NUBE ALLA RESISTENZA...
http://filmkritik.antville.org/stories/1463920/
another HERE.
and HERE.

--Libération's report on the Straubs and Venice by Olivier Seguret, in French. It begins "Vive Lenin! It is Jean-Marie Straub who inspires this heartfelt cry to us."
http://www.liberation.fr/culture/cinema/204111.FR.php

--Essay on QUEI LORO INCONTRI by Carlos Adriano, in Portugeuse.
http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropico/html/textos/2758,1.shl

--A profile of a documentary film on Straub/Huillet's staging of QUEI LORO INCONTRI, at the Teatro Francesco di Bartolo in Tuscany, May 2005.
http://www.sulmonacinema.it/Filmestival2005/pagine/conc_incontri.html

_____________________________

THREE MESSAGES

Full english translation of Straub's "Three messages" to Venice. Translation, prologue and epilogue by Tag Gallagher (thanks to Craig Keller for also keeping me abreast) :

A new film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Quei loro incontri ("Those encounters of theirs"), had its world premier a few days ago in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The movie's dialogue consists of the last five dialogues of Cesare Pavese's Dialoghi con Leucò ("Dialogues with Leuco"). And the jury (headed by Catherine Deneuve) had determined to give a special Lion to the Straubs “for invention of cinematic language in the ensemble of their work.” The Straubs, however, did not show up for their film or ceremony. Instead they sent a number of their actors who left Pisa at 4 a.m. to be in Venice on time for the film’s press conference, where Festival director Marco Müller announced Danièle was ill and that Jean-Marie had sent a statement, which Giovanna Daddi, one of the actors, read:

__________________________________________________________

Three messages
Jean-Marie Straub

First) It’s come too soon for our death - too late for our life.
Anyway, I thank Marco Müller for his courage. But what do I expect from it? Nothing. Nothing at all? Yes, a small revenge. A revenge "against the intrigues of the court," as is said in The Golden Coach. Against so many ruffians.

Why Pavese?
Because he wrote:
"Communist doesn’t mean just wanting to be. We’re too ignorant in this country. We need communists who aren’t ignorant, who don’t spoil the name."

Or again:
"If once it was enough to have a bonfire to make it rain, or to burn a vagabond on one to save a harvest, how many owners’ houses need to be burnt down, how many owners killed in the streets and squares, before the world turns just and we have our words to say?"

Pavese has the bastard say: "The other day I passed by the Mora. The pine tree by the gate’s not there anymore." Replies Nuto: "The bookkeeper had it cut down -- Nicoletto, that ignorant man. He had it cut down because the tramps would stop in its shade and beg, you understand…"
Again Nuto, elsewhere:
"Given the life he leads, I can’t call him a poor fool, as if it would do any good… First, the government should burn up all the money and the people who defend it."

Best wishes.

Second) I have been:
1. at the Venice Festival (as journalist) in 1954, I chose to write on three films:
SANSHO DAYU -
EL RIO Y LA MUERTE -
REAR WINDOW.
No prizes!
2. At the Festival (short films) in 1963 with my first film MACHORKA-MUFF(‘62): no prize.
3. At the Festival in ‘66 with NICHT VERSöHNT (Not Reconciled, 1965). Projection paid for by Godard!
4. At the Festival with CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH !
5. At Venice for retrospective in 1975 (wanted by Gambetti) of all our films up to MOSES AND ARON (included), 1974.
At the Festival of Cinematographic Art with Quei loro incontri for A Roaring Lion.

Third) Besides I wouldn’t be able to be festive in a festival where there are so many public and private police looking for a terrorist - I am the terrorist, and I tell you, paraphrasing Franco Fortini: so long as there’s American imperialistic capitalism, there’ll never be enough terrorists in the world.
______________________________________________________________


Marco Müller then closed the Press Conference without any of the actors getting a chance to say a word. (Straub's citations are from Pavese's La luna e i falò [The moon and the bonfires], which the Straubs filmed in 1979 as part of Dalla nube alla Resistenza [From the cloud to the Resistance].)

Straub’s messages caused a furor at the Festival and in the Italian press -- but have been virtually unreported outside of Italy. Was an award still in order? The jury met again. At least one jury member, American Cameron Crowe, objected it was not opportune, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, but consented on an understanding that the Festival would "distance" itself from Straub's "anti-American" message. (Apparently it's anti-American to oppose imperialism.)

The award was given but the "distance" was not announced -- thank goodness! We have nothing to fear from the world being filled with "terrorists" such as Straub defines himself -- people making movies like Straub. But we have everything to fear from neo-McCarthyites who seek to hinge artistic recognition on an endorsement of imperialism.

-Tag Gallagher

"I do it because some of the younger people must know..." -Huillet

--facsimilies of Jean-Marie Straub's "Three Messages" to the Venice film festival, in his absence. The center handwritten sheet is translated in my previous post below. A complete english translation will be posted or linked to shortly. As for actual english language reportage, critique, or analysis of the film itself (QUEI LORO INCONTRI aka The Meetings), we may have to wait some time for that. This is the only english report on the film that I know of, by Reuters; blissfully ignorant and somewhat ostracizing.

The last typewritten sheet above deals with "Why Pavese?" (QUEI is based on the last five dialogues of Pavese's Dialogues with Leuco) and, like the films of Straub/Huillet, consists of small sections of text that express singular outrage (Pavese was perhaps even more singular and alone than the Straubs in his communism) at "how the world goes", in the words of one member of the cast. Nothing is "little" in what the Straubs do, from the equality of things in their films, from shot to shot, to a "little" passage in Pavese tossed at the immodest atmosphere of a film festival (the cutting down of a pine tree because tramps were getting shade and begging there, quoted in the 3rd message above) or Vittorini (a dialogue on ricotta in their film OPERAI, CONTADINI) -- feeling as a weapon.

The urgent handwritten note or dedication is integral to Straub/Huillet. In fact they have a long history of side-propagation at festivals and public events. Handing out provocative leaflets (to get MACHORKA-MUFF seen against the wishes of it's producers), passing notes, verbally dedicating a film to the Vietcong at a certain screening ("that morning we saw in the newspapers that the bombing of Hanoi had begun again, and we said simply, at that moment, showing the film to those people, that the film was dedicated to the Vietcong."), tacking up flyers saying "This film was turned down by the Selection Committee of the Cannes festival" (says Huillet, "If I feel I must say this about the Cannes festival, it's not out of revenge or to rock the boat in any way. It won't rock anything at all; I do it because some of the younger people must know...")

And because nothing is little and the letter is handwritten, or typewritten, rather than word processed, and because the Straubs began their very first film MACHORKA-MUFF with a handwritten note ("No story; a visual, abstract dream") and have since filmed many other handwritten notes -- dedications to Holger Meins (who died on a hunger strike in prison as a suspected Red Army Faction terrorist), or to "Barnabé the cat"... for the connection between everyday life, political action and cinema...for all that, I post these facsimilies.

(Thanks to Klaus Volkmer for info and documents)

"I would not be able to celebrate in a festival where there are so much public and private police looking for a terrorist. I am that terrorist. To paraphrase Franco Fortini: as long as American imperialistic capitalism exists, there won't be enough terrorists in the world. All the best, Jean-Marie".

Message from Jean-Marie Straub to the Venice Film Festival, 6 September 2006

"D'altronde non potrei festeggiare in un festival dove c'è tanta polizia pubblica e privata alla ricerca di un terrorista - il terrorista sono io, e vi dico, parafrasando Franco Fortini: finché ci sarà il capitalismo imperialistico americano, non ci saranno mai abbastanza terroristi nel mondo."

"in asmuch as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorise him to disassemble this column."

Gustav Courbet, 1871

(later, the Paris Commune took a vote and dismantled the column)

IN MEMORIAM SOUND MOVIES (for Richard Modiano)

(Above once was embedded a sound clip of the immigrant's song from Renoir's TONI [1935]. The sound clip host went out of business.)

1935

HERE FORMERLY RESIDED THE TEXT OF PEDRO COSTA'S TOKYO SEMINAR OF 2004 "A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing"

HERE'S WHERE THE TEXT RESIDES NOW:

http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html

--all handshakes,
Andy R.

TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY (1974,Michael Snow)
(one of the finest uses of youtube I've yet seen)

Une visite au Louvre (2004, Straub/Huillet)

(dead link)

I know of one incident wherein an opportunist selling Straub/Huillet bootlegs on ebay received a hand-written letter from the Straubs telling him to STOP NOW (he instantly tried to sell the note!). I also know that the Straubs held their film CEZANNE back from being subtitled so as to preserve the integrity of the paintings. My posting of this clip goes against the Straubs presumed wishes on both these counts.

I don't quite understand the intention of posting the first 7 minutes of a film on youtube. And, as if to really test the idea's utility, the same man who posted the first 7 minutes of Une visite au Louvre has also posted the first 14 minutes of OUT-1 (759 minutes to go)! At 7 min intervals ("parts") that would be 109 "parts". Paul Gallagher, the good fellow who posted these, has well over 100 clips posted on Youtube, many worth checking out (Foucault conversation with Chomsky, Dans le noir de temps by Godard, etc).

I post it here because it brought me so much pleasure to see a bit of this film again. Perhaps it's because it reminds me of sitting in a packed house in Vienna to watch two sucessive versions of it in a row (I counted 3 differences between the 2 versions: 1) a variation in the pan across the Louvre exterior, 2) a variation on an overhead shot of the Seine later in the film, and 3) a minutely but distinctly varied voice-over intonation)...

Even in seven minutes I think you can see some of the eventfulness of a single Straub/Huillet shot. The pan across the Seine and Louvre exterior has the quality of an act; an action taken, not simply taken in. You can see the level of minutae on which the Straubs are working.

In any case, listen to Cezanne (the voice-over):

"Look at that...the Victoire de Samothrace. She's an idea, she's a whole people, a heroic movement in the life of a people, yet the fabric clings to her legs, her wings flutter, her breasts swell. I don't need to see her head to imagine her look, because all the blood which beats, circulates, sings in her legs, her hips, throughout her body, has passed in torrents into my brain and has entered my heart. When the head is gone, so what, the marble has bled...While up there in the primitives, you can chop the necks of all those little martyrs with the executioner's sword and there's a little vermilion, a few drops of blood...They have already flown bloodless up to God. Souls can't be painted. And here, Victory's wings, you don't even see them, I don't see them anymore. We don't think about them anymore, the seem so natural. Her body doesn't need them to be able to fly away in full triumph. It has elan...Whereas the haloes of the virgins and saints surrounding Christ, one sees only them. They impose themselves on us. They embarrass me. What do you want? You can't paint souls. You paint bodies, and when bodies are well painted, then, damn it, the soul, if they have one, the soul radiates and shows through from everywhere.

(...) but I know nothing colder than his (David's) Marat! What a petty hero! A man who had been his friend, who had just been assasinated, whom he should have glorified for all of Paris, for all of France, for all posterity. Did he just toss that sheet over him and wash him off in his bathtub? He was thinking about what people would say about the painter and not what they would think about Marat. It's a bad painting. And he had the cadaver right in front of his eyes!".

This film is Huillet/Straub's blast against a certain alienatation from art -- painting -- and from the spirit of nature and life that inspired the paintings (which the Museum isn't helping). And since every Straub film is about the class struggle in some way (even if by implying that that which gets in the way of lived nature must be done away with) it reminds me of an incident I once read about:

In 1920, a Kapp (fascist) putsch sparked riots in Dresden and while the people of Dresden were fighting to defend democracy a stray bullet hit a Rubens painting in the Zwinger museum. Oskar Kokoschka issued a public statement in which he suggested, in all seriousness, that the fighting be moved out onto the heath outside of town or even replaced by single combat between political leaders of opposing camps. George Grosz, Spartacist as he was at the time, said:

"(we're) delighted that bullets flew into galleries and palaces, into Rubens masterpieces, and not into the houses of the poor. Workers! Every time that the artist paints something that the bourgeois can cling to and that dazzles you with illusions of beauty and happiness, that artist is strengthening the bourgeoisie and sabotaging your class consciousness, your will to power."

Everything must be kept in mind.