Brecht, looking cunning and shifty, steps in front of the armchair I'm sitting in and, pretending to be "the state," says, with a sideways leer at an imaginary client: "I know -- I'm supposed to vanish."

Walter Benjamin
Diaries
28 June 1938

Huillet, where are you?

Klaus Volkmer and his collegues at NEW FILMKRITIK have compiled an astonishing tribute to Danièle Huillet online.

It includes (in German) :

-an excerpt of an interview with Straub/Huillet about their personal/historical/cinematic history, from Les Inrockuptibles, 1997. 

-an achingly heartfelt appreciation of their work and presence at the Berlin Film Festival 1987 and of their editing of OPERAI, CONTADINI -- by Vincent Dieutre of Libération. 

-a facsimile of Pedro Costa's letter to Danièle and Jean-Marie around the time of the release of OU GIT VOTRE SOURIRE ENFOUI? 

-a rememberance and an account of Danièle's funeral by Jean-Pierre Gorin (in English). 

-more rememberances by Harun Farocki, Johannes Beringer, Peter Nestler, and Michael Girke.

It also contains the Viennale poster in dedication to Huillet, in the original German language (translated further below) and an english translation of Ventura's recited love letter in COLOSSAL YOUTH, passed on to Lento, a most precious thing to all who've seen the film:

Nha cretcheu, my love, 

being together again will make our lives beautiful 

for another thirty years. 

As for me, I will come back full of love and strength. 

I wish I could give you a hundred thousand cigarettes, 

a dozen of those fancy dresses, a car, 

the little lava house you've always dreamed of, 

a three-penny bouquet. But above all else, 

drink a good bottle of wine, and think of me. 

Here it's all work. We're over a hundred now.  

Did my letter arrive safely?  

I still don't have anything from your hand.  

Maybe I will soon ... I’m waiting.  

Every day, every minute,  

I learn beautiful new words for you and me alone, 

made to fit us both, like fine silk pajamas. 

Wouldn’t you like that?  

I can only send you one letter a month. 

Still nothing from you. 

Maybe some other time 

...Sometimes I'm afraid of building these walls.  

Me, with a pick and cement, and you, with your silence 

...A pit so deep, it swallows you up. 

It hurts to see these horrors that I don’t want to see.  

Your lovely hair skips through my fingers like dry grass. 

Often, I feel weak and think I’m going to forget you.[ ... ]

(Klaus tells me this is the 5th and one-half repetition, thus version, of the letter as it is recited in COLOSSAL YOUTH.)

____________________________________


Also, UNDERCURRENT has published a series of beautiful texts in memoriam Huillet.

Here is a conceptual revue :

(...) letting the living live, letting what once lived, speak. 

(...) Letting what once lived, speak and appear, somewhere. People and things may not be in their place, but they are in a place. 

(...) people and reality do not give up to the camera. The people are always looking out of the frame, they are always escaping, out of allegiance to this system that Straub-Huillet's Brechtian cinema constructs and displays, whereby the actor remains in his/her own skin even while adopting the garb of another: without claiming, falsely, to be at home in this garb. 

(...) Films that enact a displacement that seems timeless: I know the word rings false in the context of a discussion of this famously "materialist" cinema, but if I'm driven to use it, it's not out of a desire to associate Straub-Huillet with any facile postmodernist practice or to enshrine their works within a bourgeois pantheon of a-historical masterpieces. What I wish to do is to point out that their films provide a space apart, a space free from all the shit in the world and in the movie theaters; and that one of the qualities of this space is a certain permanence. 

A timeless displacement, in that so many of the usual marks of the contemporary are absent in these films, and when the contemporary appears, the Western, late-capitalist contemporary (as in the shots of city streets in The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp [1968] and Too Early, Too Late), it shows a side that is turned away from a proprietary or preprogrammed gaze: it becomes a field of signs that are so firm and solid they are no longer signs of anything; they no longer mean what their owners meant them to say. Perhaps all cinema is like this, I was about to write; but of course I was dreaming. All cinema should be like this: that is more like it. The crystallization of the sign, of the present, as in Chaplin and Lang.

(Chris Fujiwara, Resistance)

______________

(...) not necessarily known is the politics of each gesture, the sharp, visceral sensation, as much as the ripened reflection, of that which in each instant brings oppression, or refusal of oppression. With Danièle Huillet, this knowledge and this instinct belonged to the order of the evident. And provided much of the light that radiated from her face. 

(...) the division of labor also is theirs, and in the service of no one, it's not economic or even intellectual; it's a matter of sensibility.

(Cahiers du cinema, Materialist Filmmaker)

__________________

(...) Whether they went through an actual wedding ceremony or wound up living together; whether they considered having children; whether it was inaccurate or precise, impolite or perfectly okay to refer to them as "the Straubs": these are all basically questions about how they defined themselves in relation to society. And the fact that most of us don't know the answers points towards a larger uncertainty about whether they were true bohemians or eccentric traditionalists (not necessarily the same thing), or some combination of the two. 

(...) part of the strength and value of their work has always been tied to the way it goads us into asking such impertinent, materialist questions, regardless of whether or not we accept the challenge of answering.
JMS: Besides, it's an elementary device when you have one who is not an actor to have something with distracts him. Renoir does it better than anyone, and Brecht too for that matter... 

JMS: For ten years I have been trying to film someone facing the camera and I've never succeeded. It always angers me in Godard's films to see people photographed facing the camera. I told myself, I'll do it one day and I'll do it differently. 

(...) 

DH: This Land is Mine, "Renoir [Laughton!]" 

(...) it's worth recalling that the first Straub-Huillet film that the New York Film Festival failed to show, their sixth, was Fortini/Cani (1976), another color landscape film - apparently rejected because the festival organizers feared demonstrations from the Jewish Defense League due to its pro-Palestinian text. 

(...) I'm still tantalized by Pedro Costa having told me in Buenos Aires in 2004 that they were spending much of their free time translating plays by Shakespeare into Italian - simply for the sake of doing so, because they were so unhappy with the existing translations.

(Jonathan Rosenbaum, Place(s) of Daniele)

____________________

(...) but what remains quite vivid in memory is the attention Straub and Huillet directed toward every inquiry. 

(...) The nature of each question was itself questioned, its subtext probed, each question seemingly taking twenty minutes or more to answer as it was put beneath the strong spotlight of their analysis. The rigor and intellectual tension of the work we had just seen was as wonderfully manifest in its makers. Here was evidence of an absolute incarnate stance of commitment from which I, like so many others, have drawn invaluable sustenance across many years.
JM quoting BB: "What will remain of our towns - the wind." 

(...) the flooding sense of bereavement has pervaded all activity and clearly is being felt by many friends and many strangers alike.
JM: "To what good?! (I film)"

(John Gianvito, From Yesterday Until Tomorrow)
________________________

(...) That's the Godardian part of Huillet and Straub's achievement, long before Godard himself got there: bringing together, in the montage of the concept and the rhythm as much as of the shots or the image-sound juxtaposition or the levels of a frame-composition, two things that are indeed very far away from each other: a chirping bird, say, and the Brechtian run-down on the superstructure of the Roman State. 

I find that I can remember every single screening, exactly and vividly, like a sensation upon the skin, of the Huillet-Straub films that I have seen across twenty-five years: I recall where I was, what time of day it was, who I was with, in a way that I cannot for any other filmmaker. 

(...) what works a strange magic is the calmness of the positioning, the recitation, the gesturing of the "non-professional" (strange term in this context!) actors in these fields, on these roads: a labor but also a joy, in a sublime, perfect world that is everywhere strangled and murdered but still ever-present and possible ...

(Adrian Martin, Curiousity/Exigency)

These two texts for Huillet could be seen together on large posters around the festival cinemas of the Viennale, 2006. QUEI LORO INCONTRI was just shown to a theater of 200 spectators there...
_____________________________

Ripe are, dipped in fire, cooked
The fruits and tried on the earth, and it is law,
Prophetic, that all must enter in
Like serpents, dreaming on
The mounds of heaven. And much
As on the shoulders a
Load of logs must be
Retained. But evil are
The paths, for crookedly
Like horses go the imprisoned
Elements and ancient laws
Of the earth. And always
There is a yearning that seeks the unbound. But much
Must be retained. And loyalty is needed.
Forward, however, and back we will
Not look. Be lulled and rocked as
On a swaying skiff of the sea

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


Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.

Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.

Karl Marx
Comments on James Mill
Éléments D’économie Politique
(1844)
______

Geschichtsunterricht/ Leçons d'histoire/ History Lessons - 1972 - Straub/Huillet

J'écoute - 2006 - Giulio Bursi

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.