(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The films of the French director couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (often called Straub-Huillet) have often been linked to resistance. Resistance to what? Against more things. The first thing that strikes one is that the films stand as carved stone tablets against accustomed audience expectations, with a bid for another setting and attention beyond what characterizes the programmatic fiction empowerment that is dominated by the dominant film
industry.
This resistance manifests itself in a consistent sweep of conventional procedures: the films are extremely stripped down and minimalist, and consist largely of everlasting images of nature and people reading sentences from a sheet. The total absence of conventional drama, intriguing narrative structures, psychological characters, star actors and post-production effects leads to films that resist easy entry. For Straub-Huillet, film is resistance to this world (society's devices and audience expectations), not empathy for another.
The directors have even said that they make films for children and cave dwellers. Only in this is there a certain resistance, a critical aspect, which links them to many modernist art directions – the desire to induce a primitive attention that opposes the rationality of the commodity community. Theodor W. Adorno has suggested how a modernist art's "allergy to ornament and opulence, that which is approaching luxury" can approach barbarism, in other words an uncivilized state. At Straub-Huillet, for example, this is evident in what film critic Serge Daney has called a "retraining of the ear". In a review of Trop tôt / Trop tard (Too Early, Too Late, 1982) he writes that Straub-Huillet was the first filmmaker after the silent film era that made us see and hear the wind.
Don't fantasize. This is related to what Richard Roud has referred to as Straub's documentary approach and an "artistic honesty": In the films of Straub-Huillet we see a film's relation to an "objective" reality, a twin to physical landscapes, and an allegiance to the sound that comes directly from these landscapes. This has led to what one might call a principled materialism in their work: films should not be fantasized and add, but focus our attention on the material reality of the world and thus get something out of it.
Even the literary texts on which they base their films (for example by Kafka, Hölderlin, Brecht) are treated as material statements, where they are often read aloud from a paper by "expressionless" amateur actors who almost only er in the picture. This "primitive" stylization can be seen as a resistance to a fiction-based empathy regime in the film world.
The directors themselves have said that they make films for children and cave dwellers.
Straub-Huillet's opposition comes not only in the form of "the politics of forms" encapsulated in its own autonomous aesthetics, but is connected with a critique of capitalism. Some of the films are based on explicit political texts, and Straub himself has made harsh statements about the form of society. He was also one of the initiators of an untitled manifesto (from 1965; the second of the so-called Oberhausen manifestos) which called for a more socially engaged and ex-
experimental film. As Scott MacKenzie writes in the book Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (2014), this was an attack on the growth of a "fictional art film" that eluded reality.
Deleuze and the resistance of art. Film as resistance – film as one concentration on reality which does not have room for maneuver in other cultural practices or the dominant film culture – links Straub-Huillet's work to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. During this year's documentary festival in Trondheim in November, this link was highlighted in the exhibition program "Tell it to the stones (prelude)", arranged in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim.
In the festival catalog, the exhibition was thematically angled with the following questions: «Is it possible to transfer a precision that seems to be so much connected with, and be so shaped by, analog film production, to the digital age? If so, on what terms? » The planned opening screening of Straub's latest feature film (Huillet died in 2006), Kommunisten (2014), went out ironically or dressily enough due to the long file upload time. What we were shown, on the other hand, was the recording of a lecture Deleuze gave in 1987, in which he connects the filmmakers to a reflection on art's relationship to human resistance.
Art creates new spaces, sounds, contexts and images for the mind and the senses, and through it can put us in a new contact with the world – just as philosophy for Deleuze is not about "reflecting on things", but about "creating concepts" . It is about, as I understand it, experimenting with life, seeking out tired clichés and social forms that lock us in certain ways of living and thinking. Philosophy and art do this in different ways – one creates concepts, the other creates sensory expressions. This is something Deleuze has written about in a number of works, and in the mentioned lecture he revolves around the question of what it means to have an idea in different art forms. What does it mean to have an idea in film, as opposed to in literature? What does it mean to create with film? What is specific about how film thinks and experiments with life?
Here he comes to Straub-Huillet: By directing our attention to material reality, through perpetual shots (images) that draw nature into speech, and at the same time get non-actors to read out cultural-historical, poetic and philosophical texts, they create the films new thoughts and experiences. It becomes a new composition of time and space, where what we see and what we hear occur simultaneously (purely materially), but at the same time are separated from each other (historically).
Concentration. Well, this is one interpretation of what Deleuze suggests, and I must admit that I myself find what I have seen of Straub and Huillet's work demanding, and often more dry than liberating. It did not help that the films during the exhibition were shown outside the cinema hall, in exhibition rooms where sounds from different screens flowed into each other and created an atmosphere that did not exactly stimulate concentration (this was at least the case for the screening of Workers, peasants (Workers, Peasants, 2001), which was the one I watched). Admittedly, the transition from analogue to digital film technology was now a theme for the exhibition, but one may wonder whether this experimentation with the form of screening damaged the experience of Straub-Huillet's films – which just asks for a special kind of concentration.
If one is to understand their work as resistance – a resistance to the dominant and fictional forms of representation of the dominant film culture, a resistance that asks for the attention of the child or the caveman – it is not important to preserve the material form this resistance took shape in, or better: where was this resistance created? Or is this a conservative and outspoken understanding of art's way of thinking and working, which should be challenged by festivals?
The exhibition at the Art Academy in Trondheim is an honorable initiative. But by moving Straub-Huillet's films out of their material-specific and ideological spaces, and into the stream of impressions that characterize the digital, one seems to undermine what may be of significant value in their work – the material-specific and bitter alienation, the attitude towards what Viktor Sklovsky called the stone unity of the stone, which opposes the usual course of the world. The exhibition was conceptual, not cinematically-ideologically – and thus interesting, but not set against the one who would listen to the wind in the picture.
