A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014) is showing on Mubi from October 8 – November 6, 2019.The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars.Thank God there’s no one left for me to lose–so I am free to cry. This air is madefor the echoing of songs.—Excerpt from Anna Akhmatova's The Return (1944)In the final shot of Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014), Danièle Huillet sits alone on in the dirt, high up on Mount Etna in Sicily and all but static, as Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16—his last major work before his death from alcohol cirrhosis—swells around her. She is strikingly still, staring off ahead as if stupefied by the living world. After a long pause, she says two words: "neue Welt"—new world.This reanimation of Huillet,...
- 10/7/2019
- MUBI
A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Straub-Huillet's Too Early, Too Late (1982) is showing on Mubi from August 6 – September 4, 2019.If there is an actor in Too Early, Too Late, it is the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History, of which it is the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a break in the clouds; this is what the landscape’s performance consists of. This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn’t seen anything like it for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise.—Serge Daney, Cinemeteorology, Libération, 1982In Straub-Huillet films, humans stand erect and impassive like statues, possessed by the spirits of the past. The...
- 8/5/2019
- MUBI
A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Straub-Huillet's Fortini/Cani (1976) is showing on Mubi from July 3 – August 1, 2019. The boy I was experienced no conflict between paternal and maternal tradition. What touched his imagination in Judaism was not the incomprehensible rites in the synagogue to which his father occasionally took him. His first knowledge of a lack of love and curiosity came with the certainty that his father did not believe in those rituals and pious gestures. When he was introduced to his father’s relatives or acquaintances who wore the tallit on their shoulders as if dressed for a secret ceremony he sensed in them not faith but rather a reproach, as if they expressed a difference he could not yet decipher. — Franco Fortini, The Dogs of the SinaiThe IMDb lists Fortini/Cani as Straub-Huillet’s first “documentary” feature.
- 7/4/2019
- MUBI
I'm drawn to Straub-Huillet’s usage of direct quotations rather than adapting or interpreting original material for a film. To me this is, among other things, a very straightforward and concrete way of highlighting that people are much less original than they are often assumed to be. (I think that Danièle Huillet once said this, but she was certainly not the first one.) It might be worth being reminded of this, especially today, in a time where we see and seek constant innovation and renewal everywhere while nothing really changes at the core. But for Straub-Huillet, quotation is also about something else. Every film of theirs is a documentation of their loving relationship to a preexisting text, artwork, or artist. The films are more genuinely about the work of the other and less about the couple's so-called vision. Quotation, to Straub-Huillet, is an act of respect, one...
- 2/7/2017
- MUBI
[...] and also, indeed more, perhaps in those who were in no way exceptional and have left no trace, there was something that went beyond the struggle against Nazism, something – be it only for a moment, the last one – that contributed, whether they knew it or not, to the “dream of a thing” which men have had “for so long,” to the enormous dream of men.These words of Franco Fortini, spoken in Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Fortini/Cani (1978), are a kind of summation of one of the major themes of their work. From one film to the next, they return to this “dream of a thing”: the day Camille dreams of in Eyes Do Not Want to Close At all Times (1969) when “Rome will allow herself to choose in her turn,” human’s desire to commune with the gods in From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979), the “new duties,...
- 3/17/2015
- by Ted Fendt
- MUBI
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