Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s aesthetically and politically stringent History Lessons, originally screened in 1972, opens from the viewpoint of a passenger of a car whose visual horizon is circumscribed by the vehicle’s windshield. Under the flat light of midday, the car briefly travels along a daze-inducing, homogeneous kind of highway, before setting off on a meandering cruise through the nondescript, labyrinthine streets, bustling with people, of what the viewer comes to identify as urban Rome. A lengthy, unbroken shot sustains the viewer’s initial perspective. In the midst of this trip, the film abruptly cuts to a peaceful and sheltered park in which a seasoned, genial man named Mummlius Spicer airs a mixture of opinion and understanding to an attentive man who is his junior. Spicer, a weathered-faced banker, is clothed in an ancient Roman tunic. The young man, angular-jawed, sports a sharp, modern suit. The speaker recollects...
- 3/7/2017
- 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
Straub-huillet Retrospective At The Hammer | 10899 Wilshire Blvd.
At 83 years old, French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub is one of the world’s most revered living artists. While he continues to make movies at a yearly clip, Straub’s output with his late partner Danièle Huillet, whom he collaborated with for over four decades, remains his most renowned work. And yet their films remain exceedingly difficult to see, rarely screening theatrically and with only a few choice titles having ever been released on home video. Which makes the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s upcoming series, “Not Reconciled: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub...
At 83 years old, French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub is one of the world’s most revered living artists. While he continues to make movies at a yearly clip, Straub’s output with his late partner Danièle Huillet, whom he collaborated with for over four decades, remains his most renowned work. And yet their films remain exceedingly difficult to see, rarely screening theatrically and with only a few choice titles having ever been released on home video. Which makes the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s upcoming series, “Not Reconciled: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub...
- 1/3/2017
- by Jordan Cronk
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Lothringen!One of the more striking shots in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) appears ever so briefly. A row of Italian anti-resistance villagers stand at a bar, peering over their shoulders at their more progressive-minded colleague sitting in a corner off-screen. It’s the first time in the scene that any of the characters are pictured all together within the space, an elegant mahogany interior resembling one of those saloons out of a John Ford western—both good reasons to linger on the shot; the mise en scène virtually demands it. Yet, against custom, Straub-Huillet spend no more than a scant, half-second on it, if that. This much is true, for cinema’s most uncompromising directorial duo, every shot counts. It’s in no small part thanks to their unwavering rebellious stance—from insisting on using direct sound recording to consistently paying...
- 5/11/2016
- MUBI
Above: Us poster for Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1965).As the 53rd New York Film Festival ends today, I thought I would go back half a century and take a look at the 3rd edition of the festival. Curated by Amos Vogel and Richard Roud, the then fledgling fest comprised 17 new features, 6 retrospective selections (ranging from Feuillade’s 1915 Les vampires to Godard’s 1960 Le petit soldat), and a number of shorts or demi-features (including Chris Marker’s The Koumiko Mystery). The main slate was chock-full of masterpieces (Gertrud, Alphaville, Charulata) and films by masters (Franju, Visconti, Kurosawa) and young turks on the rise (Straub, Bellocchio, Forman, Penn, Skolimowski). And there is only one film in the list—Laurence L. Kent’s Canadian indie Caressed—that I had never heard of before.In his introduction to the festival catalog Amos Vogel wrote:“Several fascinating, contradictory facts stand out in the 1965 New York film scene.
- 10/11/2015
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas opens with a series of disguises, image overlays revealing to us Fantomas’ various personas.Often used by silent filmmakers attempting to conjure the supernatural, they conjure the abstract instead:“It’s a visual medium”–John Ford“[Erich von] Stroheim asked me personally to take on the assignment (after the studio removed him from the film), and I did so without any protest on his part…”– Josef von Sternberg***We move from dissolves to hard cuts:Later in The Wedding March:Counterpoints:And beyond:We call for help, mere seconds later our cries our answered: “We’ve got a trial ahead of us.”Time is meaningless: there is no difference between past and present.Impressionism becomes Expressionism:But we keep being reborn:Love exists:Love unites us all, re-engages us with the world:We cease being individuals:And become a collective--We become a crowd:None of us are alone:*** Sources:Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913)India Matri Bhumi (Roberto Rossellini,...
- 3/15/2015
- by Neil Bahadur
- MUBI
The retrospective dedicated to the work of Peter Nestler organized by Tate Modern and Goethe-Institut in London that runs between the 10th and the 17th of November is the first big retrospective of Nestler’s films in the Anglophone world. The program of the documentary festival Dok Leipzig also featured a collection of Nestler’s films, and absolut Medien just put out a DVD box set featuring many of Nestler’s films. This interview, conducted with Martin Grennberger, is a shorter version of the original text published at Magasinet Walden and was translated to English by myself and Kurt Walker.
Martin Grennberger: The documentary filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky has described your thematic approaches and ideological concerns as a product of attitudes that took shape during the 1950s. Specifically, a position which tries to establish a functional critical attitude and a policy based on an anti-fascist stance; but also criticizes what you...
Martin Grennberger: The documentary filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky has described your thematic approaches and ideological concerns as a product of attitudes that took shape during the 1950s. Specifically, a position which tries to establish a functional critical attitude and a policy based on an anti-fascist stance; but also criticizes what you...
- 11/13/2012
- by Stefan Ramstedt
- MUBI
Above: Reading of the Oberhausen Manifeso before the West German press.
In 1962, twenty-six West German filmmakers—including writers, directors, producers, and an actor—declared the Oberhausen Manifesto at the 8th Oberhausen Short Film Festival. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the manifesto, the festival organized the retrospective “Provoking Reality: Mavericks, Mouvements, and Manifestos,” in which they screened nearly forty short films by the manifesto’s signatories. (Earlier this year, Daniel Kasman wrote about several of the retrospective's shorts in his report from the festival, "Manifestations".) This week, the Museum of Modern Art will also screen a selection of them from September 27th through the 30th. Out of these new films, a Junger Deutscher Film (Young German Film) emerged to counter the established film industry and the conventional German entertainment of the 1950s.
Above: The 8th Oberhausen Short Film Festival.
After the Allies defeated Germany in World War II and subsequently partitioned the country,...
In 1962, twenty-six West German filmmakers—including writers, directors, producers, and an actor—declared the Oberhausen Manifesto at the 8th Oberhausen Short Film Festival. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the manifesto, the festival organized the retrospective “Provoking Reality: Mavericks, Mouvements, and Manifestos,” in which they screened nearly forty short films by the manifesto’s signatories. (Earlier this year, Daniel Kasman wrote about several of the retrospective's shorts in his report from the festival, "Manifestations".) This week, the Museum of Modern Art will also screen a selection of them from September 27th through the 30th. Out of these new films, a Junger Deutscher Film (Young German Film) emerged to counter the established film industry and the conventional German entertainment of the 1950s.
Above: The 8th Oberhausen Short Film Festival.
After the Allies defeated Germany in World War II and subsequently partitioned the country,...
- 9/26/2012
- MUBI
“When history is what it should be, it is an elaboration of cinema.” —Ortega y Gasset
“The key for me is finding some rhythm of the film, not so much in the plot from a traditional sense but, rather, from its internal rhythm.” —Matías Piñeiro
1
There are works of art that affect in bulk, all at once; these are the aesthetic experiences that unify, that impose boundaries on the license of eye and ear. Other works of art achieve a dissociated and dissociating stylistic program; these are the works that cannot be experienced or understood as feats of synthesis, or as products of a single point of view.
While much of the art of the past century might be described as an effort toward a radical disaffiliation of elements—word and image, depth and surface, form and content—awareness of a quarrelsome relationship between two presumably incompatible ways of making...
“The key for me is finding some rhythm of the film, not so much in the plot from a traditional sense but, rather, from its internal rhythm.” —Matías Piñeiro
1
There are works of art that affect in bulk, all at once; these are the aesthetic experiences that unify, that impose boundaries on the license of eye and ear. Other works of art achieve a dissociated and dissociating stylistic program; these are the works that cannot be experienced or understood as feats of synthesis, or as products of a single point of view.
While much of the art of the past century might be described as an effort toward a radical disaffiliation of elements—word and image, depth and surface, form and content—awareness of a quarrelsome relationship between two presumably incompatible ways of making...
- 8/20/2012
- MUBI
Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation about Straub-Huillet after a screening of From the Clouds to the Resistance and Workers, Peasants
Monday, February 16, 2004, Jean Vigo Cinema, Nice, France
Above: From the Clouds to the Resistance.
Philippe Lafosse: It seemed interesting to us, after having seen twelve films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and talked about them together, to ask another viewer, a philosopher and cinephile, to talk to us about these filmmakers. Jacques Rancière is with us this evening to tackle a subject that we’ve entitled “Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs’ Films,” knowing that we could then look into other points.
Jacques Ranciere: First, a word apropos the “and” of “Politics and Aesthetics”: this doesn’t mean that there’s art on the one hand and politics on the other, or that there would be a formal procedure on the one hand and political messages on the other.
Monday, February 16, 2004, Jean Vigo Cinema, Nice, France
Above: From the Clouds to the Resistance.
Philippe Lafosse: It seemed interesting to us, after having seen twelve films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and talked about them together, to ask another viewer, a philosopher and cinephile, to talk to us about these filmmakers. Jacques Rancière is with us this evening to tackle a subject that we’ve entitled “Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs’ Films,” knowing that we could then look into other points.
Jacques Ranciere: First, a word apropos the “and” of “Politics and Aesthetics”: this doesn’t mean that there’s art on the one hand and politics on the other, or that there would be a formal procedure on the one hand and political messages on the other.
- 11/7/2011
- MUBI
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