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Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub
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Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) and Danièle Huillet (1936-2006) are relatively rare examples of international filmmakers in the sense that they have embedded their filmmaking in texts and locations reflecting political and cultural history whether in Germany, France or Italy. On their films together Straub (pron. Strorb) is credited as director while sharing production, post-production and writing credits with Huillet although, as further suggested, this functional ‘division of labour’ obscures the truly collaborative nature of their creative relationship.
Straub was born in France in Alsace-Lorraine. At the age of seven he experienced the banning of the right to continue to publicly speak French when the border province was occupied by Germany in 1940; over the centuries control has alternated between France and Germany and the culture is mixed. His interest in cinema appears to have had its first active expression in his taking part in demonstrations against the unenterprising film programming of Metz cinemas. Straub made his first films in West Germany where he had moved in 1959 with Danièle Huillet to escape being conscripted into the French army for the Algerian War, and from 1969 they lived and worked in Italy.
The bulk of their work has been in German with their sources often also German, the philosophical and technical aspects having roots in German Marxism and in the aesthetic theories of Brecht although Straub admitted to only later reading his writings. His early experiences in filmmaking were during the period of the French New Wave in Paris where he met Danièle Huillet in 1954. They married in 1959 and remained inseparable for the 52 years until Danièle’s death. Her interest in cinema, especially in ethnographic film, pre-dated the meeting with Straub when both were preparing to enrol, unsuccessfully, in the French film school, IDHEC. Prior to moving to Munich Straub worked as an assistant to Abel Gance, Renoir, Rivette, Astruc, and Bresson, the latter's work a major formative influence.
The sexist assumption that Straub was the principal author of the films with Huillet in a supportive ‘behind the scenes’ role persisted until a 1982 interview published in ‘Frauen und Film’ in which “Huillet removed all doubt that the works of Straub/Huillet are truly collaborative - and always have been” (Barton Byg 12). Byg states that the single area in which Huillet did leave more of the decisions to Straub is the aspect of filmmaking that has been reified into directorial “signature”: the set-up and framing of the shots, with areas such as script and mise en scene (staging) more equally collaborative while sound, editing, and scene design together with certain producer’s functions, were more likely to have been in Huillet’s charge.
Byg further points out that “Straub/Huillet question the notion of authorship by multiplying the form of their works, subverting the question of “originality.” “From the very beginning a principal aspect of their aesthetic has been to subvert the primacy of the visual in cinema by having the text, sound, duration, and editing clash with, rather than support, the image” (12). At the same time they did not dismiss the implication of individual work within film tradition, consistently referring to the importance of figures of the classical cinema,”especially because it is endangered.”
Although “their approach is a modernist one of reduction and simplification of form” (ibid 20), Straub-Huillet, over more than three decades, repeatedly expressed their wish to maintain a connection to film tradition and references to the great artists of classical cinema abound in their work. Jean Gremillon’s experiments with sound other than as merely an accompaniment to the image, was a formative influence on Straub. He more than once cited Jean Renoir as the source of a definition of “the filmic - a tiny dialectic between between film, theatre and life” - also varying it by replacing “film” with “encounter with place” (ibid 20). Renoir’s description of the actor’s relation to the text and his early use of live sound also parallels that of Straub/Huillet (23,24).
To come across the films of Straub and Huillet without foreknowledge is to discover “a rigorous program that's all work and no play,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum warns but then hastens to add that “every one of their films offers an arena of play as well as work, and opportunities for sensual enjoyment as well as analytical reflection.” Writing in 1988, Rosenbaum draws a distinction between the marginality separating Straub/Huillet’s films from the more widely circulated “art films” of Godard, Ruiz, Kluge et al. Their films frequently present greater challenges for the viewer simply because they insist on the reality principle - preserving and enlivening the integrity of the original text in terms of meticulous choice of actual places/settings or landscapes where intensely rehearsed performances by the actors, with total commitment to live sound recorded at source for the final release soundtrack, as more important than the pleasure principle.
Jonathan Rosenbaum's further description of them and their films is well placed : “Utopian Marxists with a taste and passion for nature, antiquity, direct sound, and obscure, mainly neglected texts, they remain materialist thorns in the sides of those critics and programmers who believe that films are meant to be consumed rather than grappled with.” (123-9). Other than what resides in the chosen text to be reshaped, Straub - Huillet rejected the narrative conventions prevailing in illusionistic film narrative. Their acceptance of photography as a baseline clearly distinguishes their films from the avant garde and “reveals the error of critics’ “tying them to the way structuralist/materialist filmmakers call attention to the material facts of film” (Byg 22).
Rosenbaum further distinguishes “the conflicts, textures, pleasures, and meanings [that] are created in the encounter of one or more pre-existing texts (verbal and musical) with concrete places/settings or landscapes. In each film the complex balance of the encounter is distinctly different.” The texts range from fiction (by Brecht, Heinrich Böll, Marguerite Duras, Kafka and Cesare Pavese) to poetry (by Saint John of the Cross, and Stéphane Mallarmé); from plays by Ferdinand Bruckner and Pierre Corneille to letters (by Friedrich Engels and Arnold Schoenberg); and from political statements (by Franco Fortini and Mahmoud Hussein) to musical pieces (by Bach and Schoenberg). The locations have included urban and rural landscapes in Egypt, France, Germany and Italy, as well as shots in New York and St Louis to supplement the mainly German footage of Amerika / Class Relations, their 1984 Kafka adaptation. (123-4)
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| Nicht versöhnt /Not Reconciled |
Based on Heinrich Boll's novel 'Billiards at Half Past Nine', Nicht versöhnt /Not Reconciled (1965) a narrative about three generations in the life of a German middle class family involving eight members over 50 years (c1910-60) told mostly in flashbacks, is “quite simply exploded” in the film, the whole novel abstracted into 12 tableaux in a chain of elliptical moments in 53 minutes, past and present co-existing on the same level. Straub describes it as “a lacunary film” - the whole body is composed of cells with gaps between. “Time is flattened out, generations are meaningfully confused – all in order to make, not a film about the advent of the Nazis, but historically one that shows that Nazisim already existed politically before 1933 and continues still.” (Roud Dictionary ed. and entry on Straub-Huillet 967). The Bressonian influence is clearly evident in the mise-en-scène of Not Reconciled. There is virtually no acting or interaction between the characters who dispassionately deliver monologues in scenes that are completely given over to them leaving little space for description of the location or for suggesting the character's state of mind. Straub stated that the intent was “to eliminate, as much as possible, any historical aura in both costume and sets, thus giving the images a kind of atonal character” so that they merge into a continuum of past and present.Thereafter politics is an implicit presence but “taken up by the post 1968 left as models of anti-realist, political filmmaking” (Nowell-Smith, ‘Making Waves’ 214). Except in rare cases such as Fortini/Cani (1976), his (sic) films (sic) were political only to the extent that they “revolutionised representation” in breaking every convention that Hollywood had established. “His (sic) Brecht-inspired critique of representation and his radical politics had a lasting impact on the Young German film, especially on Alexander Kluge and the early Rainer Werner Fassbinder” (Kaes 616).
András Kovács observes that “acts are depicted as symbolic gestures rather than as real physical facts, and so events of the plot for the most part are told rather than shown.” - the act of one character shooting another with a pistol in Not Reconciled is “reduced to the signalling of a gesture.” This aspect of Straub's style assumes the form of a kind of distanced theatricality, a tendency that becomes stronger in some of Straub/Huillet’s subsequent films. On the other hand, Straub adopts a radically minimalist style in, for example, Moses and Aaron (1974) in which two characters and a chorus perform Schoenberg's opera outdoors in the ruins of an ancient arena (148).
The film of Not Reconciled is to be counted among the many cases in the Straub/Huillet oeuvre where a knowledge of the original, in this case Boll's novel, and repeated viewings are necessary in order to comprehend the film's narrative but not the film's theme. To Rosenbaum, “for all its complexity and difficulty as an integral narrative, Not Reconciledregisters more simply and conventionally than [the Straubs'] other works within its individual sequences, and perhaps the only one of [their] individual films to which the usual concept of 'mise en scène' can comfortably be applied.”
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| The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach |
Straub-Huillet’s next film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), was a first project made after a long struggle for funding and thus Bach was their third realised film, composed of documents from Johann Sebastian’s life, musical performances in historic locations, and a few fictionalised scenes held together by a voice-over narration by his second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach. “It never presumes to tell us more about the characters’ motivations or personal lives than the historical evidence offered in the chronicle although some additional evidence was generated in the same tone” (Turim 330). Nothing survives that was known to have been written by Anna Magdalena except for an inscription in a bible. Most of the text is made up of phrases from her husband's letters and the necrology written by one of his sons. In all there are about twenty sources, plus the linking passages written by Straub and Huillet.Leading Bach interpreter, harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, plays Bach in both senses. However the Chronicle is not just a biographical account but an intelligent revelling by Straub-Huillet in the “Bach experience.” New York film critic Armond White finds Straub expanding film’s potential in letting various techniques illustrate aspects of Bach’s life and work, witnessing Bach’s real-time execution of performances (as portrayed by Gustav Leonhardt). “Rejecting the sentimental conventions of storytelling, Straub/Huillet find pleasure in the rigours of film form.”
The music, from solo harpsichord to orchestral, on the soundtrack is presented to represent the range of Bach’s work recorded ‘live’ in performance (q.v.), and presented chronologically in 25 pieces, all extracts from the original as composed from 1721-49. Roy Armes suggests “this leads one to ponder on the style of performance and the nature of the film itself” (214).
“Much time and travel was dedicated to finding [25 different original locations] and performers who could use the original baroque instruments, a practice that was not at all common at the time […] The live recording of uninterrupted performances also goes against [film] industry practices.”(Byg 55).
Chronicle is, as Straub has said, “a love story. It is also a documentary on the actors and musicians of the film; also a film with social and political aspects; and finally, to use a phrase of Straub’s, it is a film-film [i.e. 'pure film'] and it is in this last aspect that it brings us back to the music of Bach. It is because the film is all of these things at once that it is such a major achievement of integration.” (Roud BFI p.65)
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| Othon |
Othon (1969) - more an exemplar than a paradigm on the spectrum of Straub-Huillet’s radical approaches to redefining cinematic narration - their first film in colour, is also the first of a number of their films set in the ancient world. It is based on a canonical text, Pierre Corneille’s 17th century play, a tragedy inspired by an episode of Roman history from 69 AD. It contains what can be taken as a revolutionary message around an ambitious nobleman’s search for power through love and political scheming. In 1962 while they were on holiday in Rome Straub was inspired to make a film on the site of the Circus Maximus, the remains of a massive ensemble of buildings looking across a valley. Six years later after completing Bach Straub suddenly had the idea of Othon “ feeling the need of a text, a language which would be as tight a texture as the music of Bach; and on the level of the spoken word, Cornielle did the same thing that Bach did for music” (Roud BFI 105).Corneille’s play has a complex plot constructed around the struggle for the throne at the end of the reign of the ageing Emperor Galba, “the complications of the plot being its very essence.” All the characters are victims of the power game. Straub/Huillet felt that the power struggle and the relationship between the government and the governed had forceful 20th century parallels (ibid). But Straub/Huillet had no interest in a theatrically conventional adaptation of the play.
The video guide Understanding Straub and Huillet (see below) begins by asking the question: how and why does a film like Othon not look and feel like a conventional theatrical adaptation? The answer, it is suggested, lies in the underlying disconnect from generic film adaptation that feels like a documentary about actors performing an adaptation carved out of the diegesis (fictional world).
Actors in period costume are ‘dropped’ into the present without any attempt being made to cover up the process of disconnection. The original diegesis is, in effect, superimposed on a modern filmed reality. This palimpsest is made up of 5 layers seemingly in competition: the original play (1) is condensed from 135 to 90 minutes at times running too fast for ‘reading,’ cadence in delivery of the lines given priority over enunciation (2), imposed on a pre-selected location on which the film is built (3), with the actors in Roman dress denoting the period (69 AD) (4). A variety of mainly non-French actors was carefully chosen and exhaustively rehearsed. An ‘explosive mix’ forming a distancing from the ‘“rocking horse rhythms” of the Alexandrine French (ibid 113) - a variety of accents spoken without dramatic expression before a backdrop of ancient remains, the sight and sounds of traffic of contemporary Rome in the valley and of water in a nearby fountain, all forming an aural tapestry. The burden of stage - bound theatricality from the classical past is dialectically dissolved by distancing techniques of Brechtian epic theatre directed at transforming a passive into a ‘thinking’ audience.
For Straub/Huillet, as Roud points out, “ language is an ‘object - something to be manipulated and handled as freely in the composition of the soundtrack as the visuals in the cutting room” (113). In contrast, their insistence on directly recorded sound as the final soundtrack, something live that can only be partially controlled, in preference to wholly determined studio sound recording and dubbing. For Straub/Huillet direct sound becomes another available option, the tension between ‘reality’ and artifice allowing actuality and chance to play a role (114).
This is all designed as part of the Straub’s and Huillet’s craft, as Tag Gallagher puts it, to paradoxically “finally make the texts themselves disappear, whereupon we have a movie, which is why the words have so much more substance.” As Sarah Jane Foster continues in her Cinematheque Annotation on Othon available online in ‘Senses of Cinema’ : “Othon doesn’t elevate the language of the play by creating artifice around it; the words become another material element in the filming process” [emphasis added] […] The flattened hierarchy of material and narrative lets us experience the film sensorially: the timbre of each actor’s voice, the hum of background traffic, and the texture of the green trees and wine-red tunics are as important to the film as Cornielle.”
In defence of this approach to the text, novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras in 1971 implored audiences to put aside conventionally conditioned expectations and go and see Othon. “To call a work obscure is just as disastrous as to call it a masterpiece of clarity: the text becomes burdened with a prejudice that prevents the reader from relating to it directly. The work is imprisoned” (quoted Foster.” See entry on Duras in 6 (10).
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| History Lessons |
Straub/Huillet’s following film, History Lessons (1972), is closely based on an unfinished novel by Bertolt Brecht ,’The Business Deals of Mr Julius Caesar.’ Interviews with four contemporaries of Caesar’s - a banker, a soldier, a lawyer and a writer - place Caesar’s exploits in political perspective exactly quoting Brecht’s dialogue while the filmmakers “make a radical (Brechtian) break with every rule of narrative film grammar” in paring away illusions. “This is arguably political cinema at its most advanced and provocative” (Tony Rayns ‘Time Out’).****************************************
Tony McKibbin is the author a short guide on Where to Begin with the Straub/Huillet films. Click for link. https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-jean-marie-straub-daniele-huillet. He suggests the best film to start (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach), and the best follow-up viewing (History Lessons and Too Early/Too Late).
Available on YouTube is a 17 min. video guide Understanding Straub and Huillet in the Studio Ersatz series by an unidentified presenter making effective use of clips from their second feature film Othon made in the form of a palimpsest - an open ended multi-layered adaptation of a play to film.
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Stuart Liebman “Not Reconciled” review Monthly Film Bulletin March 1976
Richard Roud entry on Jean-Marie Straub in Cinema a Critical Dictionary Ed. Roud Vol 2 1980;
Straub BFI Cinema One series 1971
Tony Rayns review “The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp” MFB op cit.
Tag Gallagher “The Greatest Filmmaker You've Never Heard Of” Sight & Sound Dec. 2009
Maureen Turim Essay on Straub and Huillet in New German Filmmakers ed. Klaus Phillips 1984
Jonathan Rosenbaum “The Sound of German” Essential Cinema 2004
Martin Walsh “Brecht and Straub/Huillet: The Frontiers of Language Afterimage 7 Summer 1978
Barton Byg Landscapes of Resistance the German Films of Straub/Huillet 1995
Roy Armes The Ambiguous Image: narrative style in modern European film 1976 chapter on Straub
