Resistance
by Chris Fujiwara

One rarely saw her name in print except after a hyphen or a slash (/), or after the word "and." Her death has made it necessary to speak of her alone, without the written mark that linked her name to her partner's. But the films remain theirs, the works of an inseparable couple — even though something is known, not least because of Pedro Costa's documentary, of the distinct part each of the two played in making them. Costa's film (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?) also enables those of us who never met Danièle Huillet to see her as she was, and her own films will continue to make it possible to speak about her in the present tense.

The least that can be said to explain why the films of Straub and Huillet are so important is that they embody the most rigorous practice in cinema of playing fair with one's materials: texts, actors, elements, landscapes, buildings. That means: letting the living live, letting what once lived, speak. What once lived: what was once intended, what was once thought within a network of links with its own time and with the more or less distant past (the connections from Brecht to Caesar, from Hölderlin to Empedocles, from Pavese to the ancient gods of Italy, from Schönberg to Moses and Aaron). Letting what once lived, speak and appear, somewhere. People and things may not be in their place, but they are in a place.

Straub-Huillet's is a cinema of eviction and homelessness. I remember very few shots of the interiors of homes in Straub-Huillet films; I know they are there, but they don't come to mind first. There is, on the other hand, the great exterior shot of the woman on the doorstep that ends Umiliati (2003). A shot that is both a dividing line and the sign of a resistance.

In Not Reconciled (1965), it's already clear, this attitude, or discipline, that makes it happen that the filmmakers place themselves in front of people, in the midst of reality, in such a way that 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. (No pretended intimacy in their films, no false traffic with the inner life of people; what is discussed is public life, politics, work, genetic life, the activity of peoples and races....) What Straub-Huillet add to Brecht is cinema: the route through the real or the escape of the real through the real, at the moment of being filmed.

Later, the extraordinary outpouring of films of the outdoors: Othon (1970), Moses and Aaron (1974), From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979), Too Early, Too Late (1982), the Hölderlin films, the later Italian films. 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
© FIPRESCI 2006

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