From Yesterday until Tomorrow
by John Gianvito

I never met Danièle Huillet. And yet I've thought about her and her partner Jean-Marie Straub more than many people I know intimately. I had the fortune once only of seeing them in person. It was in April 1982, when they appeared at the long-gone Collective for Living Cinema in lower Manhattan for the New York premiere of Too Early, Too Late (1982). Only a few details have lingered in memory although the film itself remains a personal favorite. I remember the program starting a little late because we were told they were fine-tuning the sound system and that there was an issue about the film needing to be projected at its correct speed of 25fps. Earlier in the day Straub and Huillet had apparently watched a new short film in Super-8 by a young filmmaker friend from New Jersey and in a revealing gesture of fraternity they announced that they would begin the program with this 4-minute short, which they screened twice, insuring that we really gave it proper attention. Perhaps someone else recalls who the young man was. I remember simple, very poetic images of things falling, partially animated, Chaplin falling backwards on skates, a boxer with a knockout, a plane crashing, leaves falling.

I then recall Danièle introducing Too Early, Too Late as a film about "landscape and memory," and Jean-Marie saying that what we were going to see was a "topographical film, about things close and far away, about the traces of the past in the present." By way of preface, Jean-Marie then recited three quotes. The first was by David Wark Griffith, who at the end of his life said, "What the moving pictures need is a moving wind" (Though Jonathan Rosenbaum, who was also in attendance, records the quote, likely more accurately, as "What the moving pictures lack is the wind in the trees."). [1] The second was by Rosa Luxemburg, "The life of an insect is no less important than the life of a revolution," and the third had to do with Cézanne remarking to someone examining one of his canvases depicting Mont Saint-Victoire, "This mountain that you see, once it was fire."

In the discussion following the film, Jean-Marie cited yet another related quote, this one by Brecht, "What will remain of our towns — the wind." The film itself, with its evocation of two failed revolutions, one in France, the other in Egypt, left me reeling, most memorably and viscerally through the impact of its sound work. Never had I experienced a film with sound so tangibly present and alive.

I don't recall the questions asked afterwards and only fragments of the responses, [2] but what remains quite vivid in memory is the attention Straub and Huillet directed toward every inquiry. I recall Danièle remaining mostly near the front of the room while Jean-Marie paced around the audience, gripping his trusty cigar, as they addressed one another, more than the audience. The nature of each question was itself questioned, its subtext probed, each question seemingly taking twenty minutes or more to answer as it was put beneath the strong spotlight of their analysis. The rigor and intellectual tension of the work we had just seen was as wonderfully manifest in its makers. Here was evidence of an absolute incarnate stance of commitment from which I, like so many others, have drawn invaluable sustenance across many years.

Sicilia!

Just reading about Straub and Huillet having embarked on a new film would fill me with true joy — and of course reading about the films was often all one could do, given the pronounced and seemingly widening disinterest in the States in their recent work. During the few years I curated at the Harvard Film Archive, Edith Kramer of the Pacific Film Archive and I had a deal that we would each, in alternation, try to purchase a print of a new Straub/Huillet work to preserve in our collections, and I consider it one of my major accomplishments within that thorny institution that subtitled prints of both Sicilia! (1999) and From Today until Tomorrow (1997) were purchased. I attempted through a friend to invite them for a visit, but following the NATO bombings in Kosovo in 1999, they declared they would never again come to the United States, and Danièle informed us even then that they were too busy "making their last films."

A month ago I once again felt that exhilaration, reading about the appearance of another new Straub/Huillet work at the Venice Film Festival and the recognition they received: the Special Lion award for "innovation in the language of cinema" — special lions indeed. A week ago Danièle Huillet was laid to rest. From the moment the news broke, the flooding sense of bereavement has pervaded all activity and clearly is being felt by many friends and many strangers alike.

This evening I turn on and then off 60 Minutes following one of their 15-minute inquiries into the on-going "final solution" in Darfur. I listen to the words of a solitary health worker tending to over 25,000 refugees in one resettlement outpost. The young, hippieish looking doctor is named Ashis Brahma. "What is it that you think people don't understand about what's going on here now?", the 60 Minutes reporter asks Dr. Brahma. "Do you really want to know?", the doctor asks pointedly. There is a long pause as if he is questioning his ability to summon language once more for that which must in most ways remain inexpressible. "This is bad," he begins. "They go to the villages, and they burn one village after the other, then when the people come out they catch the women and gang bang, they rape them not one guy, no 10, 15, then they carve up the men and throw them in the drinking water to make sure that this place will never ever be used again. And you're telling me the people in America don't know this or don't want to know this. Maybe it's too much to know, but that's what's happening right now and its happening all over again," Dr. Brahma says. "I'm sorry to say I'm going to sit here with you in two years time and I'm gonna tell you the same sad story. People will say, 'Ich habe nicht gewusst,' which is German for 'I didn't know.'" Despite the brutal cut-and-paste reporting, the gravity of his words and some measure of what resides behind the words comes through and is at that moment silencing.

And tomorrow it will be the same — the news of the world will leave one who is still open to it, one not yet wholly benumbed, either silenced or screaming. I think of the words of my teacher, the filmmaker Don Levy, who wrote in his diary, "The quote 'To those who feel, life is a tragedy, to those who think, it is a comedy.' What is it to feel and think? Unbearable." I contemplate the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. I think of their response to that simple and complex question that the magazine Libération posed some years ago to 700 filmmakers around the world, "Pourquoi filmez vous?" Only Jean-Marie was asked, it seems, likely the consequence of that all too-prevalent misconception of seeing Jean-Marie as the director and Danièle as but an accomplice, a problem Barton Byg confronts at length in his excellent book Landscapes of Resistance, reminding us of Danièle's own comments that "the works of Straub/Huillet are truly collaborative — and always have been" and that she herself "has both stated and implied that Straub can answer for both of them...." And in that question's response, I hear their collective and utterly singular voice: "à quoi bon?! (je filme)"/"What's the use?! (I film)," poised, as we all must be, between uncertainty and defiance, and doing something.

John Gianvito
© FIPRESCI 2006

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