Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice
Toute révolution est un coup de dés
France
1977
11 Min
Color
German, French
Synopsis
Straub-Huillet’s simplest film is also their most mysterious, a tribute to Mallarmé that not only asserts the continuing relevance of his work but also confronts its literary ambiguities with political and cinematic ambiguities of its own. In outline, the film could not be more straightforward: it offers a recitation of one of Mallarmé’s most celebrated and complex poems (it was his last published work in his own lifetime, appearing in 1897, a year before his death) and proposes a cinematic equivalent for the author’s original experiment with typography and layout by assigning the words to nine different speakers, separating each speaker from the other as she or he speaks, and using slight pauses to correspond with white spaces on the original page.
—Tony Rayns
Director
Danièle Huillet
Daniele Huillet was a German filmmaker best known for her close collaboration, so close that it is often uncredited, with Modernist director Jean-Marie Straub. According to Huillet, she is mainly in charge of sound and editing while her partner deals with camera work, but she also assists with script-writing and directing. The films of Huillet and Straub are usually based on and offer historical insight into high German literature or music. Films such as Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) tend to be so intellectually demanding that they are rarely seen commercially, and are primarily to be found on the international festival circuits. Many of their works also tend to make strong political statements such as their examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Fortini (1976).
(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:95128)
Jean-Marie Straub
Filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, his wife and co-director, have become leading figures in New German cinema. Their films are not for passive viewers seeking light entertainment; films such as Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (1965) are intellectually demanding, and yet are among the most haunting films of German cinema. Prior to teaming up with Huillet, the French born Straub worked as an assistant to French directors such as Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson. He met and teamed up with Huillet in 1954. To avoid the draft, he fled to Munich, Germany in 1958 where they got involved with radical theater groups. By the early sixties he and his wife had become a prominent directors. They made their debut with the short Machorka-Muff in 1963. In 1968, their long-time friend Fassbinder appeared in The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp. Straub and Huillet’s most famous film is Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). By the late ’60s… read more
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Peter
22Oct11
Toute révolution est un coup de dés is on one level an experiment with the typography and shape of the original Mallarmé poem, with each speaker seeking to represent the pauses and breathing space within the poem. At a deeper level it's a physical embodiment of the words; a prayer, an evocation, a linking of past and present in time and space. Hence its integrative and organic nature. It's a contemplative physical and spiritual meditation on the words written by the poet, but transposed and sacralized in the living and breathing present moment. It's a political act, a statement, a making real, a communal experience that unites mind, body and heart in nature. We are present during this act of witnessing.
Arsaib and Sudarshan R. like this
gongoina
21Jun11
Prologue: "Every revolution is a throw of the dice." /// Epilogue: "Every thought emits a throw of dice." /// Camus has something to say on this: "To know about life and death and to become human to deny becoming god: the unique rule that is genuine today." Because every revolution (or thought) aims to recreate the god, but this process itself necessarily entails throwing of the dice, one after another...
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