A Straub-Huillet Companion: “Fortini/Cani”

On Straub-Huillet's astonishingly combative and lush presentation of Franco Fortini's "The Dogs of the Sinai."
Christopher Small

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a MUBI retrospective. Straub-Huillet's Fortini/Cani (1976) is showing on MUBI from July 3 – August 1, 2019. 

The boy I was experienced no conflict between paternal and maternal tradition. What touched his imagination in Judaism was not the incomprehensible rites in the synagogue to which his father occasionally took him. His first knowledge of a lack of love and curiosity came with the certainty that his father did not believe in those rituals and pious gestures. When he was introduced to his father’s relatives or acquaintances who wore the tallit on their shoulders as if dressed for a secret ceremony he sensed in them not faith but rather a reproach, as if they expressed a difference he could not yet decipher.

 — Franco Fortini, The Dogs of the Sinai

The IMDb lists Fortini/Cani as Straub-Huillet’s first “documentary” feature. Admirers of their work no doubt balk at the idea of one of their movies being labelled a documentary and another a fiction. If you have seen one, you know that the documentary element is overwhelming, the fiction element quite often merely a theoretical clothesline. All the films thus far in our retrospective here at MUBI have, at least on their face, been adaptations of works of fiction: a play by Pierre Corneille, novels or short stories by Heinrich Böll and Bertolt Brecht, and an unfinished opera by Arnold Schoenberg. 

Straub-Huillet are famously suspicious of fiction. They distrust its manipulations more than most filmmakers. They are vigilant never to allow a fictional text to exert too great an influence on their working method. Nevertheless, it was Danièle Huillet who claimed fiction to be the necessary spark that would set the ideas of a film on fire.  

But though Fortini/Cani takes a written text as a starting point, it is not a fictional film. In it, the Italian Communist writer Franco Fortini reads aloud from his Dogs of the Sinai (only recently translated into English for the first time), a memoir of his life as an Italian Jew and an extended reflection on the aftermath of the Third Arab–Israeli War of 1967 and its representation in the Italian media and by the political class. In the film, Straub-Huillet established the style to which they occasionally reverted later in their career—these are lower-budgeted projects that often follow a more extravagant one—and the register in which Straub himself has continued to work since his wife’s death in 2006. Like Straub’s late digital shorts, a sedentary speaker recites from a text, never assuming the role of a character. 

"Dogs of the Sinai" is an idiom historically popular in the region: to be a dog of the Sinai is to be a political opportunist, slavishly devoted to the powerful, acting out of pure self-interest, co-opting positions in the public sphere that reinforce regressive social and political structures. In the film, it is briefly interpreted as meaning "to run to the aid of the victor." According to Fortini, such people “bark in defense of the tablets of a law that no God ever gave and that no one any longer knows how to decipher, so encrusted is it with ancient massacres.” 

Like all of Straub-Huillet’s movies, this astonishingly combative film follows an internal rhythm born out of the particulars of landscape, of speech, and of the physiognomies of its actors. It begins with an extended recording of a television newscast about Israel/Palestine (thus distancing the audience from the warped words and images on screen), a quotation from Fortini that connects like a punch in the jaw (“People don’t like having to change their minds. When they have to, they do so in secret. The certainty of having been tricked turns into cynicism. Gain for the cause of conservatism”), and then alternates between short jabs like these and more sustained verbal and visual attacks.

Somehow Straub-Huillet are able to be direct in their assaults on a political class and its representation of a conflict—one in which Arabs were presented as "ragged, gesticulating, illiterate" but who could "still progress if educated in respect for Western values..."—and respectful of the actually-existing contours of reality. Think of the sequence where an older female speaker cuts herself off mid-sentence to let church bells ring uninterrupted or another in which the liturgical service in a synagogue is recorded with respect in an unbroken 9-minute take from the gallery. The strange beauty of the Rabbi chanting from the Book of Numbers and proceeding lugubriously with the ceremony is implicitly acknowledged by these most materialist of filmmakers as a sacrosanct image, one accorded an extended display of stoical respect, even as it is combined with words from Fortini that detail his alienation from Judaism and its rituals as a young Marxist and filmed from the gallery to which women are relegated during the service.

Though it was produced almost a decade after the 1967 war, Fortini/Cani remained Straub-Huillet's most forceful and timely political attack through to their final work together, the mini-DV Europa 2005 - 27th October. Yet its staggering geographical, visual, and aural beauty and richness of texture is hard to ignore, harder still to forget. Such contradictions are the beating heart of Straub-Huillet's cinema.

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