A Straub-Huillet Companion: “Antigone”

Films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are conduits not just to written stories and lived histories, but also to early cinema.
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. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's Antigone (1992) is showing on MUBI from May 5– June 4, 2020.

"What seems interesting to me is that the Lumière approach, though it seeks to simply reproduce reality, nevertheless leaves the door open to the wildest imagination. I find that there is more fantasy in certain images [of theirs] than in certain paintings that claim to be works of fantasy. I find that Lumière's images somehow remind me of what Le Douanier Rousseau represents in painting. That is, each man shares a sincere desire to copy reality, without adding or removing anything, but in fact the end result is the creation of a world. It is a world that exists in reality, but which also exists, with perhaps even greater power, in the imagination of Le Douanier Rousseau or in the imagination of the camera operators who went to film the Tsar in St. Petersburg or the Pope in Rome."

—Jean Renoir, from Louis Lumière (1968)

Today my mind wanders often to certain favorite movies by the Lumière brothers. I’m contemplating scrubbing my bathroom floor with detergent, watering my plants, or even picking up a novel. Yet what is really on my mind is the sight of the little girl in La petite fille et son chat (1899) sat on a garden chair, her giant fluffy cat perched on the adjoining table, desperately begging to be fed. An image as old as the cinema itself and yet existing in my eternal present. As the global situation has grown increasingly grave, I have taken solace in early cinema, and in the Lumière brothers in particular. These movies are not comfort food, exactly; what I like and have always liked is the combination of each film's extraordinary rigor of conception with the effortless experience of actually watching them. The brothers imagined, no doubt influenced by technology, that it was necessary for everything to be contained inside a single image. Whether they calculated that it would or not, the crystallization of this exact form had granted them enormous artistic freedom.

The electrifying beauty of early cinema is such that a happy accident, like dust participles caught in the sunlight or the random presence of, say, a magpie intruding into the side of the frame, somehow anticipates the underlying appeal of the structuralist cinema of the next century. It is a short leap to the works of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Besides Renoir, few could claim to have cultivated what you might call the primitive effect of early cinema to the extent that Huillet and Straub did. They famously cast aside and renounced so much of what contemporary cinema looked like at the time, surrendering most available production materials and rejecting the modes and fashions they saw all around them. Instead, they concentrated on specific forms and methods that reflected their own ascetic life and practice. This ought to be called the Lumière Tradition. The best of Straub-Huillet takes what animated the Lumières' movies and redirects them to modernist ends. The role of accident in both these cinematic modes is revealing: it is often about decisions made before the camera begins to roll that have outsize bearing on the shape and trajectory of the images themselves.

But the Straubs made movies that were also opaque, and often require serious extracurricular work. As filmmakers, they were about translating the essence of other artforms and works of art to the cinema in as unintrusive a style as possible—which is, of course, a million miles from Lumière. And generally, their work is intended to be viewed in concert with other forms of knowledge: with a mastery of several European languages, with an authoritative understanding of the complex politics of rearmament in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, with a familiarity with now-obscure texts from antiquity, et cetera. By these standards, they would seem to be the antithesis of the Lumière Tradition, and by any conventional definition, not good quarantine viewing. But in general, both the brothers' and Straub-Huillet's whole idea of staging is inherently dramatic; they merely preferred these front-loaded dramatic concoctions to elicit drama from the natural world, rather than intervene in the narrative directly. It is this outlook that charges my thoughts so powerfully, whether in pondering a single-shot film of the 1897 launch of the Emmanuel-Philibert in Naples by the Lumières, with the ship’s immediate and explosive entry into the water from screen-left at the immediate outset and with spectators crammed into every other corner of the frame, and every plane of depth, as it passes across the screen, or in watching Huillet and Straub's adaptation of Brecht's Die Antigone des Sophokles (also known as Antigone, 1992), where wind buffets the robes of performers as they speak and butterflies make unexpected intrusions into the most tightly organised compositions on Planet Earth.

Antigone, like all Straub-Huillet films, is about power and about resistance. The power of a man to strip another of his burial rights; the resistance of a woman—Antigone, the dead man's sister—in fighting for these very rights as fundamental, sacred. The Straubs, like Brecht, powerfully associate the rebellions of ancient or antiquarian religious figures with the rebellions of the communists of their century. The connection is, in ways basic and profound, an historical one. It is not a cheap ploy on their part. They are not linking withering power then and withering power now to score points about universality, history as cyclical, et cetera. As a method, theirs is almost an archaeology; by transferring these preserved and recreated forms to another context and another medium, they are leaving it to the viewer to chart the connections. The transparency of their methodology has a revelatory quality; they maintain the integrity of each sound and each image with a Lumière-like meticulousness, kept in characteristic isolation from each other section, but also charge them with the electricity of deep-rooted and dramatic historical significance. The characters in Straub-Huillet protest against a ruling order whose operations they deem constitutionally unjust, and they react as if with their very being; Brecht was only more obvious about it, directing that his Sophoclesian figures be dressed in twentieth century regalia to make the connection explicit.

For the Straubs it was plenty to reanimate these stories through cinema—diligently, scrupulously, lucidly.

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