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 Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn (1970) is showing on MUBI from May 27 – June 26, 2019.
Whether defeated viewers silently making their way to the exit after the first fifteen minutes or indignant critics taking an axe to the film in (once upon a time) major print publications, detractors of Straub-Huillet frequently bemoan what they see as the duo’s hatred of the audience. Straub, on the contrary, claimed that these were popular-minded films intended for workers and not intellectuals (i.e. to be shown in factories).
It is obvious that the verbal density alone of many of the directors' “historical” films—most famously their 1969 adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s Othon—pushes stupefied viewers unfamiliar with the texts, at worst, into a blind rage and, at best, away from the “textual” dimension that is so key to Straub-Huillet’s art and into a serene contemplation of the aural and visual materials of the film. Which is to say, these movies, Eyes Do Not Want... in particular, are hardly ideal to being shown a single time in a workplace session to an exhausted audience of laboring women and men, as Straub dreamed.
Nevertheless, this point is exactly where many of their modern-day champions are in concert with the detractors. Both sides de-emphasize the importance of the texts themselves, supposedly focusing on the aesthetic elements of the film, whether in a scathing or a positive fashion. A fine-tuned appreciation of the abundant sensuality of the material is precisely what the Straubs’ admirers perceive as an aesthetic liberation from the illusionist shackles of, say, plot and character. Yet the pair quite clearly put a great deal of stock in these would-be dramatic trivialities, even while conspiring to reduce their prominence in every possible way.
As the critic and filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette, bit player in their Othon adaptation, once wrote, Straub-Huillet had two interests as filmmakers: aesthetics and politics. Their interest in aesthetics, he said, came from a place of love, their politics from a place of hatred. While it may be pleasurable to drift into a spell and ponder the flushed faces of the performers when the (heavily accented) French is too hard to follow or the subtitles drop away from the screen (as Huillet herself always intended), it is hardly conducive to truly grasping what is going on, for instance, throughout Eyes Do Not Want...
You may find yourself bored by Straub-Huillet and start mentally composing a weekly grocery list or wracking your brains for gift inspiration for your great-grandmother’s 101st birthday. If that happens, it is difficult to absorb the details of the narrative, so acute is the alienating power of the machine-gun pace of the dialogue. Therefore, it is hard without at least a basic grip on things to feel the shock of, for instance, their ultimate, Chimes at Midnight-like gesture—a lonely Othon spurned by his love as he disappears into his role as Emperor.
Ultimately, narrative is essential to Straub-Huillet’s work. As Huillet once said, speaking of mixing narrative and documentary, "[It creates] a contradiction. A spark can flash up.” Claims that the movies they made can be understood as purely aesthetic objects should be considered spurious. In the case of Eyes Do Not... what relation we can grasp between Othon, Plautine, Galba, Camille, et cetera, including countless major off-screen plot developments, is put across through speech alone. There is not a single moment in which the “plot” as such is legible through the formal field alone. Which is not to say that there are no moments of extra-narrative poetry—far from it. It should be sufficient to talk about Plautine (Anne Brumagne) momentarily distracted by a butterfly mid speech, of Martian (Jean-Claude Biette) resting his index and middle finger behind him in the fold of his toga as he walks, or the curious beauty of Vinius’ (Anthony Pensebene) voice eerily echoing ever-so-slightly against the half-seen cliff-face just off-screen.
Still, this reliance on the narrative possibilities of the spoken word makes Straub-Huillet’s decision to de-emphasize the text, to reduce and transform it into just another constituent aspect of the whole mosaic of the film, a demanding one—and once recognized and conquered, I should add, something unique and hugely rewarding. These are not oblique narratives, with elements mysteriously withheld from our view. As is obvious, they are remarkably, unrelentingly straightforward.1 That is perhaps why they present a unique challenge even to aficionados of so-called “slow cinema”: to allow the languor and formal beauty to envelop you, to swallow you whole, is only ever half the idea.
One possible solution, then: watch the film five times in a row.
1. Even when obliqueness is the order of the day in a Straub-Huillet film, as in Not Reconciled, their aim is to demystify historical differences by scattering the chronology rather than gradually lull the viewer into a peaceful contemplation.