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 Sicilia! (1999) is showing on MUBI through September 20, 2020.
*pour le ouistiti et en souvenir de Barnabé, le chat (for the marmoset and in memory of Barnabé the cat) J.-M.S.
— Opening title card of Sicilia! (1999)
Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily (1938-39) has, like this companion, become subtly entwined with my life. Seeing it at age 16, understanding nothing, but tasting the films of Danièle Huillet and her husband for the first time; clearly, that first hint of obsession would turn out to be an abiding one. Another time, excitedly showing it to friends at university and getting my first taste of the frequently lonely, loveless existence of a Straubian, something that puts me in mind of the Raúl Ruiz quote I placed at the start of my first ever article about cinema: “In our [film school] textbook we learned that the films we loved the most were badly made.” I remember watching part of Sicilia! in the middle of a violent storm in Locarno at midnight, the screen moist with speckles of rain and the audience consisting of a smattering of hard-core cinephiles among 8,000 mostly empty seats, some clutching umbrellas and some not.
The world situation today compels writers of all stripes to grasp for the first person. We, as writers, even writers about movies, are supposed to have the tools to address it, even clarify it, in some small way. But as this companion to Huillet and Straub’s films draws to a close, a stretch that has covered a span of time remarkably dense with raw material for memoiristic prose, I realize that I have deployed that toolset here only sparingly. But why? Facing Straub-Huillet’s work armed with “I” and “me” feels disrespectful, maybe even a little obscene. It is like farting at the table while at a dinner party: the particulars of the moment—overeating, high intellectualism—would seem to invite it, though doing so is almost always frowned upon.
The Straubs were and are regularly criticized (and lauded) for stubbornly adapting literary texts for the screen with a minimum of their own artistic “intrusion” into the material, often to maddening degrees. They got flack for not intervening into the artistic process enough, for not personalizing their material, for asking too much of their audiences, for not massaging their heady literary subjects into shape. Yet as I have tried to show throughout this companion, Straub-Huillet are better than anybody at conjuring something out of the living universe at the precise moment the material—the least improvisatory acting and directing work ever put to the screen—would seem not to suggest it. These moments are rebellions. They are ruptures in otherwise heavily choreographed films. These flashes of individuality, hallmarks of a radical spirit, recur throughout Straub-Huillet's work.
It now appears obvious that Sicilia! would be the film that I would reverse course for. That is, the movie of theirs I would, in writing about it, feel compelled to “personalize” in some way; it has, after all, followed me throughout my life. It is also the story of a journey. Of a man (Gianni Buscarino), an emigrant to the United States, returning to Sicily to confront his mother (Angela Nugara) about the status of her disintegrating marriage. He passes through a landscape unfamiliar to him. He meets men on the train who espouse strange ideologies. He argues about unemployment with men at the docks. When he gets to the house, he doesn’t even remember his favorite meal from childhood. His mother, standing in her own kitchen, curses her husband, who has fled to be with another woman. She curses the misery of living with him, curses his laziness and stupidity right in front of the son, curses her husband for crying while she gave birth—while, she notes, she was the one in pain. Her son, who has traveled the country to visit her, has been exposed repeatedly to the poverty all around that creates these tensions, to the straits of survival in rural Sicily in the 1930s, with its myriad problems and persistent strife.
As the film goes on, dominated largely by this prolonged, difficult conversation with the mother, who offers the protagonist none of the comfort he seeks, the dramatic construction of space and performance, the basis of narrative, breaks down before our eyes. Performance here is an artifact, alive in all its sensuality yet confined to individual shots. The Straubs are careful to isolate each element—sound, image—from its neighbor, all while allowing their performers, Nugara in particular, to dominate the screen. The startling vividness with which she describes her son being pulled out of her body during childbirth, his face turning purple as he starts to suffocate while halfway out of her, is matched by the sonorous melody of her words. Neither this melodic quality or that graphic vividness are undercut by the diligent division of elements and diffusion of a continuous narrative that I'm describing. The cadence of her speech patterns, as in Lubitsch, is a wonder in itself; the words manage to both register as words while also flowing like musical notes.
Of all modern filmmakers, only Straub-Huillet ever reached this level of aural and visual rigor. Words, syllables, images, sounds, cuts—melodic yet discrete, isolated yet contiguous—achieve a preciously rare unity of form. The movie, superficially the most “accessible” and therefore the most famous of Huillet and Straub’s later works, nevertheless burrows down to the most primitive place of cinema. Unadorned pans across the Sicilian countryside, seemingly divorced from the concocted narrative of literary adaptation, make plain the connection to a more primordial space. A single, sound-synchronized image, in this context, seems to contain the world.
Even today, the Straubs’ unemotional intellectualism doesn’t often inspire fits of passion in the minds of romantic cinephiles. Their films are appreciated, if at all, for their austerity or, more uncommonly but more astutely, for their sensuality. I myself can trace an unusually turbulent twelve months with this companion alone, and the actual experience of the movies in these memories is far from brittle or distant. They were a salve in tough times, edifying breaks from a world of disorder. Their force was cleansing, like a mint briefly relieving bad breath. The stoic respect for the natural world that they suggested could re-frame the moment, as if by a miracle. Straub-Huillet’s restraint is itself an expression of their idiosyncratic emotional and artistic temperament. Their cinema, so pared back yet also rich with detail, is such that a lowering of the eyes or a nearly imperceptible turn of the head can express that which otherwise would be inexpressible. Their restraint, impassivity, and diligence, to me, movingly, is expression in its purest form.
Exprimere: to reach so deeply inside something, to apply enough pressure to its surface, that it emerges from within in its purest form.
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
— Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos, LXXXI