Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: "Objectivists" in Cinema (Film Culture in Transition)

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hölderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini. The impact of their work comes in part from a search for radical objectivity, a theme present in certain underground currents of modernist art and theory in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno as well as in the "Objectivist" movement, a crucial group within American modernist poetry whose members included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff, with connections to William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Through a detailed analysis of the films of Straub and Huillet, the works they adapted, and Objectivist poems and essays, Benoît Turquety locates common practices and explores a singular aesthetic approach where a work of art is conceived as an object, the artist an anonymous artisan, and where the force of politics and formal research attempt to reconcile with one another. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hölderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vitorrini. The impact of their work comes in part from a search for radical objectivity, a theme present in certain underground currents of modernist art and theory in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno and in a long-forgotten movement of American modernist poetry, "Objectivism," whose members included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff, with connections to William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Through a detailed analysis of the films of Straub and Huillet, the works they adapted, and Objectivist poems and essays, Benoît Turquety locates common practices and explores a singular aesthetic approach where a work of art is conceived as an object, the artist an anonymous artisan, and where the force of politics and formal research attempt to reconcile with one another Contents 6 Introduction 10 Part One. Foundations 16 1. Erotic Barbarity: Othon 18 2. Objectivity and Objectivities 32 Part Two. Language/Authority 70 3. The Power of Speech (or the Voice), of Seeing and the Path: Moses And Aaron 72 4. Speech against Power, or Poetry, Love, and Revolution: “A”-9 128 Part Three. Interruptions 150 5. Cinema, Poetry, History: Immobilizations 152 Part Four. Trials, Series 238 6. Industrial Civilization for the Last Time: Class Relations 240 7. On Dissolution 276 Conclusion 304 About the Author 312 Index 314 Réalisateurs atypiques, qualifiant leur cinéma de minoritaire, D. Huillet et J.-M. Straub ont assuré eux-mêmes la production de leurs films depuis 1962. Fondé sur la tension entre prégnance du politique et recherche formelle, leur cinéma est construit sur le principe d'une recherche d'objectivité radicale. Etude de leur projet et de leurs principes à travers quelques-unes de leurs oeuvres Through a detailed analysis of the films of Straub and Huillet, the works they adapted, and Objectivist poems and essays, Benoît Turquety locates the impact of their work from a search for radical objectivity. Through a detailed analysis of the films of Straub and Huillet, the works they adapted, and Objectivist poems and essays, Benoit Turquety locates the impact of their work from a search for radical objectivity.

A ground-breaking study of the cinematic representation of Paris in the films of émigré filmmakers who made it their first refuge from Hitler's Germany.