Orality and Objectification: Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Filmmakers and Translators

Abstract

Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub are filmmakers of principle. Since the beginning of the 1960s, they have been constructing a highly coherent body of work, based on a certain number of very precise, concrete laws. Some of those rules have changed with time and history; others have remained untouched, rigorously observed from the first until today. They are not an artificial set of constraints, designed to complicate a game that would otherwise be too simple; rather, they define the artist's position in the world, in the historical moment and political situation in which they live and work, the place where they stand. Some of those rules are explicit: for instance, the sound on the has to be the sound produced there and then, when the was shot. There can be no exception. Other rules are less clearly formulated. For example, all Huillet and Straub films originated from a previous work. There is always a text before there is the film, out of which the emerges. Probably not a single line was ever spoken by a character in a by Huillet and Straub that was not a quote. That is not really a law; Daniele Huillet would probably have said that it is basically humility. In any case, it's the way they worked: they needed something to react to, something that would resist them, for which they would feel both broth- erhood and strangeness, admiration and anger. So all their films have been adaptations 1 , in a very specific sense— whether from Heinrich Boll, Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Cesare Pavese, Stephane Mallarme, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Holderlin, Paul Cezanne, Elio Vittorini, etc. In this perspective, one could argue, as Barton Byg did in his 1995 book on Huillet and Straub's work, that it exemplifies a conception of film as translation (Byg 199). And it is true that the two actions of translating a text and of adapting it for share common points and problems. But in fact, Huillet and Straub have had to become translators in the narrowest sense of the word. Because of the place of previous texts in the construction of their films, Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub have had to build, from the very beginning, a cinematic approach to language that would be coherent with their poetics—and politics—as a whole. This implies considering language in all of its material forms and presence within film: as sound