Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Oblast: Film
Autor: Strani

Richard Roud - Jean-Marie Straub


Edicija Cinema one

Viking Press, 1972. godine na 176. strana, ilustrovano.



Knjiga je odlicno ocuvana.




Jean-Marie Straub, who has died aged 89, and his wife, Danièle Huillet, worked together as film-makers for more than 30 years. Straub-Huillet, as they were often called by French critics, broke away from accepted notions of realism, disengaged from bourgeois values and questioned the primacy of narration.

Their films were almost exclusively taken from pre-existing texts, whether from literature, theatre or music. The principal stylistic devices were a usually static camera, sometimes with a pan or tracking shot lasting up to several minutes, the use of non-professionals as actors and direct sound, to the extent that background noises and even wind rustling on a microphone were retained. The pair’s intention, they stated, was to teach people “how to think, see and hear”. Straub was notoriously critical of “lazy” viewers unwilling or unable to engage with his films.

Straub-Huillet were part of the New German cinema of the 1960s, which included Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. Many of their movies emphasised the continuities rather than the ruptures in German history.

More directly political was Not Reconciled (1965), adapted from Böll’s anti-militarist 1959 novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine. The film leaps backwards and forwards in time, making the point that nazism did not begin in 1933 nor end in 1945. Shot in stark black and white, with high-contrast interior lighting, sparse décor and precise camera angles and movements, it was an examination of the collective psyche of the German people.

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967) was the first of their innovative approaches to presenting music on film. Totally convincing in its historical accuracy and musical authenticity, with most of the roles taken by professional musicians, and the harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt playing Bach (both the man and the music), it is an almost documentary account of instrumentalists at work in the 18th century.

In 1974, Straub-Huillet shot Schoenberg’s religious and philosophical opera Moses and Aaron, refusing to dub the singers, as is usual in such projects. The singers could hear the orchestra through earphones concealed under their headdresses, and see the conductor on closed-circuit TV screens. They also made Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to an Animation Scene (1973), a 15-minute film essay, and the one-act comic opera From Today Until Tomorrow (1997).

Bertolt Brecht spoke of “the theatre whose stage is the street”, and in their adaptation of the Pierre Corneille play Othon (1970, released in the US as Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn), Straub-Huillet placed their non-French-speaking, non-professional actors on the terrace of the Palatine hill in Rome, reading the play against the noises of the modern city. (The couple had moved to Rome that year.) It was a disconcerting way of finding a new approach to dialogue.

History Lessons (1972), based on Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar, placed history in relation to modern political life. As Marxist dialecticians, Straub and Huillet created severe cinematic critiques of capitalism in a manner that paralleled the works of Brecht in the theatre. Straub once stated: “I don’t know if I’m a Marxist. I don’t know, because there are so many ways to be Marxist. I haven’t read all of Marx. Marxism is a method, it’s not an ideology.”