Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: "Objectivists" in Cinema 9789048543069

Citation preview

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub “Objectivists” in Cinema

Benoît Turquety

Translated from the French by Ted Fendt

Amsterdam University Press

First published as: Benoît Turquety, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, objectivistes en cinéma, Editions l’Age d’Homme 2009 [978-2825138519]. Cover illustration: Photo by Antonia Weisse. Taken in November 1997 at the Straubs' apartment in Rome, via dell'Imbrecciato. Cover design: Kok korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6372 220 9 e-isbn 978 90 4854 306 9 doi 10.5117/9789463722209 nur 670 © B. Turquety / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book.

Contents Introduction

9

Part One  Foundations 1. Erotic Barbarity: Othon A Play, A Film Principles Tradition and Opacity

17 18 20 24

2. Objectivity and Objectivities Huillet and Straub-style “Objectivity” Objectivities The Objectivists: A History Objectivist Poetic Theory

31 31 36 42 50

Part Two  Language/Authority 3. The Power of Speech (or the Voice), of Seeing and the Path: Moses And Aaron Moses, Aaron, Schoenberg, Huillet & Straub The Cinematic Form of (the Absence of) God: “The Calling of Moses” Language Remains Birth of a Nation: Act II and End Objective on Objective: Huillet and Straub’s Position

77 93 107 120

4. Speech against Power, or Poetry, Love, and Revolution: “A”-9 A Poem, History The Form of “A”-9 Value and Meaning: Capitalism and Abstraction Love as a Poetic/Revolutionary Technique

127 129 132 136 140

71 72

Part Three  Interruptions 5. Cinema, Poetry, History: Immobilizations Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene”: Motion and Pause, Cinema as History From Ideogram to Fugue: Poetry/Cinema Interruptions Continuities History Without a Name Braiding, Cutting

151 155 165 177 190 211 229

Part Four  Trials, Series 6. Industrial Civilization for the Last Time: Class Relations Trials On Space

239 240 251

7. On Dissolution Speech Without Authority: The Death of Empedocles On Dismantling: Testimony and Workers, Peasants

275 275 287

Conclusion

303

About the Author

311

Index

313

Many, many thanks to Ted Fendt To the memory of Danièle Huillet And to the memory of Paul Zukofsky. With love, Paul, as always

Introduction Abstract This chapter defines the scope of the book Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema, beginning with Jacques Rivette’s proposal of a kind of ‘objectivity’ in cinema and the ways in which films by JeanMarie Straub and Danièle Huillet have adhered to it almost to the letter in their use of pre-existing texts adapted seemingly without interpretation. It introduces an American poetry movement, Objectivism, and the poetic theories and axioms of Louis Zukofsky, highlighting their similarities to the filmmaking of Straub and Huillet. Keywords: Straub-Huillet, Zukofsky, Objectivism “How many difficulties, all caused by the ‘variables’ of time and change of state, are suggested to informed friends by saying that Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare’s Iliad, and Pericles his Odyssey. Or by saying that Bach’s dates (16851750) and Vico’s (1668-1744) agree as music-perceived-as-history.” ‒ Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare1

In 1957, Jacques Rivette began his review of Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)—a film whose “intrinsic value” André Bazin gauged as close to “absolute zero”:2 The first point that strikes the unsuspecting spectator, a few minutes into the film, is the diagrammatic, or rather expository aspect instantly assumed by the unfolding of the images: as though what we were watching were less the mise-en-scène of a script than simply the reading of this script, presented to us just as it is, without embellishment. Without personal comment of any kind on the part of the storyteller either. So 1 Zukofsky, Bottom, p. 92. 2 Quoted in Moullet, Fritz Lang, p. 142.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_intro

10 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

one might be tempted to talk about a purely objective mise-en-scène, if such a thing were possible: more prudent, therefore, to suppose this to be some stratagem, and wait to see what happens.3

This paragraph applies almost too exactly to the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, who—excessive literalness being one of the salient aspects of their work—seem to have enjoyed taking every detail of Rivette’s description as literally as possible. As if, rather than attempting to distance themselves from their admiration of Lang by overturning or shifting the master’s positions, they instead sought to exasperate and radicalize them perhaps to the point of implosion. Workers, Peasants (2001), for example, based on a passage from a novel by Elio Vittorini, does not show the scenes the novel describes—a group of men and women attempting to maintain their community during a rough winter in post-war Italy—but people, text in hand, reading their character’s words, sitting or standing, and immobile in a sunny valley in Tuscany. “Less the mise-en-scène of a script than simply the reading of this script”: unornamented, without personal commentary, without any kind of inter­ vention. Faced with a film with such a minimal approach, many spectators are tempted to judge the “intrinsic value” close to “absolute zero”: for them, the filmmakers have shirked the very essence of their work. The result is therefore no longer cinema, no longer art, only a kind of “exposé”—and what could be more boring? Something about this tempts Rivette. He would like “to talk about a purely objective mise-en-scène, if such a thing were possible”. At first glance, the idea does seem both tempting and absurd. Tempting because according to his description, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt works more like a mathematical demonstration or the style of a civil code than what we usually consider as related to the art of mise-en-scène in film. Absurd because the qualifier “purely objective” seems to go against our most fundamental conceptions of art. In fact, artistic creation allows for an “objective” part: it is what one can talk about, the reasons a director gives to his producer when he is asking for a crane shot (“it’s absolutely necessary because…”), the arguments a fan thinks are convincing and makes to a detractor. But there is the rest, without which art is not art: the indescribable, the unexplainable, the unconscious, of the author’s own self, the style. It is unthinkable to renounce this; to imagine a “purely objective” art is an aberration. 3 Rivette, Rivette, p. 65.

Introduc tion

11

Yet this idea describes something of Lang’s attitude, the singularity of his films, more than many others—and it does so even if it is contradictory or impossible. In a certain way, these very contradictions appear at the heart of the tensions that form Lang’s work, that he employs without wanting to resolve them. Huillet and Straub seem determined to outdo the strangeness of this position. Their films tend towards a radical objectivity in which all traces or residues of subjectivity—of personal intervention and even of style— disappear in favour of a form precisely calculated according to rigorous principles for which the simple “good will” of the director is an unacceptable argument. Every basic tenet of their films persists in minimizing possible cracks through which biographical incidents or other individual contingencies could penetrate the result. Systematically starting from pre-existing texts and works of which they are not the authors is one of the most visible strategies singularly displacing the question of authority. To maintain these kinds of principles is of course not without provocation. When Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1846: It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible [sic] either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. 4

—Baudelaire could not help from commenting in the introduction to his French translation: Fans of delirium may be revolted by these cynical maxims; but each may take what he wants. It will always be useful to show them what benefits art can draw from deliberation and to show worldly people how much labour this luxury object we call Poetry demands. After all, genius is always allowed a bit of charlatanism. It is not even unwelcome.5

Charlatanism, cynicism, craftiness, or mere impossibility: those who refuse to abandon themselves to inspiration expose themselves to reproach. But it also appears—to varying degrees—that adepts of this strange tendency towards objectivity are not as isolated and/or crazy as we might think: they 4 “Philosophy of Composition” in Poe, Essays and Reviews, pp. 14-15. 5 Poe, Histoires grotesques, p. 261.

12 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

can be located at different moments in certain contexts and ultimately form a kind of underground history whose outcroppings sometimes come to light through irregularities in the local terrain. Flaubert was undoubtedly among the very first to base his practice and theory on this notion; it was subsequently essential for poets as much as for painters, photographers, musicians, and philosophers. In fact, a non-negligible part of modernity (or should we say modernities?) plays a role here: from Stéphane Mallarmé to Theodor W. Adorno, as well as Walter Benjamin, those who have oriented themselves in relation to the problem of objectivity are not so rare. But not everyone has believed in the possibility of a radically objective art in the same way. Not everyone has organized their work so fundamentally around this idea, finding and applying methods to come close to it. A group on the forefront of 20th-century American poetry whose importance long remained secret was especially focused on these reflections, the term, and the project of an objective art: the “Objectivists”. The works of these artists—Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), George Oppen (1908-1984), Carl Rakosi (1903-2004), as well as, depending on the scholars, Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) and Basil Bunting (1900-1985)—display such profoundly different conceptions of poetry that it has been argued that the group had no coherence or real existence. But they shared certain ideas and practices. They used quotation abundantly and believed more in rigour, precision, and work than improvisation or automatic writing. They were deeply aware of belonging to a tradition from which they proposed a split while refusing the principle of a tabula rasa. And they wanted to connect their work to a historical movement without giving up any of their very high formal demands—they reflected on the question of expressing this and found solutions that remain profoundly novel. The basis of this coherence is located in a fundamental tension. The common part of this project consisted in creating the possibility of combining formalism and social consciousness, a leftist artistic modernity in American poetry. In every sense of the term, radical objectivity appears to these artists as a means of escaping the imperative of choosing between innovation/elitism on the one hand and engagement/simplicity on the other—an undoubtedly impossible escape but utopian enough to provoke turmoil. The Objectivists expressed these problems and determined what objectivity could contribute with the greatest precision, as indicated by the name Zukofsky chose for the movement. In a sense, studying the works and essays of these poets is necessary to determine as best as possible the stakes of radical objectivity; but in another sense because it reveals a number of programmatic and formal affinities

Introduc tion

13

with the work of Huillet and Straub, suggesting that radical objectivity creates deeper consequences than one might initially think. Like axioms of theories, a series of themes and procedures flows out of these projects and principles. Studying the results is the only way to measure the exact scale of what was at their origin: it is therefore through the analysis of Objectivist works and essays—insofar as they incarnate the purest and subtlest of radical objectivity and its aesthetic-political tensions—and a close comparison with the films of Huillet and Straub that the importance of this notion for their films can be defined, revealing a new coherence in them. The mirroring implies methodological problems that are nevertheless important: the artists under consideration are European filmmakers who began working in the 1960s and American poets who began in the 1920s. The one never heard of the other and nobody has ever proposed comparing their work. It is always possible to connect themes and perhaps situations, but what it is important to compare goes beyond them: the forms and techniques—the procedures, their modes of application, and what results—as well as their implications, aesthetics, and politics.

Bibliography Moullet, Luc, Fritz Lang. Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1963. Poe, Edgar Allen, Essays and Reviews, ed. Gary Richard Thomson. New York: Library of America, 1984. —, Histoires grotesques et sérieuses, trans. Charles Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Rivette, Jacques, Rivette: Texts and Interviews, trans. Tom Milne. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Zukofsky, Louis, Bottom: On Shakespeare. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

1.

Erotic Barbarity: Othon Abstract This chapter introduces the specificities and hallmarks of Straub and Huillet’s films through a close study of their 1969 film Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn, adapted from Pierre Corneille’s play Othon: literary works adapted to the letter, their use of cinematic composition and space, and direct location sound. Finally, it introduces the troubadour Arnaut Daniel and his complex, subtle poetic structures, later picked up by Louis Zukofsky, which echo the cinematic structures of Straub and Huillet’s films. Keywords: Straub-Huillet, Othon, Corneille “Book II—Of Love and Politics Chapter 1—What Happened in the Library” ‒ Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto: A Romance1

Danièle Huillet could still say in 1999 that Eyes Do Not Want to Close At All Times or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn (1969) “is my favourite f ilm because it’s the most barbaric and it speaks my native language.”2 This f ilm does indeed remain, especially in France, the Straubs’ most antagonistic film, the one that triggers the most violent opinions, the most passionate attacks and defences. This marks the film as a potential starting point or convergence from which to observe (to see and hear) the filmmakers’ methods and principles in their most natural state.

1 Stevenson, Prince Otto, pp. 35-37. 2 Schneider, “Entretien”, p. 257.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_ch01

18 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

A Play, A Film Idioms sometimes cause beautiful confusions for the ears of those who say them, allowing “some lucky observation which falls by chance into their mouths”3 (Rousseau) to open up. As Louis Zukofsky recalled with the title of his 1963 collection, I’s (Pronounced Eyes), English suggests that eye be heard in I—or eyes in I’s (!). As for French, it tends, for example, to confuse some of its older verbs—verbs that are barely used today, but that Pierre Corneille knew: bayer, bailler, bâiller (to gape, to bestow, to yawn). Yawning at Corneille would have been a very easy way of describing the reaction of many—I must admit, and many in the sense of most rather than evoking a numerous crowd—spectators of Huillet and Straub’s film Eyes Do Not Want to Close At All Times or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn, kindly, subsequently nicknamed Othon since the text spoken in it is Corneille’s tragedy of that title. Curiously, no one seems to have characterized the film this way. But instead, as bestowing Corneille and gaping: to offer a film “to the very great number of those born into the French language who have never had the privilege of becoming acquainted with the work of Corneille” (Straub in the end credits) to open a gap in it, and finally to remain speechless at it. This gap starts the film in every sense and signals it as erotic from its first shot. 4 A shot of a city nonetheless: Rome. The initial pan along Via di San Teodoro could be trivial, if it did not end as it does, caressing a hillside up to a leafy tree top, then descending towards a dark, sinuous crevice that a zoom-in attempts to penetrate, interrupted by a cut. This shot is, moreover, quite political: starting from the Capitoline Hill, it follows working class neighbourhoods, arrives at the Palatine Hill, and then a cave where, Straub explains, “communist partisans hid weapons during the war.”5 But evaluating this content requires having access to this information, which the film itself does not provide—no title card, subtitle, or voice-over clarifies what took place in the cave. It is their first film in togas, as well as their first in colour, warmed, after the German coolness, by a bright Italian sun that marks the faces and bodies, giving their films a new sensuality. Not that there was none before: 3 Rousseau, Emile, p. 160. 4 Straub: “The question of erotic determination? I don’t know. All I know is that […] my films are erotic in their writing—in their overall rhythm and within each shot”. “Les yeux ne veulent pas”, p. 42. 5 See the Italian translation of the script, Straub, Huillet, Aprà, and Mingrone, “Les yeux ne veulent pas èn tout tèmps sè fèrmèr” [sic], pp. 203-239.

EROTIC BARBARIT Y: OTHON

19

Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967) and The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp (1968) bear witness to the contrary. But the form changes since the subject and language do as well. Distances Corneille confirms that he took almost everything from Tacitus: “The subject is adapted from Tacitus, who begins his history with it, and I have never brought anything to the theatre to which I have been more faithful and more inventive.”6 His inventiveness is particularly embodied in the lovely form of Camilla, a character of whom there is no trace in Tacitus and around whom the entire play is organized. Tacitus narrates how when Emperor Galba was looking for a successor and hesitating between Piso and Otho—a man who is valiant but marked by the time he spends with the abject Nero—, the councillors Laco, Marcianus, and Vinius strove to support whomever was their favourite. Corneille adds a complication: along with the empire comes the hand of Galba’s daughter Camilla—who claims to have some right to decide who the successor will be. The historian suggests that “Otho was a bachelor and Vinius had an unmarried daughter: the gossip among the rumour-mongers was designating them the future father- and son-in-law”,7 but nothing prefigures the stakes of marriage and/or love whose interference in the political intrigue is the heart of the tragedy. Measuring (interference) fringes is always an erotic activity: along with those stipulated by the combination of love and power, others come to light, notably from theatre and cinema. According to Straub, “organizing the film into 69 shots (following the pre-credits shot) contradicts Corneille’s construction of a tragedy in five acts and adds to it.”8 It should be noted that this is one of the rare instances in 40 years of interviews where Straub admits that their films can in some way “contradict” the original work. Rather than contradicting each other, these kinds of superimposed structures find ways of responding to one another. The play has five acts and 30 scenes; the film has 69 shots. The five acts maintain a form of materiality: one reel of the film corresponds to each act and the end of each act is marked by an important rhythmic pause. Conceiving the organization as a supplementary structure adding to that of the original remains a strong concern in the Straubs’ films, allowing them to claim to produce meaning from a work 6 Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, III, p. 461. 7 Tacitus, Histories, p. 10. 8 “Les yeux ne veulent pas”, p. 42.

20 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

without touching it, without deforming it through personal interpretation, without predatory intentions.

Principles Othon offers perhaps one of the roughest entries in Huillet and Straub’s films. It most clearly displays their fundamental positions, almost all of which were already in place at the time. Following the opening credits, the first shots9 of Act I present these positions at once, although in three phases. Below a bright, white sky, we see two men, one brown-haired in profile (Albinus, played by Leo Mingrone) and one blond-haired from behind (Otho, played by Adriano Aprà). They are wearing togas. In front of them, a small, low wall: the brown-haired man has a foot on it, the blond man a hand. They are looking below and ahead at an unseen landscape (the camera is tilted slightly up) evoked by some bushy hills with man-made structures in the background. After a few seconds, the brown-haired man turns to the blond man and speaks to him. He speaks a somewhat strange French, not only because of the actor’s Italian accent. Its rhythm, balance, scattered rhymes, the dancer’s assurance that the diction maintains even when he falters—all of this ends up revealing what has never been heard in Corneille’s alexandrines. His first words are: “Your friendship, my lord, will render me temerarious, / I abuse it, and I know that I will displease you.”10 Corneille the author is undoubtedly warning his king. The final lines mention a Vinius “whose power serves only to inspire horror, / And destroy even more, the more one sees it increase, / What one owes of love to the virtues of his Master.” It takes a bit of time to adjust to the materiality of this language, but we have not heard anything yet. If we apply an academic classif ication, the following shot would be “subjective”, although nothing indicates it. The blond man is undoubtedly responding: a voice-over with a less marked but noticeable Italian accent, delivers a long monologue (1’34” and no one could do better) at high speed 9 Shot numbers come from two versions of the script published in f ilm magazines at the time (a pre-shooting script in French—Bianco e Nero, anno XXXI, 1/4 (January-April 1970), pp. 13-45—and an Italian-language script—Cinema & Film, a.IV, 11-12 (Summer-Autumn 1970), pp. 203-239). 10 Translator’s note: English dialogue for all films comes from the English subtitles on the films translated by Danièle Huillet in collaboration with Misha Donat, Gregory Woods, and Barton Byg or by Jean-Marie Straub in collaboration with Donat, Bernard Eisenschitz, or myself. As some lines of dialogue are left unsubtitled, I have translated them myself when necessary.

EROTIC BARBARIT Y: OTHON

21

(as fast as possible?), while the image presents a fixed “perspective” of the traffic on the Piazza di Porta Capena. We are left to assume that this is what the companions have been contemplating. The first two spoken verses rhyme “amour” with “la cour”; the man then recounts what has happened to him up to the present among the powerful of Rome. Shot 3 returns to the two men, but framed a bit differently: the camera is closer and shifted to the left. It is now slightly tilted down and the square we saw before appears with its cars, traffic signals, and contemporary buildings. The blond man is still shown from behind. He soon turns his head. If the ambient sound was relatively quiet in the first shot, it is loud in the second and third—mainly traffic noise. Loud but also—and this is important—different from one shot to the next: between shots 2 and 3, the editing introduces a very strong disjunction into the sound, both in the quality of the background and the timbre of Otho’s voice. Neither the recording of the sound nor its mixing attempts to attenuate this effect, to “smooth out” the cut. By professional standards, this is a mistake. Another (professional) mistake in shot 1 sets a condition for the spectator, formulates a postulate: while Albinus is addressing his lord and friend, a passing cloud considerably darkens the shot—the most violent change of exposure in the film. These three shots provide the play’s exposition as well as the principles of the film’s approach. Men in togas speak/perform (we will decide later) a text in the middle of (Roman) ruins. The ruins, the story being told, and the form of the costumes date from or want to evoke the same period, the Roman Empire—its 822nd year (69 AD) to be exact. The text itself comes from 17th-century France. The people speaking it were born in the 20th century and are saying it then, as the cars, buildings, and state of the ruins testify. Perhaps the light alone is the same as in the past—which alone justifies shooting in exteriors. The signs of these three time periods coexist in the film—on-screen and on the soundtrack—without Huillet and Straub ever trying to homogenize them, to shape them into a more coherent unity beyond their simple juxtaposition. The pre-credits panning shot shows contemporary buildings and a city, but a wall hides the automobile traffic—as Rome itself connotes history, nothing in the shot is really shocking. Then the sequence of the first three shots establishes how this space functions: first, Romans in togas without any excessively contemporary signs yet; then, Rome today, without the antique-dressed characters; finally, the two together in the same shot, but separated by a distance and the terrace wall—the common frame emphasizing the disjunction instead of toning it down.

22 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Shot 3 is the only one that is really melancholic, with the somewhat pathetic majesty of these nobles in front of a background of car traffic and the proud dignity of Otho seen from behind, still refusing to let us look at him. The entry of the two Romans into the frame by the cut’s jump backward, the urban landscape’s sudden appearance but at such a distance to Corneille’s magnificent language and the height—literally—of its view, presents the catastrophe of the present as the beginning of the film. Whether one sees here a very ironic version of Napoleon’s line, “From the heights of this terrace, twenty centuries are contemplating you” or a literal portrayal of Benjamin’s angel of history, the result is—strangely—the same, or nearly: history is not shaped as a progressive stratification, susceptible to being turned into narration (that would be the historicist version), but as the shock of pure disjunction—jumping the axis—whose present is manifested as distance itself—the fissure of the cut, the hollow of the distance between the terrace and the valley. Melancholy is only a point of departure. It is soon choked by rage. Another constant of the Straubian image gains its full importance here: everything is sharp (at least as technically as possible). The depth of focus is maximal and in these shots the backgrounds, no matter how far they are, remain entirely distinct, hardly less than the first shots. The sense of elements being purely juxtaposed in the frame is strongly accentuated—not a very Bazinian result. Shot 3 would not have the described effect were the horizon out of focus. The sharpness of the distant backgrounds brings a new consequence: the construction of the images constantly evokes Italian Renaissance painting, where a domestic or political scene takes place in the foreground while the painting remains open—through a window or any obvious structure—to a landscapes of hills, castles, or cities. Discordances in the time periods between costumes, scene, and setting were not uncommon. In da Vinci, for example, we find the same feeling of disjunction between the foreground and the background landscape, whose presence conserves an almost arbitrary, rather enigmatic impression. The use of sound increases the sharpness of the effects of historical and formal disjunction. We not only see cars below, we hear them constantly. In the fourth act, these ambient sounds are replaced by the constant gurgling of the fountain near which everything is staged—a lapping whose presence varies from shot to shot and through this very variation makes itself heard. The fifth act is rather calm in this regard (listening). Perhaps it must be concluded that having finally decided to act, the people are no longer content to incarnate themselves through this irritation—or that the catastrophe necessitates silence.

EROTIC BARBARIT Y: OTHON

23

Refusing to “smooth out” the sound, allowing the—objective—machine to cut continuously into it alters the timbre of each new shot—the ambiances, the voices, etc.—and is a sufficient reason for what Pasolini called a “desire to be lynched”11 that hovers over the film. Continuity is impossible; there are holes everywhere and blocks that cause difficulties—this is our position in history. It is not a river, even with its excesses, but the jerky rotation of clock hands or the intermittent movement of film, as Benjamin knew. Other principles develop out of these shots: the diction and performances are—to say the least—not academic, in terms of cinema, but also and above all, of theatre. They are scandalous, both overall in the history of stagings of Corneille and in cinema. The large majority of the actors who speak these ‘classic’ alexandrines have an accent—sometimes very noticeable and emphasized. Added to this is the strong presence of ‘ambient’ noises making it difficult to hear, and, for example, the terrible speed with which Adriano Aprà declaims. A third foundational element that causes irritation: the academy is drawn into its own trap, exceeded in its demands by the scrupulousness of the pronunciation, which lacks few diereses and silent e’s. A few random, or almost random, samples: Plautina (Anne Brumagne): “Mérite à part, l’amour est quelquefois bizarre, / Selon l’objet divers le goût est différent, / Aux unes on se donne, aux autres on se vend” (Au z’une z’on se donn’, au z’autre z’on se vend). Plautina again: “Qu’avec un reste obscur d’esprit inquiété” (inki-été). An unusual consequence: the alexandrines have twelve syllables! (Most at least: a rare few have disappeared; Huillet and Straub are even more rigorous with Hölderlin). More royalist than the kings of the academy today who dubbed this pronunciation “scholarly”. It is likely that Huillet and Straub would not deny this epithet: in Manfred Blank’s documentary L’insistance du regard/Die Beharrlichkeit des Blicks (1993), Huillet relates that the theatrical performance that moved them the most was a Corneille play staged by students who simply recited their lines in period costumes. It is with Othon that Huillet and Straub begin to discover the rhythmic power of non-grammatical pauses. Gianna Mingrone as Albiane provides a good example: too much respect extinguishes loves, “it stops vows, | captivates | desires, / abases | looks, | stifles sighs”. This returns later in their work and gains importance. This way of making the diction strange is sometimes viewed from one side—the conservative—as an attack on Corneille’s text and from the other side—a certain left—as an attack on accessibility, hence a double elitism. This attack is aggravated by the film’s extreme overall 11 Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, p. 272.

24 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

rapidity and, notably, for Aprà/Otho, its declamation. Huillet and Straub seem to want to do everything so that we cannot grasp the meaning. The speed prevents spectators from believing they have understood everything and makes them aware of how much of the work is escaping them. The speed—of execution, prestissimo—is related to renouncing oneself to the material, like to a dance—the renunciation of intentions and meaning—losing oneself in the movement of the film or the story. At the end of his 1936 essay on Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times, Zukofsky writes: Finally and despite odds, Charlie and the girl decide to go off together in the film, and their arms bend up at the elbows, their fists are clenched, too powerfully fast for the spectator to speculate what Mr. Chaplin means.12

He begins the essay: “Impersonal, faster than the audience knows”.13 The rapidity has nothing to do with the number of shots. With the actors, the rapidity plays another role: each one has an extremely personal diction, speed, accentuation, and rhythm. The contrasts created produce a striking diversity in the materiality of how the text sounds and they obliterate the reputation for monotony of the twelve flat, rhyming feet. They also allow each character to be portrayed in a very concrete, immediate manner, specifically in their relationship to the language they are using. Ultra-rapid, dry, serious, or even hard delivery for Otho; slow (weighty), even excessively, for Galba; slow and over-expressive (not without tension) for Vinius, master rhetorician; sly, calm, with marked accentuation of certain words and very “demonstrative” variations of rhymes for Laco who in his more military manner is as good as Vinius—their proximity also comes in their use of language and introduces a confrontation between them in Act V; simple and firm marked by a natural authority for Camilla; more reserved for Plautina, but no less assured; the most ‘natural’ perhaps remaining Marcianus, the ambitious slave.

Tradition and Opacity Characters The plastic-physiological distribution of elements is superimposed onto the Cornelian structure of characters who, in spite of what the author says 12 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 64. 13 Ibid., p. 57.

EROTIC BARBARIT Y: OTHON

25

about them, are not the same as in Tacitus. Corneille not only creates the female characters out of nothing or almost nothing, he in fact foregrounds them—through the number of their scenes, as well as through their strength. Camilla is the smartest, more terrible than Plautina whose rage is more under the surface and who accepts compromise better. They are all, nevertheless, inflexible, unlike the men, with the exception of Laco—perhaps making him a feminine character… Attention to women where the historian Tacitus forgets them marks a reversal that contradicts the absence of the people of which Straub speaks. Although these women were queens, here they are the people: they seize the historical machine and make it explode—they themselves and not only the love brought to them or the desires they inspire. These too, but the women first of all, who they are. Plautina enters the tragedy saying, “No, my Lord, no”. Shot 15, the longest in the film, reveals her through an axial cut, already present behind Vinius, close to Otho, where we did not hear her arrive. Charles Tesson notes that the “Indians” in Ford’s films “are always first shown in a static shot or a pan as though they were already present in the frame.”14 Here, Plautina is the “Indian”. She is being threatened by the invader: her father, power, virility. Like the people, like the “Indians”, the women go for broke, even to the point of losing what little the powerful promise them—it was too little in any case, obscenely little. They are not dangerous as “femme fatales”, but as starvelings. (A policeman in Siclia! says, “Every starveling is a dangerous man”—every woman is therefore a starveling.) Today, character is largely a psychological notion. Yet it is older, like temperament. In his introduction, Corneille writes: “I attempted to make my hero’s virtues appear in all their splendour without hiding his vices anymore than [Tacitus], and I contented myself with attributing them to the politics of the court, where, when the sovereign plunges himself into debauchery and his favour is only at this price, there is pressure on those who want to be a member of the party.”15 “Virtues” and “vices” indicate morality rather than psychology—morality that Corneille postulates immediately as political: these are not subjective qualities, but result from mechanisms of power that are objective, and therefore analysable, possible objects of tragedy. Love is sometimes strange. In a certain sense, Huillet and Straub refuse psychology less than they claim. They simply treat it as a purely external object, the way Corneille bases his not on interiority but on the interaction of different politics, of 14 Tesson, “Les Lois de l’hospitalité”, p. 73. A nice claim, complicated by the films. 15 Corneille, Oeuvres, III, p. 461.

26 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

power relations. In his beautiful article “The Style of Fritz Lang”, Georges Franju writes: For Lang, in effect, the role is not carried within the character, but upon it. His cinema is less an art of externalizing interior qualities than one of creating the appearance of a certain exterior in itself. It really does not matter to us if an actor is sincere provided his portrayal is true. It must, however, be absolutely true.16

The diction, costumes, and way of carrying one’s body—Camilla’s tense neck and her fingers nervously playing with her clothing as her father is telling her his choice for her future husband; Otho’s stiffness; Galba’s immobility in the face of Laco and Marcianus’ movements; the manoeuvring of the latter two—are more than enough to define ‘characters’. Excessive Cinema Framing and cutting are like love here: bizarre. Bizarre in that only a little is needed to aim for the most perfect classicism—but this little is missing. Seeing Othon today, one is struck by the mistake that has always been made of qualifying the Straubs as minimalists or austere: more than anything else, this film resembles a film by Nicholas Ray; it retains something of the “romanticism that is intermittent, restrained, and thus all the more moving”17 that Proust finds occasionally in Corneille. There is something about the beginning of Act IV near the fountain, in the languor of the lovers’ bodies, the kind of unstable calm constantly mixed with the tension weighing on them, voluptuous in its very precariousness, which recalls the sequences between Natalie Wood and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955); the way Plautina and Camilla, queens or witches, are like Vienna (Joan Crawford) and Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) in Johnny Guitar (1954), or Vicky Gaye (Cyd Charisse) in Party Girl (1958). Dignified to the point of instigating their ruin, they do not understand masculine precautions. And from Ray’s Cinemascope to the Straubs’ 1.37:1, it is also in how they are framed—the firm gaze, the sure gesture that nevertheless trembles, constantly exposed, stiffening between edges that can barely contain the anger—how they offer the lyricism cinema can attain. The oblique framing of Plautina in shot 49, off-centre frame right, framing out Vinius on her left, 16 Franju, “The Style of Fritz Lang”, p. 588. 17 Proust, In Search of Lost Time, p. 635.

EROTIC BARBARIT Y: OTHON

27

with the fountain in the background has a lyrical power (an imprecise term) as great as any of Ray’s wild compositions. Ray went rather far in his framing, particularly in large formats. For example, the shot in his final and largely unsuccessful Hollywood film 55 Days at Peking (1963, shot in Super Technirama 70) where Charlton Heston, filmed from a high angle in the right corner of the frame appears in close-up looking frame right, while the left side of the screen shows, in sharp focus, a soldier at the top of a city wall dozens of metres away, forming its own diagonal. Straub goes just as far. The beginning of Act IV provides some examples. Shot 50 shows Vinius from a sharp low angle, very off-centre on the lower left of the frame, his sightline accentuating the effect by looking towards the same lower left corner. Behind him stands an immense palm tree ironically balancing the composition. His final advice/orders given to his daughter, he exits the lower right side of the frame. A few seconds before, shot 43 shows Plautina in what should, according to the textbooks, be called a close-up, but it barely resembles one since the actress is pushed against the bottom of the right side of the frame, her eyes looking even further off-screen in this direction, most of the image filled with statues and vegetation ornamenting the fountain. When Otho, first seated off-screen, stands up, the camera tracks back rather abruptly (without reframing vertically) to end in a frame showing his feet on the far right, Plautina sitting close to him, and a large empty space on the left that Vinius finally fills—but he too is wedged against the frame’s edge, remaining a great distance from the couple. Problematic Resolution There are two (main) ways to see and describe these kinds of shots. The one, which one might qualify as tonal although that might be excessively metaphorical, involves considering the framing as violently off-balance: in the first case, Vinius’ face alone on the lower right of the frame, with far too much “air” above him, his eyes looking off-screen. Extended and based on the fact that, all things being relative, the coding of the ways a human being can be framed in a film is just as “natural”, and therefore inevitable, as the tonal system was in music, the metaphor presents these effects as dissonances awaiting resolution. Shot 43 appears therefore as a set of unresolved imbalances, the compensation of one creating others. In the end, the framing is almost classical, but the gap between Vinius and the two young lovers is too big to be ignored. We reach a kind of unstable semi-resolution—the way shot 50 is “resolved”

28 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

by the emptiness when Vinius leaves, but his exit is made in an unorthodox direction, to say the least (along the lower edge of the frame). The other description would be “atonal”, considering that a palm tree, if its height fills a frame, is worth as much as any human—or that one can justify filling a movie screen with sculpted hedges and stones just as much as a human face. This is what Jean Renoir called a “feeling of equality” and Rivette the “essential pantheistic” characteristic of mise-en-scène.18 This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the graphic, compositional rigour of these frames creates a shock in itself—astonishment at the image, a jolt produced by its intrusion, by a cut that does not differ from the previous ones—more than an expectation that they will become balanced, such as in suspense shots in other films—and that these “unbalanced” frames stay on-screen too long not to gain value in and of themselves. Yet it is incontestable that the Straubs take into consideration the falselyresolved character of their constructions in order to frustrate suspense— sometimes, as in the second case here, retrospectively: the reverse tracking shot when Otho stands up is necessary in order for us to “understand” that the shot could be read as a suspense shot, “corrected” by the body of the standing man. Since we are making extra-filmic connections, this system is comparable to one established by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel for his canso “Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra…”, for which he invented a new form, the sestina. Classical canso form demanded from the troubadours a structure of new and complex rhymes within the stanzas of each new poem—rhymes that had to be rimes riches, but not to the point of repeating an entire word. Arnaut does the exact opposite: he rhymes words, but not within the stanza. Their “complement” is in the following stanza, in a line designated by a subtle law of rotation. But the device that he invented and that Dante later partially used goes even further in his work: some words almost rhyme one to one (ongla and oncle; arma and cambra). The virtuoso singer-poet is calculatingly deceptive in order to better satisfy. Hearing a canso, listeners expect refined rhyming effects within a stanza. First, they hear rhymes that are twice erroneous: imperfect and extended to entire words—unforgiveable, the Lady is already looking away. But the following stanzas create a reversal, showing the absolute originality of obsessively spinning recurring words, a spiralling or vertiginous love. Arnaut’s sestina deliberately transgresses the rules of the canso’s classical, formal economy. By over-affirming this transgression, by representing it 18 Renoir, Entretiens et propos, p. 37, 114.

EROTIC BARBARIT Y: OTHON

29

through consonances, by initially making its new form appear to be a failure of the older form, it introduces a necessary space. It does not use dissonance to better maintain the harmony of the old order: it overplays the violation to demonstrate the rigour of the new order. What is playful here matches the sensuality of the song (the song is love) for new pleasures. Dante’s sestina “Al poco giorno…”, which later served as a model for Zukofsky’s “Mantis”, does not have this characteristic; it is sumptuous and desperate. On this question and others, Huillet and Straub seem to want to have it both ways: intelligent classicism—meaning non-academic—and radical novelty. Up to a certain point, Lang or Hawks, even Ray, could have conceived the structure of Othon. Up to what point is the question—if it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of trouble and by opposing them end them. This having it both ways is also what disconcerts people. Speed and impersonality, material and fleeting meaning—at the time, Straub spoke of “technical work that makes one forget any plan or initial intention in order to arrive at a filmic object, that is to say material (the art of film is materialist or the film does not exist).”19 The work exists first as the site of loss.

Bibliography Corneille, Pierre, Oeuvres complètes, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Franju, Georges, “The Style of Fritz Lang”, trans. Sallie Iannotti, Great Film Directors: A Critical Anthology, ed. Leo Braudy and Morris Dickstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 583-589. Les yeux ne pas en tout temps se fermer, ou Peut-être qu’un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour (French script), Bianco e Nero, anno XXXI, I/4 (January-April 1970), pp. 13-45. “‘Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer, ou Peut-être qu’un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour’ par Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet (suite). I—Entretien”, Cahiers du cinéma, 224 (October 1970), pp. 40-42. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time: The Guermantes Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. 19 “Les yeux ne veulent pas”, p. 42.

30 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Renoir, Jean, Entretiens et propos, ed. Jean Narboni, Janine Bazin, and Claude Gauteur. Paris: Ed. De l’Étoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1979, p. 37, 114. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile or on Education, trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Schneider, Roland, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet: le constat immuable d’un monde déboussolé”, CinémAction, no. 93, 1999, “Le Théâtre et l’écran”, pp. 256-259. Stevenson, Robert Louis, Prince Otto, ed. Robert P. Irvine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Straub, Jean-Marie, Huillet, Danièle, Aprà, Adriano, Mingrone, Gianna and Leo, “‘Les yeux ne veulent pas èn tout tèmps sè fèrmèr’ [sic] di Jean-Marie Straub e Danièle Huillet”, Cinema & Film, a.IV, 11-12 (Summer-Autumn 1970), pp. 203-239. Tacitus, The Histories, trans. W.H. Fyfe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Tesson, Charles, “Les Lois de l’hospitalité”, John Ford, ed. Patrice Rollet and Nicolas Saada. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1990, pp. 71-74. Zukofsky, Louis, Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

2.

Objectivity and Objectivities Abstract This chapter defines what the concept of “objectivity” meant for Straub and Huillet and the history and recurrence of the term in modern literature. It details the history of the Objectivists, a group of formally radical, leftist, and mainly Jewish poets who emerged in 1930s America under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and whose major representatives include Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff. They received little attention in their time and only marginal attention decades later, but their working methods and philosophies are strikingly similar to the cinematic practices of Huillet and Straub. Keywords: Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Oppen, Straub-Huillet, Objectivists, Objectivism “Farewell, dear old me, goodbye pain and joy.” ‒ Paul Verlaine1

Huillet and Straub-style “Objectivity” Deficiency These are some of the recurring criticisms of Huillet and Straub’s films, some idées fixes, some problems. An exploration of the reasons for the rejection this oeuvre has sometimes provoked—consciously in part, that is certain—may mean beginning by refusing to use a word: “Straubfilm”. To make a wager: Huillet and Straub’s productions are movies. As has often been repeated as praise or criticism, they “deconstruct” the “codes” of “classical cinema”. But with an equally great insistence, they maintain that their work is part of the tradition of the major so-called classical filmmakers, D.W. Griffith, 1

“Epilogue: In the ‘farewell to first-person poetry’ style”, Verlaine, Selected Poems, p. 281.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_ch02

32 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, and a few others. In 1987, Straub recalled: When we said in Berlin at the first public screening of Not Reconciled [1965] that it was a traditional film, they started shouting; we were nevertheless convinced of this—but we weren’t trying to make a traditional film, we weren’t trying to make “cinema”.2

Why not take this affirmation seriously, wager that their films can be seen with the same criteria, analysed with the same methods as the abovementioned filmmakers? Not to deny them any degree of innovation, to the contrary: to see to what extent the wager pays off, to understand what does not. And to echo what is perhaps their own wager: that Griffith was already working not to deconstruct “codes” but with the idea that there were no codes, that films could be made without them. “Codes” are what Straub calls cinematic “language” in a 1970 interview with the Cinemateka Group: In this way, language is an obstacle […] Because fifty years from now, if someone sees a film from today that has been declared very filmic, he won’t understand anything because for him it will be a bad, rhetorical dream; he won’t see anything but the rhetoric or the ‘language’ or the ‘art’ or the filmic aspect. I make things without art and without language.3

The absence of art they claim for their films recalls and plays with other absences, other lacks that might be related to the refusal to watch these works, to the incomprehension with which they are met. In his important article “La Vicariance du pouvoir”, Jean Narboni explains that the “unacceptability” of Othon “implicitly confirms its radical, risky character” precisely because three things are missing: First of all, Straub deprives critics of that without which they can no longer function: the subject (the author, the Creator, the “temperament” through which Nature must be seen so that Art provides a guarantee, that which, in any case, declines its identity in the certainty of its own presence and the assurance of its properties), the theme (“As Stravinsky says of music, I think cinema is incapable of expressing anything”, “I think we need to make films that don’t mean anything; I don’t think films mean anything”, 2 3

Aumont and Faux, “Entretien”, pp. 28-29. Cinemateka Group, “Entretien”, p. 50.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

33

J.-M. S.; which is not, to anticipate a very old objection, to defend nonsense, irrationality, or “pure form”, but to maintain the power of a kind of writing that uses meaning and produces effects of meaning without ultimately deferring to it as to a necessarily transcendental signified), and the style (ornamentation, approval, connotations, the craftsmanship, what fulfils, what must be paid: “I make things without art”, J.-M. S.). 4

This stance of “refusing to speak”5 creates an interruption for spectators, a pause in “reading” the film, blocking their habit of immediately being able to assign a precise meaning to each element in the frame, posed as a sign. Regarding the audience’s “defensive reaction”, Straub confirmed in 1966—partially returning to this again at the time of Moses and Aaron (1974): They simply don’t know what it means. In one sense, they’re right, because what is important is that it does not ‘want’ to mean anything. In this sense, I’d quote Stravinsky. He says: music is incapable of expressing anything. Let’s say first that the film has no message. Second: the images have no function, narratively, dramatically, or psychologically, and I think the story doesn’t come from there. We put images side by side that are each their own world […]. The shot is there and that’s all. It’s there and only functions cinematically…6

But this blockage and the eventual irritation it generates prompt questions: if what I have in front of me is not a sign, then what is it? Or should I think that it is a sign whose signifier is evading me, whose authors are depriving me of the signified? This could be due either to incompetence (the signified they wanted to produce is not there, signifying their failure) or elitism (I’m supposed to know the signified, it isn’t clarified, it’s a wink to those in the know touching on my ignorance and excluding me). The rejection, writes Narboni, was “brutal, for duplicity, hermeticism, deliberate illegibility, or condescension, which is in fact the same attitude—for poverty, insufficiency.”‘7 This effect of interfering with the meaning—or the illusion of meaning as evidence, immediacy, ‘transparency’ to use vocabulary dominant today—plays a large role in the impatience these films arouse. But the 4 Narboni, “La Vicariance du pouvoir”, p. 43. Italics in original. 5 Ibid., p. 43. 6 Delahaye, “Pornographie et cinéma à l’état nu”, pp. 54-55. 7 Narboni, op. cit., p. 43.

34 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

question is: to what degree are these three missing elements articulated? Or perhaps it must be added: in the work of Huillet and Straub? Because after all, with Godard as the most visible example at the time, disruptive effects had already begun to be used—notably in Godard’s first film with location sound, Montparnasse-Levallois (1965). In Godard, however, the subject, the author is present: we feel his personality, endearing and/or irritating; his interventions and signature effects may be perceived as arbitrary, excessive, etc., but they are presented and perceived as an affirmation of his style. In Huillet and Straub, things are not presented as such. Straub declared in 1966: I was talking about archetypes earlier [regarding Not Reconciled]. But in the beginning that wasn’t part of my intention at all. I simply got there by disappearing completely in the face of reality. That’s what German cinema is missing most: modesty. It is dying from an absence of modesty.

Providing Jean Rouch and Peter Nestler as examples of this modesty… Narboni quotes a passage from Bazin’s article “Theater and Cinema”: The subjective camera finally becomes a reality but in an opposite sense, that is to say not as in The Lady in the Lake, thanks to a puerile kind of identification of the spectator and the character by means of a camera trick but, on the contrary, through the pitiless gaze of an invisible witness.8

A witness: Jean-Claude Biette writes of Not Reconciled: [A]nd the old lady who shoots a man in power—an action at once individual and political—if it is preceded by its material preparation, it is not charged with any sense of expectation: the camera is a witness, at a distance.9

Towards the Object These missing elements force spectators into a position of radical exteriority: if they reject the film violently, it is because they themselves feel rejected by it. The work imposes a certain distance on them; it looks like a closed object, potentially having an internal coherence, but it provides no opening 8 Bazin, What is Cinema?, I, p. 92. 9 Biette, “Nicht Versöhnt”, p. 49.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

35

for them, leaves them “pitilessly” outside. Again to the Cinemateka Group, Straub declares: [The] technical work […] draws our attention away from any project and any initial intention in order to arrive at a filmic object, that is to say material (the art of film is materialist or the film does not exist).10

The recurring idea in the Straubs’ work of a filmic object, of a work as an object, must be taken seriously and fully understood. An object has no meaning, no theme; it is made with attention, precision, and rigour (more or less), but it is not an expression of its author, it is unrelated to the category of style. According to Straub, location sound allows “for the possibility of managing to make an object that is much more unpredictable than one made without location sound”.11 An object is made, the choices of methods imply its form, its solidity. The idea of the “absence of an author” in the Straubs’ films—whose implications, whose very possibility, seem eminently problematic in view of its contradictory character—does not only appear in Narboni’s text. It is present, for example, in Patrice Neron’s article on Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, which concludes: The flow of images joined with speech and sound demands that we continually make an effort to focus in order not to be tempted to compose—even if only by suggestion—a more definitive meaning from a number of possible meanings: a kind of visual, aural asceticism in relation to filmmaking seen as stereography in the face of which the author—the cause of the film or an intermediary?—is absent.12

Bernard Eisenschitz concludes his review of Robert Kramer’s beautiful film The Edge with this tendency that, in his opinion, is common to Kramer, Rivette, and Huillet and Straub: Kramer’s Europeanized culture is not enough to understand this discord (filmmaker/militant): the filmmaker is driven towards individualism. […] A film’s beauty largely arises from a deviation from the film project (a film would lose its polemical meaning from being collective; it is impossible to 10 “Les yeux ne veulent pas”, p. 42. 11 Cinemateka Group, “Entretien”, p. 53. 12 Neron, “Une lutte contre le sens”, p. 58.

36 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

make revolutionary work since such a work can only identify itself with the individual and only paint collectivity, cinema can therefore only be terroristic). The lesson to draw from Kramer (and J.R., J.-M.S., etc.): aim for the disappearance of the author, which we know is impossible.13

Approaches related to the problem of the production of meaning and approaches of a political order therefore meet on this question. These points are beginning to produce a figure: construct a work that is an object using absences, establishing a particular distance with its recipient, a “pitiless exteriority” or, if we follow Bazin, realizing the “opposite” of a “subjective camera”. An objective camera?

Objectivities As for the Subject The opposite of these conceptions would be “subjectivism” as conceived by Édouard Dujardin, inventor of the “interior monologue” with his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887). In a letter draft from 1888, he writes: Subjectivism—I began with notes on the progress of minds I’ve noticed lately; “Flaubert’s objectivism”, seeing nature, has become the naturalist’s semisubjectivism, “nature through a temperament”, which is today something like Fichte’s idea: “the self poses itself and opposes itself to the non-self”: the subject creates the object, the soul creates the world; and every action is in the soul of the character, every landscape, according to the state of the soul.14

Flaubert is therefore positioned as the source of an “objectivism”—of the project for an objective art, “seeing nature” through the intermediary of a “temperament”. And we can certainly conceive of “subjectivism” in film. In his article “Du futurisme à l’underground”, Dominique Noguez evokes the key, but underground, role of this possibility: The […] propositions […] in “The Futurist Cinema” manifesto […] are accompanied by the very clearly expressed idea of subjective cinema 13 Eisenschitz, “En marche”, p. 54. 14 Letter draft from Dujardin to Vittorio Pica, Paris, 21 April 1888, Dujardin, Les Lauriers sont coupés, p. 126.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

37

(“dramatized states of mind”) that is successful in the underground cinema, as we know—or that we don’t yet know enough.15

It should be noted that even in underground cinema, this idea is not universally accepted and the subjectivism/objectivism opposition is also found in Stan Brakhage’s attack on Michael Snow’s La Région centrale (1971). His terms are not so different from others that have already been mentioned: Once [a machine is] evolved and ideologically set in motion and the choice of the place to set it has been made—there is from that point on no possible entrance; either a splice, or certainly never a frame for the filmmaker. So it is a film which evolves itself from that point on. That being the case, I think that the simplest and gentlest thing one can say about it is that it’s an excruciatingly lazy person’s way to proceed in making […]. The more serious thing that can be said about it is that it is absolutely preclusive of what to me are the most valuable of the parts of the process of creativity: that is, the process wherein the maker is called upon to work with what he or she doesn’t know at every frame’s existence. Whether it shall be or whether it shall not be, not as a choice of anything that can be taught academically but as an absolute.16

Brakhage’s problem with the film is that the author has separated himself from it and disappeared, that the f ilm “evolves itself”. His criticism of laziness sounds familiar, as well as what is “absolutely preclusive” of “the most valuable of the parts of the process of creativity” that abandon the object—meaning the (immediate) expression of a subject, the filmmaker, and the ultimate exclusion of the spectator—in the face of something where there is “no possible entrance”: a closed object. Gérard Legrand even describes Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach as a “closed object”.17 In subjectivism, the subject creates everything and becomes comfortable; to force it through objectivity would put it in danger of exploding: Question: But there are always personal interpretive “glasses”… D. Huillet: No, not if we’re “struck dumb”. […] 15 “Du futurisme à l’underground” in Noguez, Cinéma: théorie, lectures, p. 293. Italics in original. The quote is the fifth proposition of “The Futurist Manifesto” in Marinetti, Selected Writings, p. 43. 16 “Stan Brakhage at Millennium”, p. 299. 17 Legrand, “Sur une convergence”, p. 3.

38 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

J.-M. Straub: When the spectator is struck, stunned, then there’s no filter, you can’t interpret, the lens shatters into tiny pieces, even if the spectator later starts to reconstruct the small pieces, the lens, the glasses. Later, it’s normal because you’re protecting yourself.18

Objectivity, invalidation, and the possibility or threat of invalidating personal interpretation—”suicide or abstention”—must be acts of aggression if they are considered an explosion that spectators are later obliged to reconstruct in order to defend themselves. In 1925, Robert Musil found this explosion to define both the surprise caused by the arrival of cinema and more general aesthetic concerns: It would be a mistake to want to see in the suddenly glimpsed physiognomy of things simply the surprise induced by the isolated optical experience; this is only a means, for there too it is a matter of exploding the normal totality of experience. And this is a basic capacity of every form of art.19

“Surprise” or “stupor”, “things” or “object”, “optical experience”, “glasses” or learning with the microphone and camera about objective perception, the explosion of a normal experience putting the subject back into play: something in Huillet and Straub’s work perhaps dates back to cinema’s silent years—to what Griffith, Lang, Renoir, Stroheim, Eisenstein, Vertov, Dreyer, and others were doing; as well as to the aesthetic and political stakes of that period. Concerning the Objective Theodor W. Adorno shared these preoccupations and noted regarding Arnold Schoenberg’s aesthetic conceptions: Through antipathy toward art, the artwork converges with knowledge. From the beginning, it has been the focal point around which Schoenberg’s music has turned. More have been put off by this than by the dissonance; it is the source of the hue and cry over intellectualism.20

18 Cinemateka Group, “Entretien”, p. 51. 19 Musil, Precision and Soul, p. 200. 20 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, p. 96.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

39

This may be how Huillet and Straub’s refusal of art and the brutal rejection to which their work has been subjected should be understood. Again to the Cinemateka Group, Straub declares: And with direct sound, you can’t play certain little artistic games that you can play when you shoot without sound. […] And since our ears aren’t used to it, when we shoot with direct sound, we learn from the microphone to hear objectively and it forces the spectator to hear objectively.21

Here again they want to make the spectator work and the work is strange: instead of the idea of art making interiority understandable, this is an idea of art that forces perception to adopt a state as foreign to it as possible—that of a machine, a state of “objectivity”. In his 1935 exposé Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, Benjamin writes: Nadar’s superiority to his colleagues is shown by his attempt to take photographs in the Paris sewer system: for the first time, the lens was deemed capable of making discoveries. Its importance becomes still greater as, in view of the new technological and social reality, the subjective strain in pictorial and graphic information is called into question.22

If the objective can be a means of knowledge, it is in its refusal to separate its optical and philosophical meanings, by seeking an art that no longer adopts sensations but penetrates representations that the subject and social body admit as “normal” (usual, correct, legitimate). But we are already dealing with two ways of applying semantic derivatives referring to objects, whose articulation might not be obvious: the work of art as an object and the “objectivity” of perception. Still other nuances appear in Straub’s statements: I’ll quote Aragon here: “The critics have been very surprised by what they call my objectivity, meaning that I talk about men who, in their eyes, I should hate, represent to myself or represent to others as monsters and caricatures, that I talk about these men without hate, even with sympathy, that I give them a human image, meaning realistic and not polemical […] to understand a character who is my enemy socially, if I believe I’m

21 Cinemateka Group, “Entretien”, pp. 53-54. 22 Benjamin, Selected Writings, III, p. 35.

40 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

correct, seems more convincing to me than putting a carnival mask on someone who breathes.”23

This kind of objectivity is impartiality, a suspension of judgment, or a way of not interfering too much (too soon) in the subject’s treatment: something expected more from a judge, a historian, or even a journalist. What relation can this have with objectivity in the sense of mechanical perception? Flaubert wanted to confuse the two terms: Maurice Nadeau sums up his attitude as “impartiality, non-intervention, refusal to judge and conclude”, quoting a passage from Flaubert’s correspondence: “Let’s not criticize anything, let’s sing of everything, let’s expose and not discuss”.24 In his letters, moreover, Flaubert writes: I do not even think that the novelist ought to express his own opinion on the things of this world. He can communicate it, but I do not like him to say it. […] Is it not time to make justice a part of art? The impartiality of painting would then reach the majesty of the law—and the precision of science!25 [D]epth comes from a deep gaze, from a penetration of the objective; because exterior reality must enter us […] in order to reproduce it. […] When we have our model clearly before our eyes, we always write well.26

Impartiality and the refusal to express an opinion explicitly are based here on surrender to observation or, worse still, the exterior reality one wants “to reproduce”. All the connotations of the term “objective” are superimposed here: what is outside of us—exterior reality—the goal we set for ourselves— the work—and the optics—the “profound view”, the lens allowing us to obtain the sharpness of the model, a sharpness that ends up becoming the necessary condition and—this is especially important to good writing—no longer relying on the writer’s subjectivity, but her capacity to follow the dictates of nature, to let herself be dictated to by it. This surrender must begin with intentions, opinions, even “themes”, as Narboni and Straub say: Question: When a man is speaking, he does not do it for himself; from the moment that he wants to say something, he wants to do it for someone, with someone, in the most accessible form. 23 Delahaye, “Pornographie et cinéma”, p. 53. 24 Nadeau, Gustave Flaubert, p. 139. 25 Sand, Letters, pp. 98-99. 26 Letter to Louise Colet, 7 July 1853, Flaubert, Correspondence, II, p. 377.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

41

Straub: But not to express ourselves. I have to interrupt you already because I don’t have anything to say personally. I’m trying to express, to communicate certain reactions or facts, or a rage or sadness, that’s all, but I have no idea to express. Pasolini has ideas to express because he is a filmmaker of subjects. Question: You are already suggesting your language, even if you are communicating something that is not personal to you. Straub: Yes… No, I’m trying to suggest these subjects to people, meaning not to put my feelings or my rage or my sadness at the beginning, but eliminate them so that by suggesting the thing to people in a naked manner, people have and feel the same rage as me when I discovered the thing. All of this without first communicating my feelings or my rage or my sadness. The thing that angers me (in certain films by Kluge or Godard) is the intervention, today’s simplified Brechtianism. This involves communicating one’s own reactions at the same time as the thing you are putting in front of people.27

How does one make political cinema if it must also be a hands-off cinema (of the subject, of the author)? Or can the one only be done through the other? All of these interwoven questions create a dense network of complex problems. One that goes so far as to cause Huillet, Straub, and their spokesmen and critics to hesitate in their choice of words. The interweaving of these questions and the apparent paradoxes they sometimes imply (and the polemics stemming from them) can nevertheless be found in the work of profoundly different creators. In 1995, Jacques Roubaud published an essay entitled “La tentative objectiviste”. Focusing on Reznikoff’s Testimony, this article remains one of the few attempts (including in American criticism) to problematize what the American poets might have conceived Objectivism to be and even what a “radical objectivity” could be, with Testimony as its paradigm. Roubaud isolates the criteria that should allow one to measure a work’s “level of objectivism”. For him Zukofsky’s final work 80 Flowers is his most objectivist work according to his “radical” definition. Beyond these two works, only the first two poetic experiments of Oppen and Rakosi, as well as Niedecker, seem to him to fall under his definition: Not to see that the poems in [80 Flowers] are in a lineage with Testimony is not to understand what is most original about the Objectivist movement 27 Cinemateka Group, “Entretien”, p. 56.

42 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

[…]. Radical objectivism can pose difficulties to immediate understanding. As it presents itself to us—if we are looking to understand it poetically without sentimentalizing it, interpreting it morally, or commenting on it—the world has a strong tendency towards hermeticism, lacunae, and ellipsis. […] Objectivism runs into another, near symmetrical, difficulty. Its conception of poetry is so far from general conceptions that we can simply refuse to admit it is poetry.28

The kinship with the Straubian project is immediately apparent: the search for direct (poetic?) understanding of the world as it presents itself—without interpretation or commentary; lacunae (an essential term for Straub); ellipsis; and lastly, recurring accusations of “not being cinema”.

The Objectivists: A History The 1930s The American magazine Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe, played a crucial role in the development of modern poetry in the United States. According to Serge Fauchereau: “It is agreed that the birth of modern American poetry can be placed in 1912. That is the year Poetry was founded in Chicago. From Pound to Stevens, it discovered all the great names in American poetry.”29 A special issue of the magazine appeared in February 1931, called “Objectivists” 1931, edited by a guest editor named Louis Zukofsky. He was equipped with all of the qualities necessary on such occasions: young (born in 1904), unknown, fairly arrogant, and very likely talented, although for the moment few would admit it. One person did already seem to be persuaded: Ezra Pound, himself responsible some twenty years before for a few similar exploits (his involvement in the founding of Imagism in 1913 and Vorticism in 1914) and whose importance for the renewal of American poetry was recognized, even if it occurred during a slightly less glorious period. He asked Monroe to invite Zukofsky to edit a special issue, even though Zukofsky had only published a little and privately—one poem, notably, that for Pound was a historical milestone: “Poem beginning ‘The’”, published in The Exile in 1928.30 28 Roubaud, “La tentative objectiviste”. 29 Fauchereau, Lecture de la poésie américaine, pp. 9-10. 30 Zukofsky, “Poem beginning ‘The’”, pp. 7-27.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

43

Pound seemed certain of the young man’s talent and was ready to support his ambitions—out of artistic generosity (Pound’s was great), but not entirely impartially: he also saw a possible inheritor (the only one?) in the young man; someone who would shake up the American poetic milieu, bringing back to the centre of debate a conception of poetry close to his own, as well as his name, eventually. In order to do this, Pound was convinced that Zukofsky had to create a group, a new poetic movement. He suggested that he contact some of his colleagues and friends: notably William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Rakosi, and e.e. cummings. Zukofsky befriended the first three. Moreover, the publication of “Poem beginning ‘The’” in The Exile catalyzed his meeting in the winter of 1928-1929 with Oppen—four years his junior. Zukofsky and Oppen met Reznikoff the same year, older than them (born in 1894) but not often published. Over the years, all of these poets maintained greater or lesser relations and geographical configurations. Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikoff lived in New York at the time and saw each other frequently; Williams was in Rutherford, New Jersey, putting him at a bit of a distance. But Rakosi was further away in Wisconsin, and Pound and Bunting were in Europe. All contributed to the issue of Poetry—with the exception of Pound, the only one among them, however, whose name might have been familiar to readers. The object presents itself as an anthology, collecting texts by twenty poets, followed by two essays signed by the guest editor: “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931” and “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff ”, and a few notes. The first of these articles establishes the project’s general foundations; the second expresses the conception of poetry that the authors are supposed to illustrate, commenting at length on the work of Reznikoff, as though it were a classic. Thus we have an author coming out of nowhere, taking power in the “central organ” of modern American poetry, presenting a selection of entirely unknown poets—and breaking with what was usually done in those pages as well as everywhere else—justifying himself with a very ambitious theoretical text written in a very “personal” English to say the least, and offering as an example a poet even more obscure than himself! The result was to be expected: Monroe reacted with an article called “The Arrogance of Youth” that defended the poets implicitly rejected by Zukofsky and whom the journal had been defending for a long time (Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Robinson Jeffers, Miss Millay, Amy Lowell, Elinor Wylie, the once-revolutionary Imagists—who were, in fact, not all rejected by Zukofsky): “In short, because these poets do not fit into a theoretic scheme spun out of brain fabric by a group of empirical young

44 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

rule-makers, they are simply not poets at all”.31 The April issue devoted several pages to the polemical correspondence provoked by the Objectivists: Contradictory comments have reached us in regard to the February number and Mr. Zukofsky’s editorship: from that of the Princeton student who congratulates us upon achieving an interesting issue at last, and wonders if, after that climax, we will go back to our old benighted ways—to the protest of the Long Island editor who mailed back his copy first-class, with a letter demanding the price of it.32

Among the quoted comments was a letter from critic and poet Horace Gregory that, before expressing some reservations, begins as positively as possible: “I believe this issue is a landmark, an important historical event in the writing of American poetry.”33 Several years were needed before the justice of this judgment was recognized and the importance of the Objectivist movement and the work of the poets involved in it to American poetry could be evaluated. More than thirty years, in fact. The polemics would rage again and then subside. In 1932, Zukofsky persisted and published An “Objectivists” Anthology, which was as poorly received as the magazine. Yvor Winters, for example, himself a recognized poet at the time, distinguished himself with resounding contempt in the major journal Hound & Horn—which had published essays by Zukofsky in four successive issues between April 1930 and March 1931: This anthology is of clinical rather than of literary interests. Its chief literary virtue resides in reprinting from obscure sources several of the best poems of Dr. W. C. Williams, though one of his best poems (Full Moon, from the Dial) is ruined by being cut in half. […] The others [except Rexroth] are sensory impressionists of the usual sort, and know nothing of writing. […] The book, however, is encouraging in one respect: none of the talented writers of Mr. Zukofsky’s generation are included.34

This set the tone—and dissenting voices would be rare. An “Objectivists” Anthology was published by a small press, To, Publishers, based in Le Beausset, in Var (France). The enterprise was in fact composed 31 Monroe, “The Arrogance of Youth”, p. 329. 32 Zukofsky, “Correspondence. The February Number”, p. 51. 33 Ibid., p. 51. 34 Winters, “The Objectivists”, pp. 158-160.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

45

of three people: George Oppen, his wife Mary—both publishers and paid as editors—and Louis Zukofsky. The Oppens had emigrated to France in 1929 and settled in Var in 1930. Coming from a rather upper bourgeois background, George Oppen had received a small inheritance when he turned 21 in 1929. He invested it in the creation of his own publishing house—based in France for lower printing costs as well—managed with his wife and his friend. Zukofsky gave the project its name, “To, Publishers”, which can also be read as “To the editors” (to their health, or the bullet is for them).35 The initials of The Objectivists can also be read in that “TO”… To, Publishers published three books in 1932, all flops, before folding in autumn of the same year, Oppen’s funds having been exhausted. The failures were undoubtedly due to the lack of interest in these authors at the time, but also due to more pragmatic reasons: the books were paperback, which Americans had not yet come to accept. Bookstores refused to stock what they did not consider books. Upon the Oppens’ return to New York in 1933, a new initiative delicately began in October of that year: a cooperative based at 10 West Thirtysixth Street, New York, and composed of Charles Reznikoff, Oppen, and Zukofsky. It announced an advisory board of Pound and Williams and gave Zukofsky the title of secretary. In fact, the young man was at the centre of the business, which he first thought of calling Writers Extant, before deciding on The Objectivist Press. The idea was that each author would pay the publication expenses for their own work—which prevented Zukofsky from publishing his own, not having the means to do so. On the back of the dust jacket of Jerusalem the Golden, a collection by Charles Reznikoff published by The Objectivist Press in 1934, the author wrote the publisher’s statement: “The Objectivist Press is an organization of poets who are printing their own work and that of others they think ought to be printed.”36 Seen from today, the catalogue of The Objectivist Press is impressive. In 1934, it published: —the first anthology of William Carlos Williams‘ poems, Collected Poems 1921-1931, edited by Zukofsky with a preface by Wallace Stevens in an edition of five hundred; 35 Cf. notably Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 370, note 2. Mary Oppen: “Louis chose the name To Publishers [sic]—’to’ in the sense of ‘to whom it may concern’, as on a bill of lading, or as in usage before a verb to indicate the infinitive, ‘to publish’” (Oppen, Meaning a Life, pp. 90-91). 36 Reproduced in Reznikoff, Poems 1918-1975, p. 106.

46 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

—three books by Charles Reznikoff, the poetry collections Jerusalem the Golden and In Memoriam: 1933; as well as the first prose version of the book he would return to his entire life, Testimony, with an introduction by Kenneth Burke, in an edition of two hundred; —the first book by George Oppen, Discrete Series, with a preface by Pound.

All monuments of twentieth-century American literature, but monuments that needed time to gain visibility in this landscape. “A time proportioned to our vain and pitiful duration,” Pascal would have said: at least thirty years, in any case. After this “glorious” year, The Objectivist Press slowly disappeared, only revived in 1936 by Charles Reznikoff for his collection Separate Way and in 1948 by Louis Zukofsky (finally!) for his A Test of Poetry. In Spring 1969, the journal Contemporary Literature published a special issue, “The ‘Objectivist’ Poet”, including an introduction by editor-in-chief L.S. Dembo and four interviews with Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff, and Zukofsky.37 This marks an important milestone. First, these were poets whose importance was clear but who had not been canonized. Their works—the most recent as well as those dating to the 1920s—were suddenly in line with the latest research in modern poetry. They were a kind of missing link between the first modernism (Pound, T.S. Eliot) and contemporary research, as well as a way to open up issues beyond the crushing influence of Pound, while not denying his legacy. Leftism, Judaism, and Modernity The reasons behind this renewed interest—still very minor in the milieus of American literature but no longer to be ignored—are therefore formal, connected to the discovery of a moment of poetry at once in continuity and in rupture with the era’s best known figures. The reasons are also political. To general relief, the Objectivist group appears to be a clinically exceptional case, incontestable proof of a historical fact: leftist modernism did exist! There was a general impression that since the beginning of the 20th century, forms of ideological and artistic “progressivism” had become strangely incompatible—as Richard Roud wrote in 1972 in the first monograph on Straub: Straub is also unique in that he is that rarest of animals: a formalist with left-wing views, the first perhaps since Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. It has 37 Dembo, “‘Objectivist‘ Poet”, pp. 155-219.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

47

long been a subject of concern to many people […] that the greatest writers of the twentieth century—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Valéry, Mann, Proust—were all in varying degrees socially and politically reactionary, whereas those writers with exemplary political views were less satisfactory as artists.38

From the limbo of history springs formally ambitious poetry whose position was clearly on the left without falling into the bad habits of the trumpeters of social realism. Oppen, for example, joined the American Communist Party with his wife in 1935, campaigned, helped organize strikes, etc. He enlisted in 1942 and, because of his un-American past, had to escape to Mexico with Mary and their daughter Linda after the war. Only in 1958 did he begin writing again and soon after returned to the United States. Rakosi, who had published a few poems in 1926 in New Masses—the literary organ (not yet indoctrinated by social-realist doctrines of the time) of the American Communist Party—stopped writing between the end of the 1930s—the publication of his Selected Poems by New Directions in 1941—and the middle of the 1960s—Amulet appeared in 1967. In between, he was a social welfare psychologist. Reznikoff remained ideologically distanced from these questions, although the entirety of his work—notably Testimony and his novel The Manner “Music”—reveal a very strong social consciousness related to his biographical trajectory and his sensibility: he struggled through the Great Depression with the help of editing work on a legal encyclopaedia and as an assistant in Hollywood, where he worked for his friend, producer and director Albert Lewin. While the Oppens had read Marx, his presence is nevertheless far more explicit in Zukofsky’s poetry, at least until 1939; we find in it an “homage” to Lenin (“Memory of V.I. Ulianov”,39 1925). Although Communist literature clearly left a mark on him, his concrete proximity with the Party is harder to determine. One anecdote is revealing: Whittaker Chambers, a Party member, brought Zukofsky to a meeting in order to introduce him—and he was rejected for a mortal sin: “bourgeois intellectual”.40 Reznikoff published a poem dedicated to the martyred socialists of Vienna in Separate Way (1936). Zukofsky and Rakosi appear in Writers Take Sides (League of American Writers, 1938) favouring the Loyalist cause in Spain. 41 38 Roud, Jean-Marie Straub, p. 9. 39 Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, pp. 21-22. 40 Scroggins, “The Revolutionary Word”, p. 45. 41 Homberger, “Communists and Objectivists”, p. 115.

48 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Leftist engagement was not these poets’ only commonality: all four were also Jewish. There are “coincidences” here and the presence of a “milieu”: no criterion of Judaism appears at any moment and the presence in the entourage of Pound, Williams, and Bunting highlights this—but their Judaism is perhaps not unrelated to their will or need to take a clear anti-Fascist position, putting them in solidarity with leftist organs. Their relationship to Judaism was nevertheless far from identical: Reznikoff, whose wife Marie Syrkin was involved in American Zionist organizations,42 certainly had the greatest proximity to Jewish texts and traditions—the Bible is clearly visible behind all of his writing. The presence of themes of Judaism and anti-Semitism is relatively discreet but persistent in Oppen’s texts and perhaps more directly in Rakosi’s. The young Zukofsky had a complex relationship with the religion and culture of his fathers, which hardly helped his relationship with Pound. In a letter from 1935 to the editors of the Communist journal New Masses—with which he would collaborate several times—he defended himself for not having dealt with this theme and specifies: “The Jews are a fact. Mr. Zukofsky did not highlight this phenomenon,” says Mr. Macleod. Speech bewailing a Wall Night of economic extinctions–etc. etc.43

Always wanting to show how things are connected in context, Zukofsky insists on a separation that he does not make: the religious and economic. An Objectivist Corpus Some confusion regarding the “objectivists” remains. Most commentators who invoke them are mainly thinking of Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi, and Zukofsky. Some want to limit their work to the 1930s, others emphasize the theoretical principals instead of the poems. Still others add names: The Objectivist Nexus (ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain) includes Bunting and Niedecker in its corpus. Incontestably an extraordinary poet, the latter does not appear in any of the historical anthologies: but she corresponded with Zukofsky after the shock of reading the Objectivist issue of 42 She made a trip to Palestine in 1933, edited the monthly leftist, Zionist Jewish Frontier, and was elected in 1966 to the executive committee of the World Zionist Organization. See Syrkin, “Charles: A Memoir”, p. 44, 53, 56. 43 Zukofsky, “Editors, The New Masses”.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

49

Poetry—the friendship lasted until Niedecker’s death in 1970 and Niedecker’s writing was deeply marked by it, as Zukofsky’s may have been too. 44 Consulting the protagonists, Oppen, in a letter to Mary Ellen Solt, is more scrupulous: “It was Zukofsky who got together a meeting of Williams, Reznikoff, Zukofsky and myself at which The Objectivist Press was organised.”45 Oppen did not meet or correspond with Rakosi before 1971— when they became “friends of 35 years”. 46 In his article “Objectivism” for the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Williams includes Oppen, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Niedecker, and himself. 47 Other choices are possible: one could limit oneself to texts present in one of the “original” anthologies edited by Zukofsky (which would exclude Niedecker, but include Kenneth Rexroth, for example). One could even include the list of models Zukofsky proposes at the beginning of his Program: “Objectivists” 1931— Ezra Pound—XXX Cantos (Paris, 1930); William Carlos Williams—Spring and All (Dijon, 1923); Marianne Moore’s Observations (New York, 1924); T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (New York, 1922) and Marina (London, 1930); E.E. Cummings‘ Is 5 (New York, 1926); references to earlier volumes of Cummings; Wallace Stevens‘ Harmonium; Robert McAlmon’s North America; Charles Reznikoff; The Exile Nos. 3 and 4, edited by Ezra Pound (Chicago, 1928). 48

—since according to the author, “These poets seem to the present editor to have written in accordance with the principles heading this note.”49 The particularity of my approach has led me to a narrower choice. The criteria of the pertinence of the connection to the Straubs, as well as that of the group’s historical coherence, has led me to focus on the ones I feel are at the heart of the matter: Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikoff. The three of them represent the core of what is at stake, and through the very large panorama their works present beyond shared principles, they expose a vast variety of possibilities offered by the Objectivist conception of poetry. The others should not be neglected—some of the poems of Rakosi, Niedecker, and Bunting count among the masterpieces of 20th-century English-language poetry—but their great theoretical and/or concrete distance leave less room for them here. 44 See Penberthy, Niedecker, containing many of Niedecker‘s letters to Zukofsky. 45 Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 46. 46 Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 224. 47 Williams, “Objectivism”, p. 582. 48 Zukofsky, Prepositions +, p. 189. 49 Ibid., p. 189.

50 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Objectivist Poetic Theory The Eye and the Object Since the beginning, it has been unclear what texts described as “objectivist” are, what they say, and what they accomplish, or what they desire. This is not unrelated to the density of Zukofsky’s essayistic writing—a feature connecting him to Mallarmé: never managing to decide to use “average” French or English in the name of accessibility. The compactness of Zukofsky’s style has provoked great divergences in the interpretation of his texts—and the term “objectivist” as well. An initial direction emphasized the presence in the poem of the “real”, perceived object (most often visually): the poem is an “objective” description, without commentary, without symbolism, of this object. This tendency takes Objectivism back to a poem by Williams of considerable historical importance, number XXII in Spring and All (1923): so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens50

The poem presents an object or an ensemble without any commentary— except that “so much” depends on it. But what? Williams tirelessly declared and repeated as his motto, and some thought it should be stamped on Objectivist furniture or used as their epitaph: “No ideas but in things”.51 This is where everything becomes complicated. As Roubaud writes: “‘No ideas but in things’; certainly, but these things are verses and the verse composes the object, its light, diffracting it. Verse is the only vehicle, the

50 Williams, Collected Poems, p. 224. 51 Williams, Paterson, p. 9.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

51

red wheel / barrow everything depends upon.”52 This is a shift into another interpretive tendency: what is important in the Objectivist conception of a poem is not that it describes an object (that it limits itself to an annotation of uncommented perceptions), but that it is an object, that the poem itself is constructed and manufactured as an object. We move from “external” criteria (relationship to a reality exterior to the poem) to “internal” criteria (coherence, solidity of structure); from criteria of “content” to formal criteria. For Jacques Darras, the combination of these demands in Williams’ work signals his membership in the movement: “Williams is an Objectivist from the start, through his interest in real objects, the poem as an object, and poetic concentration: ‘the lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus.’”53 Williams addressed the movement’s genealogy in his Autobiography in 1951: The Objectivist theory was this: We had had “Imagism” […], which ran quickly out. That, though it had been useful in ridding the field of verbiage, had no formal necessity implicit in it. It had already dribbled off into so called “free verse” which, as we saw, was a misnomer. There is no such thing as free verse! Verse is a measure of some sort. “Free verse” was without measure and needed none for its projected objectifications. Thus the poem had run down and became formally non extant. But, we argued, the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. Therefore, being an object, it should be so treated and controlled—but not as in the past. For past objects have about them past necessities—like the sonnet—which have conditioned them and from which, as a form itself, they cannot be freed. The poem being an object (like a symphony or cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day. This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse. I for one believe it was Gertrude Stein, for her formal insistence on words in their literal, structural quality of being words, who had strongly influenced us.54 52 Roubaud, “Brouette rouge”, p. 75. 53 Darras, “Petite biographie”, p. 336. 54 Williams, Autobiography, pp. 306-307. Williams also wrote the article “Free Verse” in the Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics and he wrote a critical analysis of Zukofsky‘s Anew entitled

52 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

This is one Objectivism, a version of the story, a variation of the theory. The others—those of Oppen, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, etc.—are more or less related to this one. For example, Zukofsky wrote sonnets, a sestina, and reused other classical forms—and through these “fixed” forms, produced some of his most original and new works. The idea is first of all to return to a very demanding structure, a form that holds. The result finally, as Zukofsky would repeat, is that good poetry and good Objectivist poetry are one and the same thing, that the Objectivist criteria are nothing other than the criteria of “all ‘estimable’ poetry”.55 Polysemy (or simultaneity) is a nodal aspect of Zukofsky’s poetics. It contaminates all of his writing and part of the poetic “condensation” Zukofsky performs consists in proliferating it. It is at work, in fact, from the moment the word “objectivist” was chosen.56 The special issue of Poetry begins with Zukofsky’s “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931”, to which the author added as an epigraph a ‘definition’ that he used in a slightly modified version at the beginning of “An Objective” in Prepositions: An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.57

In Zukofsky’s work, words must systematically be understood in all of their listed meanings—even in those that their sounds may evoke or through other languages, living or dead. We are now at the heart of the question. Three meanings are announced—others subsequently appear. The first relates to optics. Zukofsky was a great admirer of Spinoza and it should not be overlooked that Spinoza was a lens grinder. Optics is a science. In 1946, Zukofsky wrote: The need for standards in poetry is no less than in science. […] To think clearly about poetry it is necessary to point out that its aims and those of science are not opposed or mutually exclusive; and that only the more complicated, if not finer, tolerances of number, measure and weight that “A New Line Is a New Measure” (Something to Say, pp. 161-169). 55 Zukofsky, “Correspondence”, p. 56. 56 It is funny (?) to note here that the term “objectivist” had in fact appeared in France a bit before its use by Zukofsky: in 1928, Henryzeau and Jean-Daniel Maublanc published a collection called Objectivisme et musicalité: Livres d’heures—a profoundly mediocre collection. 57 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 189.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

53

define poetry make it seem imprecise as compared to science, to quick readers of instruments.58

The connection and requirements are very Flaubertian. Two years later, the poet placed his project A Test of Poetry under the aegis of a physician, Michael Faraday, choosing an epigraph by him for each of the book’s three parts.59 A lens bringing the rays: a return of Bunting’s equation that Pound uses as a possible definition of poetry: Dichten = Condensare.60 The German verb dichten means to write (in the literary sense, to write poetry), but also to make dense, compact, thick, to condense. “In German,” writes Valère Novarina, “the poet is a densifier”.61 The focus (the poem) is the place where the rays coming from the object are reunited, assembled in a place where they are non-modified, but intensified. The objective, the lens, is the ideal of an impersonal gaze that does not interpret, that does not modify the object—it is about seeing clearly: “Strabismus may be a topic of interest between two strabismics; those who see straight look away.”62 “Sincerity and Objectivation” Zukofsky’s essay “Sincerity and Objectification” is the most important essay in the Objectivist issue of Poetry. The two notions defined in it—the heart of the matter—twice describe two complementary aspects of poetry, of (literary) composition—separable even if they are often interconnected, at least partially. “Sincerity” first: Zukofsky’s use of the term has little to do with its normal use, which is more related to a “lyrical” conception of literature—the author expresses himself sincerely, the work is authentic, etc. Nothing of the sort here: In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness. 58 “Poetry / For My Son When He Can Read”, Zukofsky, Prepositions+, pp. 6-7. 59 Zukofsky, A Test of Poetry p. 1, 45, 105. 60 See Pound, ABC of Reading. 61 Novarina, Pendant la matière, p. 71. 62 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 12.

54 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Parallels sought for in the other arts call up the perfect line of occasional drawing, the clear beginnings of sculpture not proceeded with.63

Sincerity is not a moment of the self: it is a moment of things as they exist unaltered by predatory intention and whose writing must be in the details—a precise explication but also the introduction into the words of a particular element of the world. Sincerity refers to something beyond itself: the world of things, seen and considered, exterior to the text and perhaps the poet, but also to the beyond that will be the finished form (if there is a continuation, if there is a desire for something else). The kind of perfection it seeks is tense, desiring, and unstable. A second step therefore allows something else to be achieved, the f inal aim: “perfect rest, complete appreciation” occurring through the development of a “rested totality”.64 “Rested” refers to the idea of a calm, immobile form—aside from the fact that “rest” can also mean a stand (of an instrument), a “pause” in music (silence, breath), and a “caesura” in poetry. This expression can already be found in 1920 in Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations: “Between two contending forces there may at all times arrive that moment when the stress is equal on both sides so that with a great pushing a great stability results giving a picture of perfect rest.”65 This rest involves great intensity and Williams stresses immobility where Zukofsky stresses perfection. It is a question here of appreciation and desire is necessary—the “desire for what is objectively perfect”: This rested totality may be called objectification—the apprehension satisfied completely as to the appearance of the art form as an object. That is: distinct from print which records action and existence and incites the mind to further suggestion, there exists, though it may not be harbored as solidity in the crook of an elbow, writing (audibility in two-dimensional print) which is an object or affects the mind as such.66

“Satisfied” refers to the vocabulary of appreciation. Objectification is the moment when attention is paid to the form itself: “The arrangement, into one apprehended unit, of minor units of sincerity—in other words, 63 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, pp. 12-13. 64 Ibid., p. 13. 65 Williams, Imaginations, pp. 22-33. 66 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 13.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

55

the resolving of words and their ideation into structure”.67 The poem has attained its “objectified” state, is an object or affects the mind as such, when it leaves nothing more to be desired—when its form is finished, complete, and no longer needs to be surpassed (because an incomplete form calls, is lacking what would complete it).68 Sincerity is the moment when the (exterior) thing shifts to the word; objectification the edification of a form, a structure, the organization of the words themselves. The former refers poetry to an exterior; the latter measures it according to its internal coherence, its cohesion in the physical sense. To consider a poem an object has several interconnected implications. In the preface to his 1944 collection The Wedge, Williams writes: To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.69

It is no longer a moral or economic nor a literary-historical perspective that dictates the removal of what is useless. This is established by the functioning of the poem itself, its smooth operation. The criterion is no longer outside the poem: it is its internal coherence and solidity. This supposes, however, that this criterion itself becomes objective, the reasons for which a work holds together or not being generated a priori by the author no more than by any other poet (or reader) who knows his trade. A poem is objectively good or bad (“desire for what is objectively perfect”) the way a machine does or does not accomplish the task it was designed for. In “‘Recencies’ in Poetry”, Zukofsky proposes to “put the job of explanation up to cabinet-making: certain joints show the carpentry not to advantage, certain joints are a fine evidence; some are with necessary craftsmanship in the object”.70 The theory’s implication that one be able to judge a work objectively led the poet in 1948 to publish a strange book called A Test of Poetry, a kind of comparative, annotated anthology, where he explains to us (or not: readers must make their own decisions) why one translation of Homer is better 67 Ibid., p. 13. 68 Here again, the source can be located in Williams, who wrote Zukofsky on 5 July 1928: “Poems are inventions richer in thought as image. Your early poems even when the thought has force or freshness have not been objectified in new or fresh observations”, Williams and Zukofsky, Correspondence, p. 11. Zukofsky’s understanding of the term is not exactly the same. 69 Williams, Selected Essays, p. 256. 70 Zukofsky, in Prepositions+, p. 212.

56 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

than another, where a poem by Villon translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is compared to one by Chaucer, one by Alexander Pope to one by Eliot, one by Williams to an anonymous 15th-century poet. A fundamental book for its author, it shocked even fervent Zukofskians like Cid Corman, who wrote: “There is no ‘test’ of poetry. Each person responds, if he or she enters into the words offered as such, with whatever judgment or feeling / thinking he or she has to bring to the event.”71 Corman’s response may be qualified as subjectivist. For Zukofsky, a “test” is very much possible. It relates to the author’s technical skill, whose criterion he explains in his preface—a criterion that also responds to the strange question implied by the idea of a poem as a machine: for what task is a poem conceived (what purpose does a poetrymachine serve)? “The test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound and intellection. This is its purpose as art.”72 Evidence one might say, or rather an axiom, sufficiently unquestionable for the construction to appear unwavering—untouchable? The book also allows Zukofsky to reaffirm the somewhat traditional aspect of Objectivism, differentiating it from almost every avant-garde movement of the time. As early as “‘Recencies’ in Poetry” he had written: “‘Recencies’? No more modern than a Shakespearean conceit which manages to carry at least two ideas at a time. Or Dante’s literal, anagogical and theological threefold meaning referred to in a letter to Can Grande.”73 Objectivist Politics The foundations of Objectivist art are in what it considers both a poetic and moral necessity: not altering the objects it considers or uses: Ultimately, the matter of poetic object and its simple entirety must not be forgotten. I.e. order and the facts as order. The order of all poetry is to approach a state of music wherein the ideas present themselves sensuously and intelligently and are of no predatory intention.74

Ideas must present themselves—Mallarmé’s exergue to Igitur: “This tale is addressed to the Intelligence of the reader which stages things itself.”75 71 Corman, Practice of Poetry, p. 4. 72 Zukofsky, A Test of Poetry, p. xi. 73 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 213. 74 Ibid., p. 18. 75 Mallarmé, Selected Poetry, p. 91.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

57

For Mallarmé, it is the impersonal entity Intelligence that does the work while the reader lets it do so. Ideas come on their own—without an author or reader—to bow down gently to the senses and intelligence. In his essay on Modern Times, Zukofsky writes: Charlie the actor never revealing his natural self is also Charlie in the set, an intelligence working itself out in the concrete.76

His withdrawal relates to his refusal of predatory intentions. Zukofsky insists: “An idea—not an empty concept. […] The object unrelated to palpable or predatory intent. […] No predatory manifestation.”77 The empty concept is a fear of abstraction: intelligence must be revealed in the concrete, in the image, in the object presented without intentions (predatory, deforming, alienating, etc.). But this refusal of predatory manifestation extends to each of its possible forms and structural requirements go hand in hand with a poetic/moral requirement to allow the elements of the structure the totality of their degrees of freedom. Therein lies the whole problem, therein are manifested all of the (apparent) contradictions Zukofsky illustrates, that he puts into play without trying to resolve or to subsume them to some superior or global authority, to smooth them out. Zukofsky’s texts consist of a potentially misleading superimposition of levels of apparent complexity and simplicity. Out of the great syntactical density emerge a couple of rudimentary-looking notions: sincerity and objectification, seeing and shaping. But their stratigraphy and in-depth development render the terrain unsteady because what applies to the poem’s overall form, applies at every moment, in every state, to every part of its composition. Notably, in spite of “the degradation of the power of the individual word in a culture which seems hardly to know that each word in itself is an arrangement, it may be said that each word possesses objectification to a powerful degree”78—objectification that must be concretized through the production of a poetic structure. In return, the structure—as f irm and solid as it is—must not show any predatory manifestation towards its elementary units, the f irst unit being the words. The means are: “the grouping of nouns so that they partake of the quality of things being together without violence to 76 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 60. 77 Ibid., p. 16. 78 Ibid., p. 13.

58 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

their individual intact natures”.79 In his 1950 “A Statement for Poetry”, Zukofsky repeats: No verse is “free,” however, if its rhythms inevitably carry the words in contexts that do not falsify the function of words as speech. […] The least unit of a poem must support the stanza; it should never be inflicted on the least unit.80

Every word is therefore already an object, an organization, and has an individual nature—consequently, the prohibition of predatory intentions, which is applied to the relationship of words to exterior objects, concerns the relations of the words to each other as well. The one recovers the other, since Zukofsky shares with Pound “faith that the combined letters—the words—are absolute symbols for objects, states, acts, interrelations, thoughts about them. If not, why use words—new or old?”81 Violence done to words and to things is therefore inseparable. There are some tensions beneath the repose of the objectif ied poetic form. First: if a word is an object, a poem is also an object and must be understood as a unit. This unit must nevertheless leave each of its component units free, including the word unit. There is therefore a utopia of a fractal composition for the poem, where no predatory manifestation plays a part at any level—where the structure is indivisible and simultaneously allows each of its parts its natural action. Second: a word is a thing, but also an absolute symbol of a thing—“thing” in a precise but broad sense. The more it is conserved intact in its nature as a thing, the better it renders the exterior object. Likewise—and this is a particular characteristic of the Objectivist conception of a poem—the poem can only express the world in which it is born if it is itself an object of this world. The originality of Objectivist art theory is in its affirmation that abstraction (objectification) and figuration (sincerity) are complementary, that sincerity is necessary for objectification, but also, in return, objectification alone permits the exactitude—the detail—at the heart of sincerity. In his translator’s introduction to Bunting’s “Briggflatts”, Jacques Darras comments:

79 Ibid., p. 13. 80 Ibid., pp. 22-23. 81 Ibid., p. 14.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

59

A relative of William Carlos Williams (although he uses less syncopation and fragmentation), Bunting manages to create an order made with rhythmic and pictorial restrictions that manages to link the poem to the world so they may dance side by side without pretending to forget the aesthetic desire generating this dance.82

Syncopation, fragmentation, order, rhythm, image, the poem and the world “side by side”: everything here is exactly Objectivist. The task is therefore to understand the world, things, and what Zukofsky calls “context” in all their complexity, their opacity: Impossible to communicate anything but particulars—historic and contemporary—things, human beings as things their instrumentalities of capillaries and veins binding up and bound up with events and contingencies. The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference.83

What Zukofsky calls particulars are things bound up within a context, part of it and revealing it—divulging all its complexity if no excessive force is used—enriching the poem with this complexity: It is understood that historic and contemporary particulars may mean a thing or things as well as an event or a chain of events: i.e., an Egyptian pulled-glass bottle in the shape of a f ish or oak leaves, as well as the performance of Bach’s Matthew Passion in Leipzig, or the Russian revolution and the rise of metallurgical plants in Siberia.84

Politics penetrates the poem like a gunshot at a concert. Politics as well as history: objectivist poetics is also marked by “The desire for inclusiveness—The desire for an inclusive object”; “A desire to place everything—everything aptly, perfectly, belonging within, one with, a context”.85 Not assaulting the nature of the words or forcing their meaning implies respecting their natural polysemy—to understand all the meanings of ‘objective’ simultaneously. Over the years, Zukofsky radicalized this position, 82 Darras, “Briggflatts”, p. 4. 83 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 16. 84 Ibid., p. 12. The St Matthew Passion is one of the fundamental “themes” (precisely in the musical sense) of Zukofsky’s “A”—which opens with two parallel performances of the work in Leipzig and New York. 85 Ibid., p. 15.

60 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

finding it necessary not to restrict words in an overly rigid syntax, without the ambiguities, ellipses, spaces, etc. that obstruct their meaning and make it difficult to understand quickly. This implies attention to articulation, small words, and an overall de-hierarchization of vocabulary: “A case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve.”86 A word is a semantic construction because it results from a historical movement. In his work, the poet must never forget this geological density (that would cause violence to the nature of words, predatory intention): in a spoken word the song of the tribe resounds in it, the sum of its uses—every word is a quotation of anonymous and famous mouths; and the most common ones have known multiple lives. In Zukofsky’s final texts, his feeling for the age of words is brought to its greatest intensity: “A”-22 and 23 and 80 Flowers go back to the prehistory of English, mixing definitions, etymologies, and extra-linguistic assonances, allowing the Latin, Greek, or Hebrew beneath the vocabulary to be heard—through syntax that, because of its disconnection, barely deserves still to be labelled as such. If, following Pound but differently, the Objectivists wanted to write poetry integrating history, it was not only by bringing together subjects of a historical (or political, etc.) nature. It was also in the form itself, in their conception and manner of sculpting their language that history would be shaped. A poem can only have a revolutionary effect if it is one with the context, a possibility that is in turn subordinated to objectification. If the object, the singularity, is simultaneously the exterior thing, the word, and the poem—the context is in turn simultaneously all of the relations in which the thing is caught (thoughts, feelings, economy, politics, history) and the poetic structure. The theory is entirely based on a double distinction that is in fact merely a single, poetic “Möbius strip” of effects and contradictions that Zukofsky exacerbates rather than resolves and makes productive through their tension. To specify what he means by context, he talks of “order”: “order and the facts as order”. A term he likes enough to reuse in his essay “Poetry / For My Son When He Can Read”: The specialized concern to the poet will be, first, its proper conduct—a concern to avoid clutter no matter how many details outside and in the head are ordered. This does not presume that the style will be the man, 86 Ibid., p. 10. The poet to defend is Zukofsky himself who in 1926 wrote “Poem beginning ‘The’” and the rest of his life the—epic?—poem “A”.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

61

but rather that the order of his syllables will define his awareness of order. For his second and major aim is not to show himself but that order that of itself can speak to all men.87

One must undoubtedly be a very lively man to give so much import to these terms. There is therefore an order that (again) on its own can speak to everyone. The poet’s task is to disappear so that this order may appear, so that no intermediary is interposed between the order of the poem and that of the world. In “A”-6, Zukofsky notes: “An objective—nature as creator”.88 Nature creates; the poet is a mere observer and instrument, a lens. The dimension of impersonality in Objectivism becomes explicit here. Zukofsky: “‘Objectivation’—yes, ‘self-contained’ interpretations and therefore objective (contextual) not ‘subjective’ in nature.”89 As though the subject could only produce uninteresting “personal vagueness”, only be a predatory manifestation or modification and therefore a simplification of things. All of these elements suggest intersections and bring to mind many of Huillet and Straub’s statements, as well as lines from their films. The lines Joachim Gasquet attributes to Cézanne used at the beginning of their film on the painter (Cézanne: Conversation with Joachim Gasquet, 1989), for example: Cézanne: But if I have the slightest distraction, the slightest faltering, especially if I interpret too much one day, if a theory today carries me that contradicts that of the day before, if I think while painting, if I intervene, crash! everything goes away. Gasquet: How, if you intervene? Cézanne: The artist is only a receptacle of sensations, a brain, a recording apparatus. If he intervenes, if he dares, feeble, to mix himself voluntarily in what he must translate, he infiltrates in it his pettiness. The work is inferior.

Cézanne was a model for Williams90 and for Rainer Maria Rilke he was the model of a “limitless objectivity”91 in a sense extremely close to that which appears here. 87 Ibid., p. 8. 88 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 24. The reference is to Spinoza‘s distinction between natura naturans, “naturing nature”, creator—and natura naturata, “nature natured”, created—a distinction Zukofsky reuses frequently in the poem. 89 Zukofsky, “Correspondence”, p. 56. 90 See Lemaire, “La Poétique picturale”, pp. 166-174. 91 Cf. all of Rilke, Letters on Cézanne.

62 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Most striking is the predominance of the semantic field of music in Zukofsky’s texts. This remains particular to him. The other Objectivists were not so sensitive to these questions; the presence of a musical horizon in Zukofsky’s work is constant and systematic—horizon or asymptote: “Thus poetry may be defined as an order of words that as movement and tone (rhythm and pitch) approaches in varying degree the wordless art of music as a kind of mathematical limit.”92 He summarizes this with a famous, enigmatic mathematical symbol pondered in “A”-12: I’ll tell you About my poetics—  music  speech An integral Lower limit speech Upper limit music No?93

Hard to say if the italics are out of anger or disgust or what the mathematical operation of integration could represent for Zukofsky. Perhaps it is only necessary to hear the verbal translation of these mathematical symbols: the integral of what can be produced (by words?) between speech and music… As often elsewhere, the stress here is on the undefined article: an integral. Narboni noted in 1969 how much “the reference to music […] may also be applied to all of Straub’s films, which are so rife with preoccupations tending in this direction, so essentially a search for possible homologies.”94 And in the field of music, one particular figure plays a major role for Zukofsky and for Huillet and Straub: Bach. Mark Scroggins notes that “the early sections of ‘A’ […] [are] informed throughout by the formal analogy of the musical fugue and the themes and lyrics of Bach’s St Matthew Passion”.95 At the beginning of “A”-8, for example, we read a long quote from Bach’s 92 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 19. 93 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 138. 94 Rivette, Rivette, p. 87. 95 Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky, p. 25.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

63

statement to the municipal council of Leipzig on 23 August 1730, whose words are familiar to fans of Huillet and f ilms: Gustav Leonhardt reads a long extract from it in shots 45 and 46 of Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. These shots and this text are crucial in the f ilm: for the f irst time, we hear the cantor’s voice, for the f irst time we see him up close and at home in an intimate context—Anna Magdalena listens and gently runs her hand over his shoulder, the only time the two touch each other on-screen. The lines are not addressed to the listener, but recall the diff iculty of liking one’s job in certain conditions (political, economic, historical, etc.). The presence of these words says something about the relationship between filmmakers and poets in their respective works, just like the methodical similarities—massive quotations of pre-existing texts respected to the letter, despite being rearranged by ellipses and crossing out, “re-edited” perhaps—say something as well. Bach’s work—notably the St Matthew Passion—is present in all of Zukofsky’s and Huillet and Straub’s work to an almost obsessional degree. The poet attends both to the librettos, physically present (quoted) in his texts, and the music itself. In Zukofsky’s mind, his admiration for the art of counterpoint should not remain in the domain of a vague feeling for beauty, but penetrate his artistic research: he constructed some of his practices on a fundamental question explicitly expressed at the end of “A”-6: Can The design Of the fugue Be transferred To poetry?96

Could we say that Huillet and Straub sought to “transfer the design of the fugue” to cinema? Zukofsky loved Bach, as well as Schoenberg, and in both cases for similar reasons as those that animated Huillet and Straub’s own feelings. In “A”-12, we can read, after a long quote of the Viennese composer complaining that having a brain is more a source of attacks than admiration: It is honest history to admit this possession And not fatal 96 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 38.

64 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Except to the conceit of the dull corpus. Honest to remember that Bartok of another mind, Like Schoenberg, did not acquiesce quietly That is, stay with his day’s Germans.97

Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” (1972) comes to mind here and creates an echo—just like the filmmakers’ statements about their own work, real statements or simply probable ones. Bach and Schoenberg were “mathematicians”: they were interested in precision and structure, they believed in intelligence, they desired “what is objectively perfect”. They were also men living and working in certain conditions that they were aware of and, if need be, were capable of refusing. This shared taste for Bach and Schoenberg is certainly not specific to Zukofsky and Huillet and Straub. The obsessive presence of these two figures in bodies of works full of musical references is certainly a sign of a common conception of art and the artist—all the more so since this interest is always expressed in similar terms. But furthermore, it is about more easily measuring the kinship of methods on these similar subjects and simply to begin pointing towards a more specific, common horizon. The formal comparisons with music complete the play of tensions on which Zukofsky’s work is constructed. Sincerity and objectif ication as two non-contradictory but complementary and necessary movements, each the outcome of the other; disintegration of the artist into veins and capillaries, and then among historical and contemporary, poetic and political singularities; and even the attempt to lead art towards what it is not: music. And again: to write poetry that is perfectly political and revolutionary without abandoning oneself to the rhetoric of calls to the people, so quick to signal “the alliance with the proletariat”—a radical leftist art not looking to be accessible at all costs but instead considering that “Poetry, as other object matter, is after all for interested people”98—without forgetting that its goal is to “show an order that speaks to everyone”. The political dimension of this is rarely absent, whether it is in the explicitly didactic works (A Test of Poetry), in some occasional quotes (Confucius in Zukofsky: “Education begins 97 Ibid., p. 249. 98 Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, p. ix.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

65

with poetry, is strengthened through proper conduct, and consummated through music”99), or in a more general ethical requirement—no predatory manifestation. Reviewing Oppens’ Discrete Series (1934), Williams notes: An imaginable new social order would require a skeleton of severe discipline for its realization and maintenance. Thus by a sharp restriction to essentials, the seriousness of a new order is brought to realization. Poetry might turn this condition to its own ends. Only by being an object sharply defined and without redundancy will its form project whatever meaning is required of it. It could well be, at the same time, first and last a poem facing as it must the dialectic necessities of its day. Oppen has carried this social necessity, so far as poetry may be concerned in it, over to an extreme.100

A paragraph that echoes with the memory of Walter Benjamin’s lines in the chapter in One-Way Street called “Ministry of the Interior”: “The more antagonistic a person is toward the traditional order, the more inexorably he will subject his private life to the norms that he wishes to elevate as legislators of a future society.”101 It is not certain that the artists in question here—Huillet and Straub in the f irst place—are exactly hostile to the traditional order. It is not even certain that this proposal is entirely true with regards to its author. Up to a certain point it is. The works at the centre of this book also share the strange space of a modernity that is not constructed on the absence of memory. The goal now is to examine how these positions are incarnated or objectified.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Aumont, Jacques and Faux, Anne-Marie, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, Der Tod des Empedokles/La Mort d’Empédocles, ed. Jacques

99 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 4. 100 Williams, Something to Say, p. 57. 101 Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 53.

66 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Déniel and Dominique Païni. Dunkerque: Studio 43 M.J.C. de Dunkerque, DOPA Films, and Ecole Régionale des Beaux Arts, 1987, pp. 25-54. Bazin, André, What is Cinema?, 2 vols., trans. Hugh Grant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Benjamin, Walter, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott. London: NLB, 1979. —, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Biette, Jean-Claude, “Nicht Versöhnt de Jean-Marie Straub (Allemagne)”, Cahiers du cinéma, 171 (October 1965), p. 49. Cinemateka Group, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, Cahiers du cinéma, 223 (August-September 1970), pp. 48-57. Corman, Cid, The Practice of Poetry: Reconsiderations of Louis Zukofsky’s A TEST OF POETRY. Vermont: Longhouse-Origin, 1998. Darras, Jacques, “Briggflatts”, Poésie, 7:4 (1978). —, “Petite biographie de William Carlos Williams”, In’hui, 14 (Winter 1980-1981), p. 336. Delahaye, Michel, “Pornographie et cinéma à l’état nu: entretien avec J.M. Straub (Situation du nouveau cinéma: Pesaro. 2)”, Cahiers du cinéma, 180 (July 1966), pp. 52-57. Dembo, L.S. “‘Objectivist’ Poet: Four Interviews”, Contemporary Literature, 10:2 (Spring 1969), pp. 155-219. Dujardin, Édouard, Les Lauriers sont coupés, ed. Jean-Pierre Bertrand. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. Eisenschitz, Bernard, “En marche”, Cahiers du cinéma, 205 (October 1968), pp. 53-54. Fauchereau, Serge, Lecture de la poésie américaine. Paris: Somogy édition d’art, 1998. Flaubert, Gustav, Correspondence, 5 vols., ed. Jean Bruneau. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Homberger, Eric, “Communists and Objectivists”, The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. R. Blau DuPlessis and P. Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999, pp. 114-126. Legrand, Gérard, “Sur une convergence de plusieurs f ilms récents”, Positif, 112 (January 1970), pp. 1-7. Lemaire, Gérard George, “La Poétique picturale de William Carlos Williams”, In’hui, 14 (Winter 1980-1981), pp. 166-174. “Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer, ou Peut-être qu’un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour’ par Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet (suite). I—Entretien”, Cahiers du cinéma, 224 (October 1970), pp. 40-42. Mallarmé, Stéphane, Selected Poetry and Prose, trans. Mary Ann Caws. New York: New Directions, 1982. Marinetti, Filippo, Selected Writings, ed. R.W. Flint. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

Objec tivit y and Objec tivities

67

Monroe, Harriet, “The Arrogance of Youth”, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 37, 6 (March 1931), pp. 328-333. Musil, Robert, Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Nadeau, Maurice, Gustave Flaubert, écrivain. Paris: Denoël, coll. Dossiers des Lettres Nouvelles, 1969. Narboni, Jean, “La Vicariance du pouvoir”, Cahiers du cinéma, 244 (October 1970), pp. 43-47. Neron, Patrice, “Une lutte contre le sens”, Cahiers du cinéma, 208 (January 1969), pp. 57-59. Noguez, Dominique (ed.), Cinéma: théorie, lectures. Paris: Klincksieck, 1978. Novarina, Valère, Pendant la matière. Paris: P.O.L., 1991. Oppen, George, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990. Oppen, Mary, Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978. Penberthy, Jenny, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934. Reznikoff, Charles, The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, ed. Seamus Cooney. Boston: Black Sparrow, 2005. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters on Cézanne (1907), trans. Joel Agree. New York: North Point Press, 2002. Rivette, Jacques, Rivette: Texts and Interviews, trans. Tom Milne. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Roubaud, Jacques, “Brouette rouge et choses vers”, In’hui, 14 (Winter 1980-1981), pp. 71-76. —, “La tentative objectiviste”, Revue de Littérature Générale, 96/2, 1996. Roud, Richard, Jean-Marie Straub. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Sand, George, The George Sand-Gustav Flaubert Letters, trans. Aimee L. McKenzie. New York: Liveright, 1949. Scroggins, Mark, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. —, “The Revolutionary Word: Louis Zukofsky, New Masses, and Political Radicalism in the 1930s”, in Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, ed. Mark Scroggins. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1997, pp. 44-64. “Stan Brakhage at Millennium”, Millennium Film Journal 16/17/18 (Fall-Winter 1986-87), pp. 297-307. Syrkin, Marie, “Charles: A Memoir”, Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, ed. Milton Hindus. Orono: University of Maine at Orono, 1984.

68 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Verlaine, Paul, Selected Poems, trans. Martin Sorrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Williams, William Carlos, Imaginations, New York: New Directions, 1970. —, “Objectivism”, Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. —, Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963. —, Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1954. —, Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, ed. James E.B. Breslin. New York: New Directions Books, 1985. —, The Autobiography. New York: New Directions Books, 1967. —, The Collected Poems: Volume I: 1909-1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987. Williams, William Carlos and Zukofsky, Louis, The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Winters, Yvor, “The Objectivists”, Hound & Horn, 6, 1 (October-December 1932), pp. 158-160. Zukofsky, Louis, “A”. New York: New Directions, 2011. —, A Test of Poetry. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. —, Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. —, “Correspondence. The February Number”, Poetry, vol. 38, no. 1 (April 1931). —, “Editors, The New Masses”, 6 April 1935, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —, “Poem beginning ‘The’”, The Exile, ed. Ezra Pound, no. 3, Spring 1928, pp. 7-27. —, Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

3.

The Power of Speech (or the Voice), of Seeing and the Path: Moses And Aaron Abstract This chapter contains a detailed analysis of Straub and Huillet’s 1974 filmic adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera Moses und Aron. It pays closes attention to the similarities and differences between the films and how the filmmakers’ choices of adaptation and mise-en-scène, which flatten out the opera and its story, result in an analytic posture that allows viewers to see the powers at play in the opera in a more objective manner. Keywords: “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.” ‒ Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds1

As early as 1970, Straub had declared a difference between Moses and Aaron, then in pre-production, and Othon: [Moses and Aaron] will not only be a film about the relationship of the dialectic to the people, […] it will be a film about the people. The opposite of Othon, which is a film about the absence of the people. This will be a film about the people and its presence.2

All things considered, this claim is less surprising than it may at first appear. After all, among other things, the opera Moses and Aaron is “about” a people and its creation: the people of Israel. Yet, we must also recognize a shift here, a gap, and, finally, a problem the film poses: between the unrepresentability of God and the unrepresentability of the people. The people are literally 1 O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 9. 2 Cinemateka Group, “Entretien”, p. 57.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_ch03

72 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

present in Moses and Aaron—or visibly represented. The opera stumbles constantly over their literal presence. For Adorno, Schoenberg’s opera admirably poses the problem of objectivity, which for him was fundamental to modern aesthetics. The opera’s subject—the simultaneous birth of the Jewish people and monotheism— requires transcending the individual, which is for Adorno, moreover, the task of all contemporary art. Adorno finds that these problems deeply infuse the composer’s techniques and his approach, and it is only through these questions that the extreme rigour of their application can be understood. This tension towards objectivity acts deeply on the opera and leads it to its conclusion, the contradictions inherent to the idea perhaps becoming embodied in the work’s limitations. Huillet and Straub’s film is also constructed solely on and through this Schoenbergian objectivity. Anywhere that Schoenberg obtains the objective, they add an additional stratum of objectivity, a new floor to the building. The remaining subjectivity in the original work is harder to manage.

Moses, Aaron, Schoenberg, Huillet & Straub A Project At the beginning of the 1975 Cahiers interview, Straub relates how he discovered Schoenberg’s opera during its first staging in Berlin in 1959 and immediately decided to make a film whose staging “would be its exact opposite”.3 If they needed some fifteen years to realize their goal, it was not only due to the inevitable expense of such an operation or the aesthetic radicalism this “exact opposite” suggests, but also to the complications it implied for their approach. As Straub recalled, “Immediately, the idea for the film was to shoot it outside.”4 This would not bring particularly terrible consequences, were it not for the principle Huillet and Straub are attached to like ivy to a tree: direct sound. The two together were promising. The filmmakers’ demand for direct sound is at once radical—as we have already seen with Othon—and in need of clarification. We discover its limits here: the singers—more precisely those singing on-screen—and the

3 4

Bontemps, Bonitzer, and Daney, “Conversation”, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

73

ambient sound were recorded on location. The orchestral part was recorded in Vienna before production. This division is not as clear-cut as it may seem. For example, in shot 57,5 the Sick Woman sings to the Golden Calf. Her on-screen singing is recorded with direct sound. In the following shot, the beggars march past the idol, placing their offerings before it. According to the score, they are singing as a choir. In the film, however, we hear the choir off-screen, while the actors walk in silence. The choir had been recorded in Vienna. This has implications for the aural texture, as well as on other levels: the Sick Woman must be a singer, able to read and perform a score. The beggars are local farmers hired as extras. When they offer their tunics and appear naked above the waist their arms have tan lines from contemporary shirts; when they leave food at the base of the statue, some make very Catholic genuflections. This would be different with singers, whose gestures would lose this weight, perhaps gaining that of a singing body. There is also a conception of aural coherence that is not obvious: rather than separating the image from the sound that is supposed to be produced by it, Huillet and Straub prefer cutting into the heart of the musical material, dividing it in two parts recorded in different conditions (interior/exterior) hundreds of kilometres and several days or weeks apart. This division within the actual musical substance reproduces a division familiar from traditional cinema between speech and ambient sounds and “film music”, each dealt with “as necessary”. However, the uniqueness of how Huillet and Straub navigate these issues prevents the separation from becoming academic. Gertrud Koch sees another consequence: “[R]emaining imageless, the instrumental music is reintroduced as ‘absolute’ music, while the speaking and singing voices fall into the aporia of desacralization through their visualization.”6 It may be possible then to understand Huillet and Straub’s entire endeavour as an interrogation of the sacredness of Moses and Aaron, and of the possibility of maintaining or inventing something like a materialist sacredness—a materialism that does not reject transcendence but finds it in its path. On the other hand, the question of knowing if a word—or melody—figures, remains at the heart of the problem. The ambiguity of this approach is also found for example in how the orchestra was recorded, as Gielen explains, “in four track mono and as dry as possible because the Straubs and their engineers had discovered in their 5 The shot numbers come from the script published in Cahiers du cinéma, 260-261 (OctoberNovember 1975), and 262-263 (January 1976). 6 Koch, Die Einstellung, p. 36.

74 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

tests that the natural reverb in the radio studio in Vienna corresponded very closely to the reverb in the arena in Alba Fucense where we shot.”7 The Straubs preferred a “dry” recording out of personal taste and because it makes the edges sharper rather than drowning them in an overly “polished” orchestral mass. But Gielen also emphasizes that their love of disjunction had its limits and they also tried homogenizing the soundtrack to a degree. This is of course a question of balance as well as respect towards the work and, as it rarely is elsewhere in the Straubs’ films—Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematgoraphic Scene” is the proof—admiration (Biette writes of “troubling empathy”8) for Schoenberg himself. Rather curiously, moreover, the presence of ambient sound is shocking: as if it were “inconvenient” that the worldly sounds mix with the celestial music. The dynamic is obviously different, but after all we can also hear a body fall on a stage—and we must admit that here no sound ever covers up the music. It is true that some of these sounds have an unusual status in a film: in shot 68, when “men throw themselves into the void, one after the other” and we hear them fall off-screen a few dozen centimetres below the frame, it is rather “bothersome”—“poorly done” or “distancing”, depending on one’s affinity, but meaning: “we don’t really believe it”—and it is also very beautiful. In 1969, Straub commented: In La Voix Humaine, you can hear the dolly moving. That is very beautiful. Not if one does it systematically, like the stupid intellectuals who say: “I will let people hear the dolly, so that they remain conscious of being in the cinema.” I don’t follow that. But if it’s there and comes in by itself, then one shouldn’t hide it.9

The sound is beautiful if it is there not through authorial intention but if it happens on its own. The author must disappear for beauty to arrive. To summarize: we see people singing; the sound of their voices was recorded at the same time as the image. We never see the orchestra: it was recorded earlier—along with some choral parts sung off-screen—but some parts sung off-screen were recorded on location. The actors/singers had to be able to hear the music in order to perform it, but it was not recorded directly with the voices: the Nagra on set had to not “hear” the 7 Straub-Huillet, Moïse et Aaron, p. 122. 8 Biette, “Le Jeu du bec”, p. 11. 9 Engel, “Andi Engel talks to Jean-Marie Straub”, pp. 2-3.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

75

orchestra—and they had to be able to hear themselves and each other. The actors/singers had to be able to see the conductor without the direction of their eyes changing too much. The real and fictional space had to remain (classically) understandable so in no way could classical découpage be applied. The location had to allow for this kind of sound recording, despite the open air—unlike Othon, sounds that were too contemporary (cars, planes, etc.) were not tolerated. A very different kind of signifier blurs Moses and Aaron. The film’s opening credits are divided into two parts: from shots 2 to 6, the text is black on white, presenting the producers, directors, and musical directors. In Shot 8 the text is white on black, the opera’s title and names of its composer and publisher. Shot 7 is shorter than its neighbours, creating the impression of a somewhat abrupt intrusion. In red handwriting on a white background: “Für Holger Meins * J.-M.S D.H.” Meins, a left-wing student in Berlin, had joined the Red Army Faction in 1971. He was arrested with Andreas Baader and Jan-Karl Raspe during a shootout in Frankfurt on 1 June 1972 and died from exhaustion during a hunger strike on 11 November 1974. In a famous article published on the front page of Le Monde on 2 September 1977, Jean Genet wrote: Germany has abolished the death penalty. But it brings death through hunger and thirst strikes and enforces isolation through the “depreciation” of the slightest sound except that of the prisoner’s heart. Locked in a vacuum, he eventually discovers in his body the sound of pulsing blood, the sound of his lungs, that is, the sound of his organism, and thus he comes to know that thought is produced by a body.10

In Moses and Aaron, we hear the sound of lungs. Bodies produce thought. But life presses from all sides. Hadrien Laroche comments on Genet’s relation to the R.A.F.: The Red Army Faction’s relationship to Germany’s past is striking: its insistence on the continuity between the Federal Republic and the Third Reich and the desire of its members to mourn in their own way. To Germany in particular and those who understood it (Grass, Beuys, Genet, etc.), the R.A.F. poses a problem of memory. It stops the clock hands of democratic Germany.11 10 Genet, “Violence and Brutality”, pp. 176-177. 11 Laroche, Le Dernier Genet, p. 30.

76 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Be it a reconciliation conceded too quickly or the rational use of competencies, the Straubs, following others, had been denouncing the intolerability of this continuity since Machorka-Muff (1963) and Not Reconciled. The temporal proximity and the trauma caused in West Germany by the R.A.F’.s violent activities allow us to imagine the reactions in 1975 to this dedication in the opening credits of a film adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s biblical opera. The red of the writing had too many resonances. Seeing the f ilm with, after, or under this send-off is a diff icult task. Should we recognize it as a moment seized on for engagement, a provocation and/or a desire to denounce the behaviour of the police? Or did Huillet and Straub think this f ilm would have interested or concerned Meins? How so? Perhaps as a filmmaker. Meins was also a friend of Straub’s and a student at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin 12 and had made a very beautiful documentary, Oskar Langenfeld: 12 Mal (1966). He was expelled from the Academy in November 1968 for political activism along with a few others who subsequently did not go as far as he did, or did so differently: Harun Farocki, Günter Peter Straschek, Gerd Conradt, Hartmut Bitomsky. Pascal Bonitzer notes that the dedication “ended up becoming the most important thing in the film for the Straubs, precisely because it appalled people who thought this hair had no place in the cultural soup, and planned to cut it out. […] Don’t bring Schoenberg into this! And why not, since he involved himself in it? ‘Blood offerings! Blood offerings! Blood offerings! Blood offerings!’”13 The idea of a relation between what Schoenberg mixed with, what Meins mixed with, and what the opera evokes, figures, or shows (it is not the same thing) is very possible. In any case, this dedication is thought-provoking—like the other epigraph, the first German translation by Luther (1523) of Exodus 32:25-28, read by Huillet, which also causes some possibly-related shifts. According to Huillet and Straub, they have always respected the texts they have adapted to the letter. In Othon each syllable is audible, even those that are silent. Here, the score is performed with precision in its entirety—and every word is pronounced, even those without music in Act III. Everything is there. And yet, they make discreet alterations without seeming to. This analysis will bring these to light and question them—not only their most visible manifestations, but also the erosions in Schoenberg’s material Huillet and Straub’s cinematic structure causes. They will be measured in order to 12 Straub’s explanation in Straub, Huillet, and Jousse, Entretiens [CD]. 13 Bonitzer, “J.-M.S. et J.-L.G.”, p. 7.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

77

test Straub’s 1976 declaration: “I hope […] that the idea of the film is not just displaced in relation to Schoenberg but is even opposed to him.”14

The Cinematic Form of (the Absence of) God: “The Calling of Moses” “This marvellous spiral gives me such overwhelming pleasure by virtue of its singular and wonderful properties that I can scarcely satisfy my desire to contemplate.” ‒ Jacques Bernoulli 15

Analytic Cinema 1: Horizontality The first scene in Moses and Aaron is entitled “The Calling of Moses”. It is filmed in one, nine minute and 35 second shot (10)—perhaps in homage to the appearance of the unique God, like the unique series on which the score is constructed. It is a panning shot shaped like a spiral, if not a slight spinode: it begins looking down at Moses in a close-up three-quarters from behind, pans diagonally upward to the left, then horizontally, before finally stopping—covering a horizontal angle of about 300°. It traces a shape from interior to exterior, below to above, beginning close to its centre (Moses, next to the camera) and ending at the point in the distance marking its edge: a double mountain (Monte Velino). But the spinode, the non-rounded angle the camera traces as it moves from the diagonal to the horizontal pan, throws doubt on the spiral. Perhaps it is instead a portion of a circle attached to a diagonal. The line traced by the camera movement is typically Straubian and announces the principles of the film. The spinode is its logical consequence. The horizontal part of the pan is horizontal. This proposition is true, but only of slight theoretical interest. Yet it says something since, like socialism, most supposedly “horizontal” panning shots are in fact not so. They are vaguely horizontal: moving left to right, but following a “natural” line, adjusted to follow the subject. It is very rare in academic (industrial), narrative cinema for a horizontal pan (one this long I was going to write, but none are as long as in this film) to be made without correcting the horizontal, meaning a pan with the vertical tilt locked off. This creates a very particular sensation, as if 14 Quoted in Walsh, Brechtian Aspect, p. 94. 15 Quoted in “Beauty in Mathematics”, Le Lionnais, Great Currents, p. 126.

78 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

the edges of the frame were not following the objects being filmed, but were slicing into them, sectioning them up, violently cutting through the material of the world. The frame never pretends to follow the lines or movements of things. It places itself against them; affixing the abstract structures that thinking participates in to the opaque phenomena of what is there. At the time of Moses and Aaron, Huillet and Straub had never gone so far in their use of panning shots, only using them occasionally: this technique slowly becomes systematic and forms the basis of Too Early/Too Late and Lothringen! Slicing, I wrote. There is something palpably violent about the rigidity of the path of the frame’s edges. Straub’s sense of framing and his improbably stable, impeccably firm, extraordinary compositions accentuate this despite or because of their enormous internal tensions. There is a severity in the line’s indifference to the physical accidents that our eyes focus on. The opacity of things is considered; there is a desire not to apply to them what, in the realm of thought, they have little or nothing do with—a refusal of predatory manifestations. But the indifference in Huillet and Straub’s films is of course false or complicated: they take this stance less to ignore than to wait for eventual meaning-producing coincidences, between the shot and the text for example. The line of the movement being smooth, only things themselves, in their inadaptation to the uniformity of the design, can create the gaps that make information possible (in the sense of signal theory). Huillet and Straub’s films are figurative insofar as we could replace “word” by “shot” in Zukofsky’s line: “The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference.”16 The diagonal part of the shot is also strikingly linear. It is as if the camera operator Saverio Diamanti was not instructed to follow a line of sight or one specific thing, or to go from one point to another, but simply that each turn of the tripod’s gears in one direction corresponded to a rotation in the other direction, meaning he was to follow as closely as possible the line extending the diagonal of the frame—until the horizon appears. The visual sensation of this abstraction is somewhat attenuated, because the direction roughly corresponds to the assumed direction of Moses’ gaze (assumed because we never see his eyes). It is nevertheless reinforced by the absence of any object to which the spectator can attribute this gaze: nothing looks like a “burning bush” and the abstraction of the movement pushes away or throws doubt on any (or almost any) candidate for the speaking bush, hardly burning at all. The diagonal pan is a combined movement, vertical and horizontal. It is one of the simplest and fewest movements in the film. Nearly all of the 16 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 16.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

79

other movements are simple, meaning travelling or panning shots, (purely) vertical or horizontal. We could say this gives the film a primitive aspect contributing to and above all announcing what—in terms of how this works with the rest of the construction—I’ll call analytic. What exactly do we see and hear during the shot’s nine and a half minutes? A man three-quarters from behind: his neck, curly hair, beard, and the tunic covering his shoulders, all in the ochre tones of the sand behind his body. It is a high-angle shot. We don’t see his face or his eyes—when he speaks, we can see the movements of his throat, emphasized by his beard. In fact, the slight palpitations of his skin become quite important—just like his neck (founder of the “stiff-necked people”), for this Moses who begins by refusing to obey. We hear a voice off-screen. The man, who the preceding title card has identified as the likely Moses, raises his head slowly. Then, slowly listing the divine attributes (“Unique, eternal, omnipresent, invisible, and unrepresentable God”), he raises his hands (his right one already in the frame) just as slowly, in a liturgical-like gesture, until they cover his eyes. His first words are an address to God; his first gesture is ceremonial: the film presents itself as sacred. Moses hides his eyes because God is appearing to him. Or rather not: speaking/singing to him. We are not told in the libretto (aside from the stage directions) what he sees and the film does not show anything. But he hides his eyes—which in any case are already hidden to us, the audience. We do not see what Moses sees; we do not see Moses seeing. In fact, if the prophet is speaking to God himself, it would be unthinkable for this to happen differently: only Moses is allowed to see what he sees; only God sees Moses seeing him (putting the camera in front of the prophet would be as blasphemous as putting it in front of the “bush”). Through a process of elimination, this framing was in some ways the only logical one, the only one possible, once we admit that we must not see what Moses sees, which the film validates. The theme of seeing (or not seeing) is one of the foundations of the opening sequence, of the text and image, one of the problems structuring it and that it poses. Moses would like to refuse his mission (“Now proclaim!”) but the voice insists: “Thou hast seen the abominations, known [erkannt] the truth: thou canst [kannst] otherwise no more: thou must free thy people!” Moses: “Who am I to set myself against the might of blindness?” The issue of seeing/not seeing seemed to be theological in nature (invisible is a divine epithet). It becomes political. To see and to have seen is an obligation. The echoing erkannt/kannst is the material evidence of an ineluctable, logical implication. The choosing of Moses is not an arbitrary,

80 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

divine action. God is not asking anything of anyone: Moses having seen what he has seen, certain events simply must follow. The subtitles do not translate the “Now proclaim!”, an absence—or rather subliminal presence, adding negative terms to the interpretation—that can be justified because the line is useless: the old shepherd “can no longer do otherwise”. Huillet and Straub’s decision to record the sound in mono intervenes here. This is not only a plastic decision; it has consequences for the film’s form and meaning. Schoenberg had precise instructions for the choirs that are of considerable importance since they resulted from his reflections on what is central to the opera: God, the impossibility of making him seen, and the related necessity for the opera of making him heard. The choir in charge of the “voice originating from the burning bush” has some particularities: composed of six soloists, it is supposed to be behind the stage and the sound should come from several different places, by the means of speakers or telephones!17 A mono recording cannot reproduce or imitate this effect. On the other hand, for Alain Poirier: While God is not represented directly, he is manifested in the form of two kinds of choirs, one that sings (six solo voices) and another that speaks. This reinforces the idea of the dissociation between thought (Moses) and the expression of this thought (Aaron). This dissociation is further accentuated by stage directions specifying that the choirs are visible or not depending on whether the God in question is “unimaginable” or “fetishized”.18

In the film, the divine choir is systematically invisible, always off-screen. We can imagine visible side wings (the orchestra pit) and invisible ones (behind the stage), but this distinction is hard to transpose to film. Huillet and Straub ignore this Schoenbergian subtlety, despite it being the site of an important opposition. The sung/spoken contrast in the choir is nevertheless very noticeable and emphasized by the dryness of the recording. The system of the film can therefore account for the speech-song opposition, but it ignores everything formally distinguishing the divine choir from the choir formed by the people in order to build another equation. The formal differences between the God-choir and the people-choir are blurred until they are cancelled out. The only remaining nuance is that the divine choir is always invisible, whereas the people’s ultimately shows itself. 17 See Schoenberg, Moses and Aaron, p. 3. 18 Poirier, “Analyse de l’œuvre”, p. 731.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

81

The f ilm further accentuates the confusion: the popular choir does not appear until shot 19. It sings off-screen before a pan brings it into the frame—revealing the source of the choir. It is the first time we have heard a group of singers again since the divine choir in shot 10 and both are offscreen. The pan in shot 19 therefore appears as the “logical” resolution to the problem of the “choir” posed in shot 10 and restated at the beginning of this shot. It is inevitable that we think both choirs are the same—that the God-choir is the people-choir. Straub confirms that this fusion is deliberate, expressing the troubling equation on which the film is constructed: “burning bush = off-screen people”.19 This shift is obviously of considerable importance. It results from Huillet and Straub’s own choice. In some sense, it can be considered latent in the opera. Yet it is impossible for this not to appear like a forced, if not radical, inversion of Schoenberg’s content. Rather than saying this reversal has a “latent presence” in the opera, we should perhaps say: it happens that, for reasons that remain to be further developed, the opera as it is “allows this interpretation”, and Huillet and Straub, without modifying the score or the libretto, felt they had “the right to make this image”—just as at the end of Act II, Moses becomes angry at what his brother has done.20 To paraphrase Bernhard Riemann, the Straubs believed they could work “on the hypotheses which lie at the basis” of Schoenberg’s work and show that the presupposed God is not indispensable to the work’s coherence. In removing Him, it is enough to arrange adequate substitutions and construct previously missing or implicit (the nuance is considerable) synonymies in order to obtain a (new?) coherent work. The work is no longer theologicopolitical; it turns theology into a branch of political philosophy. The first words the voice says are “Put off thy shoes: thou hast gone far enough; thou standest on holy ground”. Moses takes his hands away from his eyes and—we sense from the motion of his shoulders—does so. Before sending him in search of a Promised Land—real or ideal—where he can lead his people, the voice says to him: you have arrived, this land is holy. The high-angle framing and depth of field, keeping the sand in sharp focus and flattening the space, glues Moses to the ground, which is the desert—even worse, in bare feet—nearly indistinguishable from him because it is also ochre. Nothing distinguishes the space or gives it a sense of singularity. The ground is holy, but it is nothing more specific than the desert—or the 19 Ibid., p. 111. 20 Ibid., p. 61.

82 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Desert: a place that exists to be a non-place, which is its definition—with a voice issuing from a thorn-bush that is nowhere or not anywhere: a God who exists to be absence or absent. Moses is therefore resisting his God, his people, or himself. The voice explains what to do, but he keeps repeating the same thing: he will not make it, this will not work, he is old and wants to be left alone. The Bible says he has “uncircumcised lips” (Ex 6:12): “My tongue is not flexible. I can think, but not speak.” The diagonal pan begins on the word “flexible”; the man disappears from the frame at “I can think”; “but not speak” is said to the emptiness of the inanimate world. To think: “denken”—the term echoes what Moses consequently calls his “thought” or his “idea”: “sein Gedanke”, meaning God, the God according to Moses. Here again, the term authorizes the Straubs’ reading; God-as-Thought suffices; his existence matters little. The patriarch knows his thoughts, they are familiar to him: but this is a thought beyond speech whose very characteristic is to be beyond—inexpressible, unspeakable. From this moment on, Moses, complying with his speech, stops talking and the camera follows his unseen gaze and, during a passage where we hear only the orchestra, shows what has always been silent: stones, bare earth and poor, dry vegetation, naked rocks, the things of the world, as well as terraces and steps, human constructions. The horizon is reached above four shrubs: can these even be called bushes? But the camera moves on, continuing horizontally to the left. The voice responds: “As from this thorn-bush, dark, ere the light of truth fell upon it, so wilt thou perceive my voice from every thing.” We see bushes: are these the ones? They are no more ablaze than their neighbours, no more than the grove at the end of the diagonal pan before it shifts direction—a pan that seemed to be following the patriarch’s gaze and should have ended on what he sees. Both candidates cancel each other out. We must therefore conclude that the bush is ‘every thing’ or nothing, that God is everywhere, nowhere, or both. Or that the accent is on the “thou wilt perceive”: on the choosing of Moses, which we cannot access, on the subjectivity of his perception and thinking. Like some of the preceding ones, this statement is blasphemous. The pan continues unperturbed, never correcting its vertical angle, even when the horizon line becomes so low it disappears from the frame, leaving only a sky crossed with less defined lines, clouds. Unperturbed but nevertheless full of strange coincidences. Straub noted at a screening that when the voice says that the people have been chosen so that “it may survive all the trials to which in millennia the idea is exposed”,

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

83

we see an outcropping of rocks that have themselves been exposed to the elements, eroding, for millennia—geology again. In Huillet and Straub’s words, everything happens through the form of the shots, the constancy of their speed and the unshakeable uniformity of their movement, as if such conjunctions between the images and the words could only be, had to be, literally providential. On each occasion, it is as if by a kind of miracle that by developing a shot with thoughtful, reasonable principles, we discover opaque things commenting on them, leaving their trace. Having a shot of the rocks because the voice says ‘millennia’ is not the same as coming upon them by chance in a shot that did not know they were there. The rocks are not the illustration of a thought: they participate seemingly on their own (or with God), provoking the thought, and above all perhaps recognizing it as being of the same nature, concrete and material, as old as them. A rock is a rock is a rock; a thought a thought a thought. But the thought is also solid, exists only as a solid, it is exposed to the same millennia as the rocks. This all assumes and is only possible if the construction of the shot appears as purely “abstract”—its form smooth and indifferent, its rhythm unvaried, its angulation uncompensated, etc. By working and reasoning solely in formal, cinematic terms, one can bring out thoughts from within things, that is, make them participate in thinking without imposing on them a predetermined interpretation or “predatory intention”, to return to Zukofsky. In this way, the artist can devote himself to his “major aim [which] is not to show himself but that order that of itself can speak to all men”.21 But the pan stops. As the voice says, “I will lead you thither”, we see a double mountain in the distance under heavy clouds. The mountain evokes the Sinai where the Alliance takes place, “Where you will be united with the Eternal”, and it “plays” this role again in Act II—the text evokes the Promised Land, though there is room for doubt. This time the pan stops. If the preceding conjunctions between image and sound leave room for doubt, perhaps being the fruit of the spectator’s, analyst’s, or director’s imagination, this one affirms its deliberateness. In a certain way, it is the literalness in Huillet and Straub’s films that is sometimes surprising. It is sometimes excessive or naïve: “I want to lead you there” and the camera stops, indicating a place as if pointing a finger—a fictional place, since this mountain has nothing to do with this story, but is clearly indicated; “this thorn-bush” and we see some 21 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 8.

84 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

vegetation, etc. This provokes a strange combination of regimes: purely abstract constructions seem to rub shoulders, without being transformed, with modes employing referentiality, but that are fictional, shifting the name of the object. These economies are superimposed, follow each other abruptly, critique each other, and give the Straubs’ f ilms a particular status, which also relates to the f ilmmakers’ particular, paradoxical, and practically untenable position between experimental cinema and narrative-representational cinema and wanting to remain there—both or neither. P. Adams Sitney, on the experimental side, describes this effect in his own way: The chain of substitutions not only undermines representation by preferring an oblique allusion to a theatrical evocation (e.g., dry vegetation for the burning bush), but also polemically denies the topolatry of Zionism by making an Italian (and virtually anonymous) peak stand in for the eponymous Sinai. It is precisely here that the concreteness of cinema opens a dimension Schoenberg never had to consider as long as he operated with the generic periphery of opera.22

These substitutions play less with representation than with the degree to which the imaginations of the spectator or Moses must participate. Fiction intervenes between the shot as it is and the shot as it should be or as we could imagine it would be; it slips into the interstice, discovered between the thing and its name. A caption might read: this is not the Sinai. The camera stops. The mountain is a mountain, but also a breach in the sky. During the entirety of the pan, we see the sky or the hilltops in the foreground. This is the first time that something appears in the distance—even if the image does not indicate anything about this distance: a pure effect of atmospheric perspective. The mountain is the site of the alliance; it is God—the double mountain is also undoubtedly Moses and Aaron—and the mountain is distance, another definition of God. Benjamin: What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.23 22 Sitney, Modernist Montage, pp. 206-207. 23 Benjamin, Selected Writings, III, pp. 104-105.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

85

A distance appears, then, in the form of two mountains creating a breach or a hole that stops the movement suddenly. The distance establishes this stop or interruption. As a consequence of the movement being blocked, the circle that began and continued for a long time through the pan is, in the end, not closed, reinforcing the opening that this stop and this distance consist in, completing the hole. The opening, the breakthrough in the line of hills, and the discovery of a new horizon, distant but real, mark the gaping possibility of revolution, the suddenly possible rupture in the circularity of ancient, historical time, the time of slavery. Closing the circle would have meant showing the objects on which the circular movement began again—the vegetation. The audience would then be able to have a better orientation in the space, to find their bearings. Sitney highlights a number of these characteristics: The landscape apprehended in the tour of the ellipse resists sublimation; it is naturalized, and, concomitantly, the mediations of the camera and the tripod come to the fore, dehumanizing the panning motion. In fact, the gap between the mechanical recording of the horizon and the fiction of an encounter of patriarch and Divinity grows so great over these nine minutes that the spectator loses the ability to position Moses in relation to the mountain. […] The movement has gone on so long that we lose sense of the scope of the arc.24

What Sitney considers “dehumanizing” to the movement touches on what I indicated about the notions of non-naturalness and abstraction: taking away something human to replace it with a machine (Michael Snow), but also perhaps thinking (abstract construction), or God, or nothing, if it makes any difference. Between the natural and the divine, machine and thought, the man disappears. Our position in relation to the filmed objects in the space and the fiction are two superimposed losses. Still too uncertain to be established, the fiction slowly gives way to merely the sight of and surprise at the form of this movement and what it is showing and to an effort (quickly aware of its ineluctable failure) aiming to understand the space and listen to the music and a libretto recited by a difficult-to-locate voice. Surprise, exhilaration as I wrote earlier, or stupefaction as the Straubs say, are present as traces

24 Sitney, Modernist Montage, p. 206.

86 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

of what may be another loss, that of the subject in its gaze, that of the man or the human. It is important that our sense of the overall space is frustrated. What the shot may have been on paper—a classical presentation of the space where the film’s action takes place—is replaced with something completely different: a presentation of how this space functions, its economy—specifically, as well as in relation to Schoenberg’s work. Rather than giving the spectator the ability to mentally construct the three-dimensional relations between the elements (orientation, approximant distances, etc.—information a Western spectator accustomed to several centuries of the linear perspectival system knows how to use), the filmmakers instead offer a kind of unrolled space: as if a panorama were flattened out or a painted cylinder unfurled and glued to a flat wall and then one walked past it. This is also why the high-angle/low-angle opposition introduced in this shot plays a role in the film but perhaps in a less pertinent manner than the (graphic) opposition between shots where the sky is in the frame and shots where it is not. By cutting out a limited rectangle of the landscape and compressing the perspective, the long focal length (75mm) adds to the effect of the deprivation of space. While seeming to provide all the necessary details for (mentally) reconstructing it, the shot actually undermines the space, reducing it to the thickness of the screen. This principle is at the heart of how Huillet and Straub proceed and what I am calling analytical: the film is not (or not only) the incarnation of a text by musicians, singers, and actors in a natural space, in both senses of the term. It is (also) an analysis of how the opera functions, perhaps its critique. The opera is flattened out in a space where the relations of ideas rather than the lives of the characters are performed. In its concrete form (frame, line of movement, rhythm) the panning conveys the sensation of this flattening. Our perception of the form competes with our perception of the objects, playing with the form rather than denying it in a constantly shifting permanent ambivalence around an unstable point of equilibrium. “Burning bush = off-screen people”. The Straubs have removed the hypothesis of God. Was it the depth of Schoenbergian space? The rest of the film links panning to the people, its intervention in the movement of the story. Here, panning ties Moses, rising, to a mountain that is the hole for the revolution and perhaps the access to the Promised Land (distant and open). Substituting the people for God implies the substitution of the illusion of depth with the critical reality of the flattening out (dialectic: perspective always plays a role deep within the structure).

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

87

The Cinematic Form of (the Absence of) the Opera: “Moses Encounters Aaron in the Desert” Something or someone in Moses and Aaron is called God, and God is a problematic name, like Yahweh or “thought”: the “name of the Only One” is not revealed. In spite of the limits of language exposed in any attempt to describe or define this God, divine words, names, and epithets are very present—to such an extent that the work could be considered a “sacred fragment”. Huillet and Straub have transferred an opera to film whose libretto has not been modified: everything is said, sung, and performed—musically and, with a few exceptions, dramatically—as Schoenberg indicates. How is it possible then that God seems to have disappeared from the film or is no longer necessary, even while the religious and liturgical are at the heart of the mise-en-scène? Of course God did not disappear: the words referencing him are present as many times as in the opera. In shot 10, we can still attribute the voice to God or a burning bush, or to the echoes of God’s voice heard through Moses’ heart. Nothing forces us to follow the Straubian reading. Or rather: someone who has read the score, already heard the opera, or simply knows the biblical story enough to recognize rather than to see and hear what is happening can still understand. An unprepared spectator, seeing and hearing shots 10 and 19, can only retrospectively hear the first chorus in the second, or at least be troubled by their dangerous resemblance. The way shot 19 is filmed—the popular choir first intervening off-screen before a pan reveals the source for what it is—critiques shot 10 and shifts its contents. As we have seen, the form of shot 10 in fact already contains this reversal, but it is still underground, buried, and not explicit. The aural and visual appearance of the other choir is required for the form to be activated. We can therefore see how this deviation can occur: Huillet and Straub do not modify or bend the opera to change it to their conception, but they superimpose another structure on top of its existing structure, another cinematic form on top of its existing form. The film shows the opera as it is, with not a letter or note of difference. But formal layers and structural echoes are placed above and below it, interacting to produce different levels of meaning and even to capsize it. For a concrete example, let us look at scene two, the encounter between Moses and Aaron in the desert. Aaron asks Moses what justifies the severe prohibition of representation: “Invisible! Unrepresentable! People, chosen for the Unique, canst thou love what thou darest not represent thyself?” We

88 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

see Aaron in left profile as he asks this question (shot 13). As he speaks— taking the opportunity to partially reuse Moses’ list of adjectives—the music decrescendos to silence, making the question perfectly clear and the remainder of his singing very gentle. During the silence, the film cuts to the first frontal shot of Moses, a medium shot (14). He steps forward and on the “Darfst?”—which could use several exclamation points—his voice rises in a thundering crescendo underscored by loud trombones. The effect is even stronger because Moses is looking below the camera. Like the entire sequence, he is filmed from a high angle, and he looks below the lower edge of the frame, something rarely done in films and always striking. We then return to Aaron, still in profile but seen from the other side, meaning in right profile (shot 15). In his analysis of this sequence, Martin Walsh notes: Insofar as shots [13] and [15] bracket shot [14], Aaron metaphorically surrounds Moses—is his voice. It is difficult to verbalize the effect of this, but the way in which Aaron surrounds Moses in these shots has a very bizarre resonance.25

It is incontestably strange. But considering the brutality of the visual force of the cut between the two men, as well as the context, it appears impossible to interpret it “metaphorically” (a term that is hard to accept here) as fusion, the one being the voice of the other, when what is articulated is exactly what in the end remains the point of misunderstanding: the division in the two men’s conceptions masked by their apparent agreement about God’s uniqueness. It is in fact very tricky to explain the effect of this découpage and the editing, to which all of the elements contribute. In the first scene, Moses is alone (with God). Here, Aaron and his relationship to his brother and above all the intellectual connection maintained by the two ideas they represent must be presented. Neither one of them nor the opposed forces are presented as characters, but rather as forms of ideas, the meeting point of a conception (God(s), power, freedom, the law, etc.) and a position (priest, prophet, elder, farmer).26 Only Aaron acquires a (slight) psychological weight over the course of the film, the beginning of ‘subjectivity‘: precisely because his idea is the only one that is not lucid. 25 Walsh, Brechtian Aspect, p. 99. Italics in original. I have conformed the shot numbers to those used here. 26 “Moses, Aaron, the people: they are materialized as representations, as constellations, not as characters”, Koch, Die Einstellung, p. 49.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

89

The “abstraction” of the characters—in quotes for the attention the Straubs bring to the concrete materiality of the bodies, clothes, and voices—and the theoretical character of their relationships are already present in the sequence’s découpage. It consists of five shots (12 to 16). The first, at a slight diagonal, shows the two men face to face—the only time in the film. Then two profile shots of Aaron (one from each side, shots 13 and 15) and two frontal shots of Moses (14 and 16): profile and frontal shots that share the characteristic of being too perfect and “abstract” as well. The “natural” diagonal therefore changes into shots and cuts at 90° angles, making the structure visible. The stiffness of the horizontal angle (pure frontal or profile) is visually accentuated by the cut from shot 12 to 13, which is almost an axial cut: we move from the brothers together to Aaron in a medium shot. The jump is very noticeable, and, most importantly, at first we see Aaron filmed from an intermediary angle between left profile/ three-quarter frontal view, then in full profile. The slight difference in the angle is all the more noticeable precisely because it is slight—violating the so-called “30° rule”—emphasizing the decision to film him in perfect profile (almost having the effect of a “vignette style” or a medallion like in Othon but mitigated by the higher angle). Profile and frontal shots already provide some characterization of the brothers: the craftiness of a serpent and the rigidity of a staff, one who uses cunning and one who attacks things head on, the demagogue and the intransigent. It may have been possible to find a compromise—the ease of the frontal three-quarter view, the flexibility of the diagonal—but these options remain in the disjunction and the gap. This is all multiplied by additional factors. The entire sequence is filmed from high angles so that every shot shows a man in front of a background of flat, uniform sand without any spatial reference points, without a horizon or anything allowing us to know exactly where he is or to have a clear perspective, without the impression they are developed in a space. The location is abstract: the desert, a non-place. This uniformity has an important formal effect. Together with high or low angles, the sky’s presence or absence in the frame remains a pertinent criterion of distinction throughout the film. Shots 13-14-15 are connected like this: Aaron in left profile; Moses from the front; Aaron in right profile—all high-angle. It is thus very important that Moses looks below the camera in shot 14. If he looked to one side or the other, there would be a continuity error. Everything is ‘correct’ in terms of classical doctrine (no violation of the ‘180° rule’). Fritz Lang often uses this kind of shot sequencing in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932-1933). Several times, a shift in character relations results in a cut across the axis via an

90 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

intermediary frontal shot. In Lang’s film, people actually look into the camera, which goes more strongly against the dogma than Moses looking below the frame. Something here does lack continuity: the direction of the light (the sun). A small diagram will help: For each shot, the “v” indicates the camera direction and the arrows the direction of the light. In shot 12, the two angles form a diagonal, “outside the system”, so to speak. Here, the image only shows the two men face to face and not yet a confrontation of ideas. Next, the direction of the light and camera angle form two superimposed combinations, each at a right angle or nearly. In terms of lighting, we could say that shots 13 and 16 are matched above shots 14 and 15, which match each other. The two profile shots of Aaron (13 and 15) are not only from either side of him, but it seems on-screen as if the sun were following the camera, meaning that Aaron’s profile is always lit (facing him in shot 13 or on the camera’s side in shot 15). The idea that shots 13 and 16 match and 14 and 15 are enjambed, forming a coherent unity, a kind of parenthesis, is strange: it seems to result from a particular mode of analysis, perhaps one independent from how one normally watches films. Can we consider it to be somehow noticeable? Or is it merely the artificial fruit of a study “viewed from above”? And yet in shot 16, Moses, from the front, seems to be looking just slightly to frame right (where Michael Gielen was standing?), which would, according to dogma, make the continuity with shot 15 false, but it would be correct with shot 13, where Aaron is looking towards frame left… Whatever the validity of its results in a particular case, this model makes sense for how Huillet and Straub’s films function, particularly this one. Even if we ignore the enjambment, the lighting and shot arrangement function here like a double, superimposed structure, mixed with two apparently independent arrangements, both applied to the text and critiquing it, and the one critiquing the other.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

91

This structural stratification has several kinds of consequences. It puts the text at a critical distance. The profile and frontal shots and the 90° cuts have a similar effect as the perfectly horizontal pan in shot 10. They make the form visible. Not to the detriment of what is represented (the opera, let’s say) but as a material, like material in a drawing whose texture is impossible to forget. Moreover, it acts on (perturbing, upsetting, critiquing) the feeling of the space the spectator has constructed. Shot 10 unrolls and transforms the space into a ribbon whose original, unusual form cannot be recovered. This time we can perfectly arrange the elements in relation to one another. There are only two: Moses and Aaron. Far from lacking information, all that we need to know is cordially provided from the start: the brothers are in the frame face to face at a considerable distance apart. There is nothing around them and nothing will be around them aside from the space, which is no space, the “desert”. In the rest of the sequence, neither character moves. There is therefore no reason and almost no means of questioning this organization. Even so, there is the découpage and the direction of the light. I do not think the change of profile suffices for us to imagine Aaron having moved behind Moses, for example. We can sense that nothing and nobody has moved. Nevertheless, the solid, unquestionable arrangement in the space is somewhat undermined, and, formally, something is running less smoothly—we might wonder if Aaron has not somehow turned away from Moses… Here again, there is no real continuity error in the sightlines, aside from the very slight one in 15-16, forcing this interpretation. But it could explain why Aaron’s face is lit on both sides successively (even if we can see that the light is not the same, the angle and height of the sun are not identical in the two shots). In any case, there is a division, a caesura between the two men, isolation and disjunction. The spatial construction is ambiguous, somehow impossible, tense. We try to reconstruct the space with the available information, but no solution is satisfying, no completion is permitted. We can sense other results, which can be expressed in various ways. We might say that it feels like a reprisal, that having come up against Moses’ firm opposition on the question of representation and love in shot 15, Aaron tries again from another perspective, attacks from another flank, this time regarding the law. We might say that the formal ambiguity between facing or looking away is the cinematic equivalent of the superimposed voices in the singing, the musical ambiguity between communion and disjunction, the one the voice of the other or both deaf to each other. By superimposing the structures, the scene is left as is, sung and performed on-screen by Günter Reich as Moses and Louis Devos as Aaron. But the superimposition adds a commentary, even augments it with its critique.

92 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

This kind of work has variations and different forms. Walsh locates a structural repetition in the last four shots (at 90°) in scene two, which we have described, and shot 19, in which the camera pans from the priest of the old gods to the choir to his left and further left to the three converts (the Young Man, Another Man, and the Girl) and finally back to the choir on their right: “the fourth element repeats the second (i.e. shots [14] and [16] in the first instance, the two appearances of the chorus in the second instance). And in both cases the second element (Moses/the chorus) is bracketed by a leftward gaze/camera movement and a rightward gaze/ camera movement.”27 We should add that 1) this is the shot where the choir/ people appear; 2) the rightward pan to the choir at the end of the shot is the first panning movement in this direction in the film. If we accept and pursue this parallel, Moses finds himself linked to the people, and Aaron immediately and contradictorily to the priest and the three converts—hence the ambivalence of his character. But it is not the same to move from one to the other with a cut or a pan. Echoes are therefore created between the structures. Shot 30 shows the people’s reaction to the first miracle—the staff changed into a serpent. What takes place here is considerable. First we see the choir, then the camera pans to the three on the left, then tilts up to the horizon while the “voice” returns, a near-silent moment. The only other vertical tilt in the film is in shot 62 during the night of orgies. The frame begins on two men, one of them pours his cup of wine over the other, who smiles. It pans left and tilts down to show hands pouring wine from a wineskin into the cups of a procession of people, and finally tilts up to a torch burning on a wall. The choir of the Elders is singing off-screen about the happiness the people have regained, the contradictions in the heart of man, and that “Sense gives the soul sense first, soul is sense. Gods, you who gave the soul, senses to perceive the soul, Gods, be praised!” The repetition of the upward tilt in these two unique instances and in shots that begin by panning to the left is obviously crucial because the content alone prohibits any connection between the two passages. One is about the first victory of the new God. The other is a pinnacle of the victory of the old gods. That this zenith is introduced by a tilt that is also upward and not downward, for example, establishes a parallel if not between the results, at least between the enthusiasm presiding over these historical changes. What the people are looking for here is no less divine than what they are offered elsewhere. 27 Walsh, Brechtian Aspect, p. 99.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

93

The similarities between the two shots are tangible in how the emphasis on form entails what was previously described about the “abstract” character—cutting, at a right angle—of the movements and mise-en-scène choices in general. None of the camera movements follow or are motivated by the characters’ movements (gestures or glances) or an object in the scene, as is the case in most classical and academic films. They start and stop at a precise moment only through an obvious rhythmic or structural decision. The process is very simple and yet this kind of formal rhyme causes an important shift that equates the orgiastic and the divine. These kinds of parallel structures can be found more or less clearly throughout the entire film.

Language Remains In Language: History if not God Let us begin by admitting that Huillet and Straub effectively make a counterreading of Schoenberg’s opera and empty it of what is at its centre: God. The next question becomes: if not God, who or what is directing things? For example, how are the miracles being performed? Displaced in this way, the film must fill this void in order to hold together; it must or should recognize that there is something, perhaps on the surface, to which an influence can be attributed without creating contradictions. Aaron is Moses’ mouth; Moses is God’s mouth. The “voice” in the burning bush tells the patriarch: “so wilt thou perceive my voice from everything. Aaron will I enlighten, he shall be thy mouth! From him shall thy voice speak, as from thee mine!” But Adorno points out: “To act as the mouthpiece of the Almighty is blasphemy for mortal man.”28 That God himself demands this does not change the matter much. As Moses wants the Invisible to understand, it is necessary to do the impossible at this moment: disobey God, renounce. All that remains is to be a voice of nobody, perhaps of anybody, a voice without a defined source, an uttered voice, or even a song. The voice of someone in everything: of Moses, things, or language. When Moses and Aaron address the people with their superimposed voices for the first time (shot 24), their words seem divine. Huillet and Straub construct their film on their refusal to take this into consideration and their denial of this affirmation and its implied contradictions. Speech need only 28 Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, p. 225.

94 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

appear divine, whether or not it is so. The film is constructed around this. The people’s first reaction is to doubt: are the brothers’ words divine or is this pretention merely a rhetorical tool to make us swallow a tall tale (“A new God: new offerings!”)? The film must not resolve this question. It must maintain it as an aporia in order to analyse this language as political, as rhetoric. This position can also be considered blasphemous as it seems to lower the divine word to the profane mechanisms of the art of persuasion, but after all, as already mentioned, the mission God assigns to Moses is political first and foremost. The film therefore wants to remove the divine from what is said and see what remains, if this can be seen; to consider language not in terms of what it communicates—a signified or a designated, God or another—but what it does. The misunderstanding is flagrant from the first words Moses and Aaron exchange with the people. It is as if, ultimately ready to give themselves to the new God, to love him, the people freeze upon hearing a discourse it cannot begin to understand: “Adore? Whom? Where is he?” Aaron responds as he can: “Close your eyes, stop up your ears! Only thus can you see and hear him!” The people insist: “Is he never to be seen?” “The righteous man sees him. […] Who sees him not is lost!” At which the chorus explodes: “Then are we all lost, for we see him not!” The question here is only secondarily about images. It is primarily language that is in question. Moses, the people, and, with Moses or elsewhere, Aaron, do not understand each other, first because despite appearances—fatally misleading—they have no common vocabulary. They use the same words, but define them differently. By “God”, “law”, “sacrifice”, or specifically here, “to see”, they do not mean the same thing. Moses is calling a “new God” what is profoundly the invention of a new regime of language, which is much less accessible to the people since this new language is hidden beneath the current language, since the same symbols reappear. Moses’ language is caught in the “too early/too late” of the revolutionary situation. It is a language that the people will only be capable of understanding once the revolution that must be realized has occurred. Aaron is the main tool in this realization, which must translate the sacred language and prove to the people that in Moses’ mouth, “God” is a neologism, that he is seeking a better God than the ones made by the Egyptian priests. The gap between the languages at the base of the film first becomes visible regarding the nature of God. Moses defines his God as absent: he talks about God in a very particular manner that in some sense acknowledges the conjunction in Judaism of the prohibition on representation and the prohibition on speaking God’s name. The tradition inaugurated by Moses

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

95

and recovered by Schoenberg is called “negative theology”—an underground current at work in the darkest corners of monotheistic religions. It starts from the premise that we cannot say anything about God—that God is precisely that which we can say nothing about. The incommensurability of God means that the language we use to talk about ourselves—in our finiteness—is absolutely inapplicable to describe anything about the divinity. Moses Maimonides explains this clearly: [I]t follows necessarily that likeness between Him and us should also be considered ehovestent. […] Similarly it ehoves those who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of the Creator—namely, that He is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Him and to us in the same sense. According to what they think, the difference between these attributes and ours lies in the former being greater, more perfect, more permanent, or more durable than ours […] Know that the description of God, may He be cherished and exalted, by means of negations is the correct description—a description that is not affected by an indulgence in facile language and does not imply any deficiency with respect to God […].29

God is to language what a hole is to the remainder to be measured; He is the negative of language, the absent figure between words and the place where words appear as an absence. He is consequently what puts language in its place and marks its boundaries, as well as what re-interrogates its possibilities. God becomes the Unnameable. Negative theology as language appears here in full form. It is often linked in part to mysticism, and the negative it invokes sometimes drives its discourse crazy, twisted into a Möbius strip where God, more infinite than infinity, is found dangerously close to being nothing. In On the Name, Derrida quotes the mystic poet Angelus Silesius, “to become Nothing is to become God”,30 after recalling that negative theology “at times so resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for it.”31 Of course, from the perspective of the “negative theologian” (!), the opposite is true—as Maimonides confirms: “I shall not say that he who affirms that God […] has positive attributes either falls short of apprehending Him or is an associator or has an apprehension of Him that is different from what 29 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, p. 130, 134. 30 Derrida, On the Name, p. 43. 31 Ibid., p. 35.

96 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

He really is, but I shall say that he has abolished his belief in the existence of the deity without being aware of it.”32 This is exactly what is at stake in Moses and Aaron: knowing who will be able to find God and who God will elude. For both Moses and negative theology, by defining God as something missing (from language, for example), he will not elude us. According to the prophet, this is the highest conception of God and therefore the only one possible; the more he holds onto this idea, the closer he is or more suspect to considering God to be nothing—the apparent proximity of Moses’ conception of God and atheism is what allows Huillet and Straub to make the very small and enormous shift between the two. The Mosaic conception of God in question is not all that is in question. Entirely contaminated by the opening caused by the discovery of a God that is absolute absence, exteriority, and alterity, unnameable and unrepresentable because incommensurable, the Mosaic language is also in question. Moses or Schoenberg removes the prohibition on representation in order to present it as a radical impossibility. For negative theology, what works through affirmation in the end “abolishe[s] his belief in the existence of the deity”. Wanting to qualify God affirmatively and say something positive about Him, we lose and betray Him. Consequently, contrary to what the opera claims, the problem is not so much the image as the affirmative attribute. The image is a form of it—unless every affirmative attribute resolves itself into an image or, worse, aims only to make an image. Some of the confusion troubling the completion of the opera becomes clear here; Aaron’s victory or Moses’ victory. But to consider it necessary to replace the prohibition on representation with an impossibility also means presenting it as natural and unavoidable, the opposite of the Brechtian effect of rendering strange or distantiating—and therefore reaffirming it in all its power, recreating the myth of its origins, re-establishing it as an urgency, and delaying criticism as long as possible. For Huillet and Straub, removing the God hypothesis means first proposing to see the opera as a study of the historicity of language as it exists in revolutionary times. The problem of the image enters here but perhaps not as centrally as it may seem. For Schoenberg, the major shortcoming of the language of negative theology is its rhetorical powerlessness: its just relation to the divine can only be maintained by forgetting its relation to the listener. As a language aiming only to speak the truth—the exemplarily incommunicable in this case—it cannot take communication into account and therefore addresses nobody 32 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, p. 60.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

97

(except God, but does God need language?). The essence of this language immediately leads to its radical political inefficiency. As I said, Moses has a political mission. Unless he wants to renounce this leaky, “uncircumcised” language whose nature is or would like to be the pure absence of rhetoric, he needs someone who will agree to translate this rhetoric into something understandable. After all, “mission” is the right word, God is sending Moses to convert the people: sermons were one of the places where rhetoric as an applied art survived historically. The Young Man, Another Man, and the Young Girl have a particular place: they are on Moses’ side not because they understand his language, but because they have experienced what this God is. Following this experience, the Mosaic language becomes understandable. When Aaron declares that “the righteous man sees him”, the Young Girl confirms: “I saw his glow!” She saw Aaron “as a fiery flame sprang up, which was calling him” and the Young Man “a luminous cloud”: the mystic experience excludes them from the people-choir, conferring on them a different position, opposite the priest of the old gods in the space of the arena where the film is set. Mysticism is related to negative theology: it deals with the incommunicable too. It understands the same language without needing it. To reuse the classic distinction of Carlo Michelstaedter, the three have been persuaded: the rhetoric is not addressed to them. In the opera’s first scene, the “voice” makes an unusual statement: “Before their ears thou wilt do wonders—their eyes will acknowledge them” (my emphasis). I’ll pass over the interesting “acknowledge” (“anerkennen”); the miracles will first be done before the ears, they proceed through hearing; they are a supplement—in the Derridian sense—to language. They are appended to Moses’ silent tongue as a supplement—images produced by imageless language. In any case, the eyes see them less than they acknowledge them. The question of whether miracles are for the eyes or for the ears is obviously at the centre of the opera—or rather the question whether it makes a difference if they are addressed to one sense or the other. Culturally and theologically, the two organs are not equivalent at all; the refusal of the image reflects or produces a particular distrust of sight, which has always been suspected of more baseness than hearing. Performing miracles “before their ears” implies that the miracles are addressed to reason and that they will, moreover, always be accompanied by a gloss. That the eyes recognize them suggests that their action could involve the body more concretely as well. It may be that Aaron is portraying the tradition according to which the fact of a miracle’s visibility does not make it an image of God or proof of his existence, but of the love of God for his people.

98 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Making Things Speak: “Moses and Aaron proclaim to the people the message of God” Three miracles take place in Moses and Aaron. But the term “miracles” (Wunder) is already problematic. The Bible says “sign”—Ex 4:17 and 4:30: “And Aaron spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses, and did the signs in the sight of the people.” The only canonical source for the long scene in the opera where “Moses and Aaron proclaim to the people the message of God” is the above-quoted line and the tale of the signs as Yhwh shows them to Moses (Ex 4:2-9). Schoenberg invented everything else, including their expression and, above all, their explication, the discourse’s reappropriation of them. It is not up to Israel directly to discover the meaning: Aaron has already discovered or produced it. Huillet and Straub’s découpage structures these three moments in an extremely precise way corresponding to three stages in the evolution of the people’s relation to Moses and Aaron or their liberation: the first prodigy—the staff turned into the serpent—is a demonstration of divine power; the second—Moses’ leprous hand—wants to give the people courage through confidence in its own power; the third—the Nile water turned into blood—emphasizes servitude and revenge as well as the corporeal and the spiritual. These three parts are separated by two short shots of the priest of the old gods. The signs are addressed to the people, but it is he, not the choir, who makes a retort and argues—he resists the most when he sees the power he is losing. Moses and Aaron take their place in front of the people at the end of shot 22. The shot begins on the Young Girl and pans right, stops for a while on the choir, who describes the brothers’ approach, then swings quickly around to show them before immediately cutting (too early: we have hardly seen the prophets, we have not heard them at all) to shot 23 of the choir. Two formally opposed static shots of the choir (21 and 23) frame the patriarchs’ arrival: shot 21 is at eye level and frontal, shot 23 is from a high angle and films the rectangle formed by the choir on a diagonal. Before their arrival, discord and opposition reign (“Do not believe the beguilers! / We want to love him!” are superimposed in a shot that stands out for its long stretch of talking without any music)—the people are literally resisting in a frame blocked in the background by the perimeter wall and the entryway, which looks like a black mass (closed door?) and also blocks the sky. In shot 23, the people spontaneously and prematurely give themselves to the new God “not only for the prospect of grace; giving itself is voluptuousness, is highest grace!”

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

99

In shot 24, Moses and Aaron’s words begin to be heard and the misunderstanding develops, solidified in the following shot by the choir’s violent refusal of this God who is distant to the point of indifference or absence: “Stay as far from us as thy God, the Omnipresent! We fear and love him not! As little as he rewards and punishes us! We do not want to be freed through him!” The situation from which everything arises is now established. In a splendid frame, timid Moses, sadly imploring, loses his courage. And as the “voice” calls Aaron—or the choir off-screen cries out in confusion—he intervenes, “Be silent! The word am I and the deed!”—and grabs Moses’ staff, emblematic of the Mosaic figure and in his hand since the second scene. Shot 26 marks the beginning of the older brother taking power or taking over. Moses is silent until the beginning of the third miracle, where he again attempts to speak, unsuccessfully. The violence of Aaron’s gesture is underlined in the shot by the pause between the moment when he roughly takes possession of the staff and the moment the score authorizes the cut to the next shot: for a few short seconds, the brothers stand motionless, “waiting” for the cut. The effect is absolutely anti-naturalistic and magnificent: this pause is pregnant with all the revolutionary potential of the historical situation and forms a constellation or dialectical image in Benjamin’s sense. The first sign is dealt with in five shots: Moses alone, then a reverse tracking shot including Aaron (26); Aaron alone with the staff (27); the serpent—the choir and Aaron singing off-screen (28); Aaron giving the staff back to Moses (29); the choir commenting on what it has seen, before a pan returns back to the three on the left, then upwards as it accompanies the “voice” (30). Several aspects of how Huillet and Straub treat the miracles are already present here. First, we only see the choir at the end: we do not see its reaction to the miracle directly but instead as a block forming a sign with its interpretation by Aaron. The miraculous action takes place in the space of power, framed by shots of the brothers—like the entirety of the sacred text in a way. In the end, it is up to the chorus to draw its own conclusions from what it has seen and heard; conclusions that are of course largely guided by Aaron’s words. Aaron makes two glosses of the first prodigy that the découpage neatly separates. The first is said off-screen in shot 28. Aaron constructs his discourse using a series of associated figures: Moses = staff = rigidity = law / Aaron = serpent = mobility = finesse (Klugheit, intelligence…). This discourse is allegorical: it has the form of a classical gloss. The second commentary is more direct, uttered on-screen in shot 29: “Know the might that his staff imparts to the leader!” This is how the truth of the manoeuvre is presented: a demonstration of might—divine power, the power of Moses the “leader”.

100 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

No one is mistaken here because only here has the choir felt this power, the terror and/or possibility of entering into a conflict with Pharaoh. Like the two that follow, this miracle is circular—which is perhaps emphasized by Aaron’s turning around to give Moses back his staff. The piece of wood becomes a serpent and then becomes a piece of wood again. The healthy hand becomes leprous and then healthy again. Water is blood and then water again. The prodigies that the people ask of the gods were supposed to have some permanence: healing, help. Here, God causes something bad to show that the usual, once returned, is good or miraculous. The shot of the serpent (28) has a strange status in the découpage. It has commonalities with some of the frames we have already seen: the animal is on a background of sand, nothing identifies where it is any more specifically than the desert. And yet the animal moves and for a moment the camera follows it before letting it leave the frame. In itself, the movement is already exceptional—in Huillet and Straub’s films, moving within a frame is reserved for non-humans, animals and plants, light and wind; people are like rocks, immobile. But the direction of the movement is especially surprising: the serpent exits at the bottom of the frame towards the camera, while the choir sings off-screen, “See! It is turning against everyone!” This shot is therefore the only shot where we must conclude—against all expectations in a dispositif where the perspective has been intermediary, neutral from the start—that the camera has adopted the people’s perspective and placed itself (out of solidarity?) where the terror/fascination is occurring, unless it is designating itself as this very site. It is impossible to fill the gap between this shot and those around it. Before, Aaron throws the staff, which hits the ground with the sound of wood against the earth. After, Aaron shows the staff to the choir and returns it to his brother. The miracle, properly speaking, the transformation, the continuity between the piece of wood and the animal, is in the cut. Responding to a journalist according to whom “the people need to be satisfied and Aaron gives them something to satisfy them”, Straub said: For a Western and bourgeois spectator today, what Aaron presents to the people’s eyes are kinds of miracles. Now, historically for the people, this doesn’t work. Miracles don’t exist, not only because the people is materialist, but because for someone from the Middle East, a miracle does not exist. There is no difference; there is continuity. There is no difference between a staff and a serpent, etc.33 33 Bontemps, Bonitzer, and Daney, “Conversation”, p. 13.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

101

Some Western minds, however, have also been sensitive to or consternated by the hidden, real continuity beneath the apparent discontinuity of forms: for example, Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy bewildered by a small bit of wax that melts when he brings it close to fire: “for whatever came under taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing has now altered—yet the wax remains.”34 No appearance makes this secret continuity palpable—a continuity that is the things themselves, all of the varieties in which a thing presents itself to our perception without ceasing to be the thing—only accessible to reason. It is already problematic that Middle Easterners are aware of this continuity to the point of not recognizing a miracle; that the people as described by Schoenberg—a Western and royalist mind from the 20th century—are 1) materialist and 2) more sensitive to the continuous than the prodigious is even more problematic (“Miracle!” [“Wunder!”] the choir exclaims before the hand that has become healthy again—and the word returns frequently). But something appears here that is allowed by how cinema itself works. Thus, the world in its concreteness, more or less perceptible by the senses but real, forms a continuum. Not only does one thing appear as part of a (discrete) group with noticeable varieties without breaking its cohesiveness, the different objects are deeply linked—as a result of being the creation of one God?—their form is contingent and transformable. In any case, this is the position Aaron explicitly claims on two occasions. The first is said before the third prodigy by the Aaron who is Moses’ mouth: “The Almighty changes sand into fruit, fruit into gold, gold into delight, delight into spirit”, lines about which Huillet says, “no one has written anything more materialist and less puritanical.”35 The other Aaron, the one who makes the Golden Calf, states the second: “Unchangeable, like a principle, is the material, the gold, which you have given. Seemingly changeable, like everything is, secondary, is the shape which I gave it!” Superimposed on and parallel to the continuous “reality”, cinema reveals itself to be discontinuous, or worse, to have a perpetually problematic continuity. Cinema takes charge of the apparent discontinuity of things and turns Aaron’s gesture into a miracle. By placing the actual transformation in the cut, but showing both objects—staff and serpent—cinema ascribes the gap in the continuum to its machinery. If this hole in the cut is indeed a form of that fundamental mechanism of film, the ellipsis, since the spectator must imagine a link omitted between two events that are shown, it is a very particular form of it in which what is missing has no duration (we hear the staff fall 34 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy p. 20. 35 Bontemps, Bonitzer, and Daney, ‘Conversation’, p. 16.

102 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

off-screen; then it is already a serpent). The language is also discontinuous: Aaron says, “This staff leads you: See, the serpent!” The cut is a kind of colon. Historically, there was a miracle—at least a “sign” or “prodigy”. Egyptian magicians performed them too, to a certain extent. Power relations are in question. But the people believes signs: they are efficient. Is this because they “satisfy the gaze” of the people or because of what is said? There are two continuities: the world’s fundamental one (in the Western conception according to Straub) and the miraculous one Aaron claims between the staff and the serpent. They can be one and the same. Cinema testifies to the reality of objects, it does not testify to the veracity of Aaron’s discourse. It does not deny it either: it takes advantage of its constitution (the frame, the cut: gaps) in order to hide its content. What a film presents is discontinuous. Whether or not there is continuity before or after it is not its business. What we perceive of the physical world—the separation of objects—as well as what we can express through language is discontinuous. The idea of continuity before or after this is metaphysical. Therefore by doubling the discontinuity of perception, cinema can avoid betraying the deep continuity that is its first law. The film therefore contains no concrete image of a miracle as such. All of its constitutive parts are present, but the transformation itself, the continuity at the heart of the prodigy, is absorbed into the cinematic machine. Because the interval is its base, film allows the absence of images. But fundamentally and contrary to the ambiguity Schoenberg wanted to establish, a miracle has nothing to do with an image nor a fortiori with an idol and cannot be confused with one—and has never been. On the other hand, it has always been the object of a particular suspicion, as Rousseau summarizes in his “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar”: [A]nd since the magicians of Pharaoh dared, in the very presence of Moses, to produce the same signs he did by God’s express order, why would they not in his absence have claimed, with the same credentials, the same authority? Thus, after the doctrine has been proved by the miracle, the miracle has to be proved by the doctrine, for fear of taking the Demon’s work for God’s work.36

The miracle is entirely in its gloss, in language: while a miracle is recognized by the eyes (or the eye of the people), it is the ears that must be addressed. The miracle is the hole between the images, the interval that creates the appearance of continuity and the illusion of movement. The miracle 36 Rousseau, Emile, p. 298.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

103

is between the images and God is missing from language: both are only conceivable as a continuity that is itself only accessible to reason. God as “idea” is another name for this continuity. As the first prodigy is accomplished, there is a shot of the priest from an unusual angle (in right profile for the first time). He explains the miracle as a seizure of power (“Thy staff compels us”) without considering the fact that their power is still insufficient (“yet it does not compel Pharaoh to set us free!”). The choir admits the power even if so far “the three” alone have expressed their recognition of God. The second moment now begins. The camera changes sides, crossing the axis of the sightlines that linked Moses and Aaron on one side and the people on the other (Moses always looks straight ahead, perhaps at the people but more likely at the void—his God?; Aaron always looks at the choir). It is now on Aaron’s side and at a low angle, showing the brothers against the sky. The sky also appears more than before in the shots of the choir. The second prodigy is organized in six shots. The transformation of the healthy hand into a leprous one occurs in the cut from shot 33 of the choir—where Aaron, off-screen, exclaims “See!” right before the cut—to shot 34, of the hand. We then return to Aaron who explains. The “miraculous return”, the healing, takes place outside the frame during a pan from the choir to the brothers, passing over “the three”—and this time, Aaron’s “See!” is seconded by the “voice”. Here, Aaron says twice, “Know yourselves therein”: weakness without God, strength and courage with Him. At the base of the Golden Calf, he tells the people: “Revere yourselves in this symbol!” Thus, if this prodigy had to make an image, it would not be of God, but of the people themselves. This is also why in the Bible this prodigy is the only one not repeated in any variation in front of the Pharaoh: it is for Israel alone. Aaron is a man of circularity and especially immanence. Aaron turns around: he shows two profiles, spins around himself, motivates the panning shots that tie him to the people, acts in one sense and then another. The “miraculous return” is therefore logically caught between two panning shots, both leftwards: shot 36, going from the choir to Aaron and Moses, passing by “the three”; shot 37, returning from the brothers to the choir, passing the priest. The complete turn, the revolution is accomplished and the circle closed. In shot 37, the choir draws its conclusions: “the symbol expands itself to the image” and “through Aaron Moses lets us see how he himself has beheld his God; thus this God becomes representable whom visible wonders attest”. Obviously, this passage is extremely problematic: the succession the choir describes—miracle-sign-symbol-image-representation of God—presents

104 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

something very confused in the form of a logical series. We would simply have to say that the people are mistaken, and Aaron and especially Moses do not bother to correct them because they find the misunderstanding useful to their ends. But Moses and Aaron themselves fall into this confusion at the end of Acts II and III. The tirade tends, in any case, to prove one thing: in the 1975 Cahiers interview, admitting as one of the journalists says, that “the gaze of the people needs to be satisfied”, since a Middle Easterner would not really talk about “miracles”, Straub says that “none of this would really satisfy the eyes of this historical people”.37 But the eye of the (historical?) people declares it is satisfied: the God, they say, becomes representable. Their eyes have recognized miracles performed before their ears. A miracle can be a “sign” in the biblical sense of the word; it is in no case an image and above all not from God: if he (eventually) testifies to his presence, power, or interest in the people of Israel, he does not represent anything. At worst he can only “make an image” in the sense the word would be used in rhetoric. While the first miracle begins with a shot of Moses alone, then includes Aaron by tracking in reverse, the third begins with Moses and Aaron together before approaching Aaron by tracking forward. The “two-way” prodigy—the transformation of the Nile water into blood and its return to its initial state—are no more visible to us than before, but this time they are also not visible to the people who can only testify that one substance then another comes out of the same jar. After the second sign, the people are converted, conquered, seduced, and dominated by the rhetoric or freed by the divine word. The third one only confirms their enthusiasm, authorizes the violence that will be necessary in presenting the liberation not as a revolt, but as the rectification of a bad situation, like Aaron’s previous miracles. And while before we see the staff prior to it becoming a serpent and Moses’ hand prior to it becoming leprous, everything happens here as if the Nile water in the jar has always been blood. As Straub says, while the previous two signs were, at the limit, still miracles, “with the blood, there is no more miracle, especially the way it is filmed.”38 He emphasizes the “gaps”, as well as the fact that they do not show the choir again: Why? Because that moment is perhaps the only one in the film (the third miracle no longer being ambiguous for the Western spectator, for the 37 Bontemps, Bonitzer, and Daney, “Conversation”, p. 13. 38 Ibid., p. 14.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

105

film’s spectator) where it becomes so obvious that we are pouring blood and saying: it’s your blood that nourishes the land the way the Nile water nourishes the land. There’s no more ambiguity or miracle.39

If there is no miracle, what is happening? The serpent is a sign, an image in the rhetorical sense of divine or Mosaic power. It can be interpreted as such. Likewise, the leprous hand is a striking image of the people’s despair. Here, for Straub, Aaron is speaking literally. His rhetoric no longer uses poetic imagery, aiming to astound, but prose: it makes things clear. Aaron’s words speak the truth, not a physical truth about the continuity between blood and water, but a historical truth about their equivalence as food for the land. The Straubs’ films are trying to hold together by establishing gaps, interweaving two regimes of language: to testify to the historical beneath the physical without doing violence to either one. During the entire sequence, Aaron speaks and his language is effective: it acts, transforms things, and at the same time modifies the course of history. “The word am I and the deed!” The words do not want to act on things in a predatory manner: leaving the world as it was before, unchanged save for having been seen as miraculous, but above all forming things not according to the caprices of one man (or one God?) but in accordance with what exists more profoundly. Cinema testifies to the miracle as a sign, but not as a prodigy: it leaves things and their gloss untouched, but resolves the assumed or forced continuity in the cut that is the normally-forgotten centre of its dispositif. This interval spared, the film can take the image at face value or, rather, testify to the actual work of language in the things of the world, its complicity with objects, the only state of their relation through which revolution is possible. Zukofsky again: “The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference.”40 If we let the Nile water speak, it calls itself blood—it must therefore be shown as such. Questions remain. One concerning Aaron’s discourse is the degree to which “predatory manifestations” remain in his speech. In a 1953 letter to Walter Eidlitz, Schoenberg addresses his difficulties in writing Act III: Here I have so far encountered great difficulties because of some almost incomprehensible contradictions in the Bible. For even if there are 39 Ibid., pp. 14-16. 40 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 16.

106 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

comparatively few points on which I adhere strictly to the Bible, still, it is precisely here that it is difficult to get over the divergence between: “and thou shalt smite the rock” and: “speak ye unto the rock”!41

The problem is built around this point. In the act as it is, Moses tells his brother: Thou didst strike the rock, instead of speaking to it, as was commanded thee, so that water flowed from it. From the naked rock the word had to strike refreshment.

Speech is valued over action—Straub often cites the Goethean reversal in Faust of “In the beginning was the Word” into “In the beginning was action”‘ as a characteristic example of petty bourgeois ideology. 42 But Aaron commits other mistakes as well. He does not trust enough in the “power of speech”, to borrow a title from Poe and Godard. And above all, he has predatory intentions—Moses to Aaron, again in Act III: The rock also, like all images, obeys the word, whereupon it was become appearance. Thus, thou didst win the people not for the Eternal, but for thyself.

The reasoning here is hard to follow, given the slippery meanings the brothers subject the words to, especially “image”—confusions they use in their rhetoric and to obtain victory against each other (or facing the people). If they exist, Aaron’s “predatory intentions” are simultaneously in his relation to language, things, and the people (to power). One must speak to the rock—the rock obeys the words since it is one, since it is the words that make it appear (image?). One must therefore let the rock speak, not force it by (physical) violence to do what is necessary for us. There is also violence in the relation to language, in wanting to make the expression “Promised Land” mean something other than what it is, forcing the meaning of the vocabulary. Language’s effectiveness on things is guaranteed as long as it remains complicit, as long as we do not try to constrain it. Liberation is only possible if we avoid any predatory relation and this restraint can only be of value simultaneously in relation to language and things—in this way a non-predatory politics can be established. 41 Schoenberg, Letters, p. 172 42 Delahaye in Straub and Huillet, Ouvriers, paysans, p. 178.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

107

In the same way, what signals Moses’ political victory, his concrete victory, his seizure of power, is also what remains for us as spectators to critique of the rhetoric that is behind his personal language, at least in the final part. One of his mistakes involves twisting words indifferently, using the word “image” as an anathema against everything that is not his idea (his idea of his idea), indifferently. But as we have known for a long time, and Jean Genet repeated often, it is a particularity of those with power to “make use of words as they please, as they have done and still do”. 43

Birth of a Nation: Act II and End To Be One, To Be Many Something is produced at the end of Act I: a people is born to itself and to history. The movement of this act is one of progressive amplification in three successive parts: Moses alone (with the “voice”); Moses with his brother; Moses, Aaron, and the people. This progress through intensification is replayed in the beginning of the third part with the shot series 18 to 22, panning (except 21 and 23, static on the choir) with increasing scope to prepare for the entrance of the brothers twice: shot 18 pans 30° from the Young Girl to the Young Man and then to Another Man; 19 covers almost 180° with a 90° return (from the priest to “the three” facing him, passing over the choir, and then back to the choir); shot 20 is also 180°, but in the other direction (from the priest to “the three”, passing over the still empty place where Moses and Aaron will stand); shot 22 is 270°, from “the three” to Moses and Aaron, passing over the choir and the priest. The ellipse sketched in shot 10 is made again and completed, constantly interrupted and repeated until the movement is powerful enough to include all the protagonists and allow for the arrival of the prophets and for the historical process to be triggered. In this way, we see the entirety of the arena and the positions where the characters will remain, separated and facing each other in the four cardinal points of the ellipse. In Act II, the Golden Calf logically takes the place occupied by the priest of the old gods in Act I. What is initially a series of clashing and truncated pans ends by becoming a large encompassing movement: a form of unification is occurring. The second and third parts of the first movement are then repeated to reverse the evolution. Like the second scene in Act I, the first scene in Act 43 Genet, “Violence and Brutality”, p. 172.

108 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

II is staged in five shots. The first frame in this act shows Aaron off-centre on frame right, looking to the right. There is a dark, rectangular opening to his left that marks the absence of the person who was on his left in Act I, Moses—an absence his brother again turns his back to. The shots alternate between Aaron and the two choirs who face each other: the choir of the Elders and the one already seen in Act I. Act II continues with the long section about the Golden Calf, paralleling the miracles in Act I. The division that the first scene begins to describe—the people-choir finds itself split in two—becomes generalized. In fact, the absence in Act II of an equivalent to the first scene in Act I—where the God understands (and sees?)—is inevitable: this second movement is about the lack of a God, where the God refuses to manifest himself. Act I presents the action of the unique God through which a people finds its unity. The structure is oriented towards adding together dispersed motions and the dispositif is based on a principle of unity: unity of place and mode of operation. Offering us a vision of the dissolution of the new nation, Act II is organized using several different formal systems in several locations. But the choir also appears in the film as a visually striking unit: six rows of eleven singers arranged in a tight rectangle. The rigorous geometry is all the more clear because everything around it is ellipsoidal. This is the only choir in Act I and must consequently represent the people in its entirety, since “Moses and Aaron proclaim to the people the message of God”, as the title of the third part of this act indicates. More important than we might think, the dispositif does pose some problems. In his essay, “La Césure de la religion: Adorno et Schoenberg”, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes: Acknowledging that I am allowing myself to be guided by the admirable film version of Moses […] we owe to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet I must recognize that their dramaturgical intuition is decisive: staging the first two acts but not what remains of the third in a Greek dispositif, the Roman theatre Alba Fucense in Abruzzo. Moses and Aaron was initially intended to be a tragedy. 44

Lacoue-Labarthe clarifies the pertinence of the tragic model in a context that arrives at Adorno through German philosophy—Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger first of all:

44 Lacoue-Labarthe, “La Césure”, p. 123.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

109

For Hegel, tragedy or, more precisely, the tragic scenario, is defined as “the struggle of new gods against old gods.” […] In a direct lineage from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, as well as from Hegel when he analyses tragedy as a work of “religious” art (that is, also political), Adorno instinctively begins his considerations of tragedy with the choir as the bearer of “religion” itself, less as zeal or belief than as being-in-community. The choir is not the people or a representative of the people (the audience); but it is nonetheless the indication that tragedy was originally a common or community work, the community at work. That is to say, it is a work without an individual or singular subject. It is a dogma of German aesthetics from Hegel to Heidegger that in the final analysis all “great art” is the creation of a people. 45

In the film the people literally substitutes itself with God in order to establish and maintain religion, meaning its proper form as a people, its unity. When Lacoue-Labarthe writes, “the choir is not the people or the representative of the people”, he must clarify this as “(the audience)”, because the people in question in this sentence is not the one being represented, but the one watching the performance, the Dionysian celebration. Lacoue-Labarthe finds a complication necessary: “Despite what it looks like at first, the choir, for example, which is effectively the people, is not at all Greek and has no relation to the protagonists in a Greek manner.”46 But does the choice of the “Greek dispositif ”—the fundamental idea of the film—remain pertinent? A choir cannot represent the people: it can only be a specific group (the old Thebans in Sophocles’ Antigone, the heroine’s young servants in Electre…) or divine beings (the Eumenides in Aeschylus’ play). In a certain way, Greek tragedy knows that the people are unrepresentable—perhaps as much as God is here. To make “a film about the people and their presence” as Huillet and Straub claimed to do poses the same problems as putting God’s invisibility into an opera; and the fact that the filmmakers structurally substitute one for the other—the newly unique God with the people in charge of establishing his uniqueness—is coherent from this perspective. The choir in the film is “effectively the people”—a choir shown alone in Act I and doubled by the choir of the Elders in Act II. There is almost no individuality within it—barely, on rare occasions, there is non-localized internal dissension, grumbling; and strongly only in shot 21 where those 45 Ibid., p. 123. 46 Ibid., p. 125.

110 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

who refuse to believe the imposters oppose those who want to love the new God. The people-choir constitutes a mass. There is of course Bresson, whose Notes on the Cinematograph was published the year of Moses and Aaron’s release: Resemblance, difference Give more resemblance in order to obtain more difference. Uniform and unity of life bring out the nature and character of soldiers. Standing at attention, the immobility of them all shows up the individual signs of each. 47

The choir arrangement in the film does look a bit like a military formation—an undoubtedly desired effect and in accordance with the circumstances. The framing, distance, the insistence on filming frontally or at a high angle, and the geometry do much to attenuate the diversity—visible upon close inspection—in favour of the overall effect of an extremely dense block. This form of the people—the mass conceived as such—is the result of this historical process. Aaron’s rhetoric and Moses’ thinking create a people that conforms to this. Or conversely, perhaps the people must be conceived in this way to consider political speech the way Moses and Aaron do—or as it appears in the film? Whether it is by obeying or resisting this speech that allows a revolt against and liberation from oppression, the two prophets’ rhetorical methods—individually, because Moses develops his own rhetoric—generate this mass from the start. This is also why the people have lost against the words from the start. The mass is the form of the people as power: against the enemy, against oppression, or against the people themselves. Act I presents a mass—“the struggling people who are the mass”48 (Straub)—produced by a certain regime of language. This mass hardly contains any individuals. It holds a precise place as a block in a spatial arrangement and cinematic découpage. In the third movement of Act I, four forces—excluding God—interact, concretely arranged among the four cardinal points in the arena: Moses and Aaron, “the three”, the mass, and the priest. This configuration is fixed. The camera remains close to the centre of the arena, on one side or other 47 Bresson, Notes, p. 47. 48 Bontemps, Bonitzer, and Daney, “Conversation”, p. 19.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

111

of the gazes that cross there. Only the panning of the camera ties together the actors in the situation. In the sequence of miracles, we saw that the panning camera intervenes to concretize a relationship, showing how one orator acts on another (eventually through an intermediary), how power or influence circulate, and to whom words are directed and how they act. The prodigious return of Moses’ hand to health occurs between two leftward pans, each one covering a portion of the ellipse: from the choir to Aaron and Moses, passing over “the three”; from Aaron alone to the choir, passing over Moses and the priest. This is the first miracle concluded by this kind of connection. The first miracle is framed by Aaron alone and Moses and Aaron, the choir only being shown afterwards. The panning shots—mostly fast, occasionally slower—always connect two points in a strange way: especially since they are not descriptive and never pretend to show us a landscape. Shot 10 was more like that. The movements here are too fast for us to see what is passing by and too obviously “mechanical” for us to attempt to see anything. By “mechanical”, I mean mechanisms in the film’s machinery, elements of the construction. It is not only shot 10 that creates the impression of an unrolled space and an analytic mise-en-scène. The entire film works according to this principle—noticeable first and foremost in Act I. The film is a “mise-en-scène” of the opera: singers interpret its characters, its situations are presented in a coherent manner, we can follow the plot, etc. But it is also an analysis of these situations, this plot, even these characters: we are shown relationships more than episodes. There is a concrete space in Moses and Aaron: Albe Fucense where the actors stand immobile, face to face, like at the end of a Sergio Leone western. This space combines a very strong visual presence with a very weak fictional existence. It is these moments, when the space described by the fiction corresponds to what is on-screen, that the spectator experiences as strange, exceptional, problematic (linking a real shrub to the “burning bush”, a real mountain to Mount Sinai, etc.). Act II shifts this dispositif without reversing it. The first scene between Aaron and the two choirs clearly exasperates and agitates the mechanics of Act I: we have the fixed positions, almost the same protagonists, and the same issues about conversion and choosing between the new God and the old ones. But the shots are from increasingly higher angles, the tension builds to a crescendo, the angled panning shot ends on Aaron alone, opting for ruin, lost within a frame that is too wide. Note that in the Bible, while Aaron does agree to build the Golden Calf, it is not with the aim of giving the people back their old gods, but

112 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

because “Tomorrow is a feast for Yahweh” (Ex 32:5): the feast is for the new God; the image is in his honour. In this scene, it is not so much the absence of God as such that the choir of the Elders complain about and that the people protests, but the lack of rule and law: the priest: “Forty days now we have been waiting for Moses, and still no one knows rule nor law.” The Elders: “Violence reigns! Unruliness knows not its punishments, virtue not its reward!” The people: “Give us back our gods, that they create order!” The people become enraged and demand that the priest of the false gods who has abandoned them be torn apart, slaughtered, burned, and killed because of this lack of rule and law. The people are lost because of it: they need a superior authority to take charge of the law and decree it. This is the price for its status as a people and its possibility to survive. From a revolt against their Egyptian oppressor, the people switch to the violence of abuse—lawlessness, war against everyone—and finally to revolt against their elders, priests, and “guides”—a revolt provoked by a lack of restrictions. Just before expressing his “continuity principle” (“The Almighty changes sand into fruit, fruit into gold”) Aaron states clearly: “The All-knowing knows that you are a people of children, and does not expect from children what is diff icult for grown-ups.” Nothing in the opera contradicts this proposition: neither the people as a mass nor the “individuals” when they are isolated. The Golden Calf section pursues the division of the people and completes the disruption of the dispositif. Separated by a few frames of black leader, three major parts can be distinguished here: as an introduction, Aaron’s presentation of the Golden Calf before he goes away, and the arrival of the cattle (shots 51 to 53); by day, the offerings of the animals, the dance, the offerings to the idol, and the arrival of the twelve princes of the tribes (shots 54 to 60); by night, the “orgies” (Schoenberg’s term—shots 61 to 71). The daytime part involves: the group of dancers or “butchers”, the beggars, the old people, the twelve princes… So far their only connection is the idol. One person stands out but he had already done so: the Young Man from Act I tries to resist and dies. The Sick Woman is presented alone but it is clear she is part of a line—with an important inversion Huillet and Straub introduce: according to Schoenberg, the Sick Woman should stand up healed after saying her prayer. This is not the case in the film: her imploring arm falls down again, hopeless. Nothing is neutral here. In any case, we must await the orgy for individuals to appear. Rarely commented on, the “orgies” pose a particular problem in the film. Straub spoke about this in 1975:

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

113

They’re enigmatic in so far as these are kinds of “myths”. […] For me, a myth involves filming something whose meaning you don’t know, but which is very obvious without asking yourself what it means. […] The shots are enigmatic if we look at them separately (because they aren’t linked dramatically), but they have a very logical succession. 49

Schoenberg develops this part in three sections: “Orgy of Drunkenness and Dancing”, “Orgy of Destruction and Suicide”, and “Erotic Orgy”. His descriptions leave little doubt about his intentions: “Everyone gets drunker and drunker. […] [A] bacchanalia ensues which leads to quarrels and blows. […] Destruction and suicide […] wild dancing”, etc.50 Huillet and Straub do not follow Schoenberg in his desire for accumulation, which is delirious in itself. Everything is supposed to be simultaneous, the stage covered in barbaric acts and enormous confusion. The filmmakers simply have the events occur successively, doing away with the element of spectacle. The lesson is no less terrible. It may be even more severe. The shots are not linked dramatically. But in spite of being undramatic, the series of shots shows itself for what it is: logical. And the logic is terrifying. The shots are no longer enigmatic, revealing the kind of childishness of which the children are accused. Straub: “[T]hough these are not people struggling, they are people suffering from despair.”51 The logic leading the people from the return of the old gods of their oppressors—but above all from the absence of law—to despair and then self-destruction is palpable here: the offerings during the day and the murder of the Young Man, still on his feet, find their coherent continuation in the intoxication and rage that are exhausted through the collective energy. After the sacrifice of the four naked virgins, shots 65 to 68 are undoubtedly the most impressive: various objects are thrown into a ravine; a man stabs himself at the base of a tree; a man on fire runs away from the camera; men jump one after the other into the void. Huillet and Straub give these shots and a few others the feeling of a macabre farce: a first series of objects is thrown, then nothing happens for a moment before a giant cart crashes; the man, on his knees, stabs himself cleanly and then falls forward, his feet in the air like in a Tex Avery cartoon; the excessive speed of the shot of the enflamed runner makes it incongruous; etc. The farce underlines the strangeness of these scenes, giving them back their fictionality and phantasmatic character. 49 Ibid., p. 20. 50 Schoenberg, Moses and Aaron, pp. 232 and 254. 51 Bontemps, Bonitzer, and Daney, “Conversation”, p. 20.

114 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

The following shot shows the moon rising on the horizon: an inverted dawn, light in darkness, or the rising of the night’s powers. This shot might also create a barrier to what is waiting behind it: the erotic orgy. The orgy is rather well-behaved: a naked man tears a dress off a woman who barely seems bothered (reading this as rape is theoretically possible, but the images do not support it) and then presents her at the foot of the altar before slipping away. There is little of the collectiveness Schoenberg suggests. Within the “logical” progression of this move towards negation carried through to collective suicide, there are nevertheless “erotic” shots—the only ones in Huillet and Straub’s work tackling this delicate affair so explicitly. The musical treatment of these scenes is obviously important in a consideration of the Schoenbergian ambiguities. Although Charles Rosen finds this passage “academic […] with hopelessly square rhythms”,52 Olivier Revault d’Allonnes hears something else: In order to remain in the realm of ambiguity and almost constant oscillation between the idea and the image, between God and the idols, it is obvious that Schoenberg—fully convinced Moses is right—took a truly sensual pleasure in composing a long Golden Calf scene to take up most of Act II. The wisely combined succession of parts creates a lyrical effect that goes, crescendo, from the adoration of the Golden Calf and the magical therapies asked of it to entire people wildly dancing, the rape of virgins and their slaughter, and finally the intoxication that, decrescendo, puts everyone to sleep, paving the way for Moses’ sudden, celestial, rage. There is nothing religious about this. Musically, the instruments and choirs are mixed together so much that we might say the musicians have been carried away by the orgy too […]. The fury becomes contagious. The point is showing its attraction and pleasures. This would be missed if it were painted in repulsive or painful shades, as religious asceticism would have done.53

This reveals what is at stake and how the stakes intermingle. On the one hand, the musical materials’ obvious sensuality and dynamic power create the force of the Dionysian motion and translate the exhilaration but they are also intoxicating, perhaps even for the composer. On the other hand, the scene’s dramatic structure suggests that this ostensible or real abandonment to the senses is in fact a means for a more austere ending. It is possible that

52 Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 94. 53 Revault d’Allonnes, Aimer Schoenberg, pp. 138-139.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

115

the music’s truly pleasurable character does not make up for the difficulty of the series of sequences but instead makes it even more terrible. Huillet and Straub clearly try to “save” this passage. To do this involves an attenuation of the spectacle, the addition of a farcical dimension, the calmness of the image (night, freshness, vegetation), and the direction of the actors—even if the calmness may be like the music’s sensuality and cuts both ways. The upward tilt in shot 62 is another and very important technique. The third exit from the dispositif: the organization abandons the vaguely tragic form in favour of a structure lacking a precise centre, one that is less trenchant and more sinuous. These techniques and others undermine the worst of what is at work in the opera (the ideological appreciation), even though on the surface, the logic continues to play a role. The erotic orgy returns to the priests’ sacrifice of the four naked virgins, which, from a ritual whose sexual aspects are present, becomes directly libidinous, contaminating the entire passage. The death drive is presented to our eyes: the appearance of the individual in the story is a moment of despair and savagery. The sequence is presented as a series of images without any significance. This is true, but it is also therefore rhetorical. There remains only what may have no significance: the calmness of the shots, faces, demeanours, postures, the occasional tenderness of the gestures, the chirping crickets. Divergent Path Moses returns in the morning. His anger is impressive: when he screams at the Calf to disappear, the image of the image fades to white because images obey speech. Then comes the inevitable confrontation, the brothers’ duel, perhaps the film’s most beautiful sequence. The rhetorical combat is cut into five shots ending with Moses destroying the tablets of the law; then a pan to the right along the hilltops and the sky, evoking shot 10 in a shortened form; finally a shot where Moses collapses in defeat. The first movement of the five shots (74 to 78) is constructed on the same model as the brothers’ first encounter in the desert: one shot of the brothers, then two of Aaron and two of Moses alone in alternation. The score itself references the beginning of the work, the music being “full of fleeting reminiscences of the first two scenes of the opera”.54 Aaron’s back is to his brother and both have their backs to the altar where the idol sat. Nevertheless, in shot 74, Moses is on frame left as he has always

54 Sadie, New Grove Dictionary of Opera, III, p. 482.

116 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

been and they are placed in the frame on the same diagonal as in scene two. Instead of his staff, he now holds the tablets. The first alternation opposes Aaron in a low-angle close-up with the sky in the background and Moses in a wide, high-angle shot, with sand and the altar steps behind him. Aaron is calm and sad: he tries to calm his brother, arguing that he was continuing his task. When Moses says, “God’s eternity annihilates the Gods’ presence!” the “annihilates” makes Aaron flinch like a little boy scolded by his father. The second alternation returns to Aaron, now from a high angle as well, his composure regained: he stops reciting his act of contrition and defends his conception. He changes tactics, becomes arrogant and sure of his analysis. He begins by affirming that he loves this people, that he has “seen how it lives, when it dare, see, feel, hope!” To the Mosaic conception of a people offered or who can be offered to the idea, he opposes a people to be conserved and very much alive, a people who play a role in their history. But his argument quickly veers towards demagogic contempt: “No people can believe what it cannot feel”, “no people grasps more than a part of the image, which expresses the graspable part of the idea”, etc. The mise-en-scène follows and the human Aaron from the previous shot now rolls his sharp eyes and shakes his fist—threatening Moses, according to the script.55 The image suggests conviction and tenacity, but doubt persists. In the libretto, the scene is initially striking because it is centred solely on the question of the image and its relation to words and the idea without there ever being a question of the missing law, except Aaron’s specious deduction: “The people has waited long upon the word of thy mouth, from which rule and law spring. So I had to give it an image to look upon.” Additionally, it is unthinkable that Moses—who his brother recalls “[has] God’s word”—gives in to the point of destroying the tablets of the divine law in the face of arguments as weak as Aaron’s, which are clearly sophisms. In the Bible, Moses destroys the tablets immediately out of anger at his people (Ex 32:19), and the gesture is easier to understand. Moses is angry with his people; he does not question the tablets themselves but doubts that the people deserve them. It is hard to see how Moses could accept the confusion Aaron causes about the tablets—“part of the image” has become an “image”—how this could bother him enough to destroy what God himself has just offered him. In shot 78, Moses even comes to consider the cloudy, fiery pillar to be “idolatrous images” to which his brother is right to respond, “God’s signs, like the glowing thornbush”—but the indiscernibility about the cause of the confusion decreases the interest of the confrontation. 55 Straub-Huillet, Moïse et Aaron, p. 59.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

117

The final problem is structural: having witnessed the “unbridled” orgies and “demonic events”,56 Aaron’s line, “Thou too wouldst love this people, hadst thou seen how it lives, when it dare, see, feel, hope!” is impossible. We have mainly seen despair and hopelessness. Shot 75 is tight on Aaron, in profile as in scene two. Shots 76 and 77 are from sharp, high angles, breaking from the strict profiles and frontal shots. Moses then destroys the tablets in a long almost frontal close-up, squinting under the painful sun. Moses’ defeat having been signed by the breaking of the tablets, Aaron insists and affirms his victory as well as that of the idea: “this people shall be preserved, to attest to the idea of eternity.” The people-choir now returns off-screen, singing of how God has chosen it; their joy in his power, which will destroy the gods of Egypt, and their faith in the Promised Land, where they will enjoy what had been announced to their fathers. Their return is ironic, and their faith in an embodiment of the demagogue’s promised pleasures in the guise of the idea is terribly ironic. But Aaron curiously affirms: “My destiny is to say it worse than I understand it”, a line that suddenly makes him into a Mosaic figure, destined to lose his thought in language, even he who is a master of it, even he whose destiny is to be the language of a thought that is not his own. Shot 79 refuses to return to Aaron, preferring instead and in spite of everything to attest the presence of the divine with a low-angle pan across the horizon, the sky, and the same vegetation as in shot 10—or should we say the presence of the people rather than the divine. Shot 80 then ends Act II. On his knees with his back to the altar, Moses complains to his God about what He has allowed, blaming Him. He ends by raising his fists against his head in a gesture that parallels the raising of his hands to his eyes in shot 10—and falls against the earth, hopeless, his voice falling like his body in a horrifying complaint: “O word, thou word, that I lack!” Here, of course, Moses lacks words—but perhaps God does too, having failed him. Act III brutally inverts the situation. Moses had been defeated, abandoned by everyone, perhaps even including God. Aaron now has his hands tied and is lying face down on the muddy soil. The rupture is equally stark visually: not only are we totally outside the theatre or arena, but in a location that is its opposite in every way—a lake in place of sand and with mountains all around, evoking the double mountain in the distance that played the Sinai, blue rather than ochre. The disparity creates a juncture—a break, but this should also be understood as being like a folding hinge, like a window shutter—within the work, presenting Act III as a kind of epilogue 56 Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 352.

118 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

or annex whose relationship to the body of the work remains and must be maintained as problematic. For a special issue of the poetry magazine Ironwood devoted to George Oppen, Charles Bernstein wrote an essay and a poem entitled “Hinge, Picture”, in which he defines a “hinge” as Oppen’s specific mode of articulation between verses: In contrast to both enjambment and disjunction—as well, of course, as more conventional static techniques—Oppen’s hinging allows for a measure of intervallic “widths” of connection/disconnection between lines. At its most riveting, this hinging taps into a horizontally moving synaptic/syntactic energy at the point of line transition.57

A hinge or juncture is a strange method of construction in which a work finds coherence beyond dislocation, and the means to build a solid—objectified—form while maintaining an unarticulated appearance that is instead a joint with a number of degrees of freedom. Yet the apparent break is contradicted or completed by another structural movement that transforms it into a pivot. The entirety of Act III is filmed in a single shot. At the beginning, Moses is standing on frame left and Aaron is lying at his feet with two soldiers to his right. A forward tracking shot ends in a high-angle shot of Aaron alone before Moses begins to speak. When Aaron has finished speaking, the camera tilts diagonally up to the left to frame Moses alone in a medium, three-quarter view from behind looking into the distance on frame right. Some rhymes are produced: Aaron is bareheaded for the first time in the film—for the first time since Moses was in shot 10. That shot was also a sequence shot. It also contained a diagonal tilt upwards and leftward pan joining Moses’ head in a high-angle shot to the horizon. Like he is here, in shot 10 Moses is also shown in profile, his gaze hidden from the audience. A major inversion takes place: shot 10 ends with a (long) pan from a low angle; this one begins with a high-angle forward tracking shot. There are substitutions too: in shot 10, Moses’ neck appears against a background of sand and a shallow depth of field breaks the sense of depth. Here, Aaron’s face is literally glued to the now muddy ground. Moses accuses him, “Then thou didst desire physically, really, to tread with thy feet an unreal land, where milk and honey flows” and administers the first punishment: that Aaron tread with his feet a real land, sterile mud, that he will sink 57 Bernstein, “Hinge, Picture”, p. 241.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

119

down in the water with which he threatened Pharaoh, with whom Moses compares him. The patriarch’s staff is too similar to the soldiers’ spears. The law of God or Moses has been established, and the prophet holds power on earth. The return to the beginning of the film triggered by the formal parallel is completed by something that helps us understand the situation: the epigraph, the text from Exodus 32:25-28 that recounts what happens after Moses takes charge of the people again after destroying the Golden Calf: “Thus speaks the Lord God of Israel, bind each one his sword at his side and go back and forth through the camp from one gate to the other and slay each other one his brother, friend and neighbour. The sons of Levi did as Moses had said to them, and there fell that day of the people three thousand men”—which Huillet reads, adding caesuras to the end: “and there fell that day / of the people / three thousand men.” While Moses creates a State and a new configuration of society, it is the audience’s job not to forget the former one, to be able to return to where the film begins and the future off-screen space of the story—an epigraph provided too early to warn of what happens too late to be shown. Following the form’s call to look backwards makes a reading like Louis Seguin’s impossible: “[T]he film gives Moses the last word. He does not stop at the despair of the second act where the word is lacking but, at the end of the third, at the political serenity of the alliance with God [Vereinigt mit Gott].”58 The illusion of political serenity goes hand in hand with the illusion of speech that is not missing: the real serenity that the shot releases—even a kneeling man—is the sign of terror. To reveal at the beginning what happens after the end undermines the ground beneath the conqueror’s feet. There is a double structural movement then: the palpable formal rupture in the material on the one hand puts Act III at a distance from the first two. The end of Act II is presented as a closure; Moses’ fists over his eyes and his face on the ground closing what was opened when he obstructs his gaze in front of the bush with a background of the holy ground that he had reached. The low-angle pan in shot 79 rhymes ironically and terribly with the more ample one in shot 10, with the people—still off-screen—running to the support of the day’s conqueror, Aaron. Formally, everything seems closed and complete, rejecting Act III outside the form; it is an addendum with an even stranger status since there seems to be no dramatic continuity that can link it to the end of the second—conqueror and conquered interchanged without any forewarning—and it therefore seems like a hypothetical, 58 Seguin, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, p. 52. Italics in original.

120 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

theoretical reversal of the situation, a response to the question: what would have happened if the other had won? On the other hand, the system of formal parallels—whose importance in the film is now clear, as well as the point to which they are foregrounded for the spectator—unequivocally include Act III as a finale through the re-exposition—with variations—of a fundamental formal theme going back to the first scene. The ambiguity of this construction is not only maintained, it is exasperated around the juncture (break/folding hinge) between the end of Act II and beginning of Act III—the precise moment that LacoueLabarthe defines as the work’s (and consequently the religion’s59) “caesura” in the sense of the concept going back to Hölderlin, passing by Adorno and, above all, Benjamin. “Juncture” rather than “caesura” would also help us understand the real obstacle Schoenberg was facing, preventing him from joining the two pieces of his work. Flann O’Brien claimed it was possible for a book to have three different openings; here is a film that offers two endings and maintains that both are the ending: a balance arranged by the structure, which is repeated, doubled. The “good ending” cannot be decided upon: formally or politically, or “good” in the moral sense as well. A hole had already been made in the “tragic” form at the end of Act I, a flight from the stage: just after Aaron pours the water from the Nile out of his jar and promises that Pharaoh will sink down in it, shots 42 and 43 show the Nile Valley. Shot 42 shows the river in its seductive beauty and the pan ends on its disappearing into the horizon, promise and opening—while the choir sings, “he will lead us into the land where milk and honey flows; and we shall enjoy what he swore to our fathers”, Aaron’s concept. Shot 43 presents the Nile more distant, cultivated fields, and the beginning of the sand. The choir ends its song with “leadst us into the promised land. We shall be free, free, free!” as the frame arrives at the desert and finishes its movement on the arid slopes of a mountain—a mountain, at the foot of which the people await Moses’ return, and a desert, the only land he has promised. The duplicity—if I may: the double existence—of the film’s structure occurs at the beginning and remains unresolved.

Objective on Objective: Huillet and Straub’s Position The big question that has tormented the film’s commentators is: how do we choose between Moses and Aaron? Franco Fortini wrote: “As for Straub’s 59 Lacoue-Labarthe, “La Césure”, p. 130.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

121

film, I’d say it doesn’t take a position and that’s its real tragic significance, bringing it close to Empedocles.”60 Huillet and Straub try desperately not to decide, to expose Schoenberg’s problem without resolving it. Benign neutrality does not result from this position, nor consolation or reconciliation. Organized around the juncture that cracks the people’s historical destiny, the structure’s partially contradictory double movement is instead built on a desire to exacerbate the tension to the point of mutually destroying the two “conductors”. The uncertainty of the balance leaves nothing in peace: the stakes are terrifying in and of themselves. Instead of locking the question in a binary opposition, the filmmakers try to reveal the weight of a third force absent from the title: not God but the people. The film works through escalation. Huillet and Straub superimpose another “constructivism” on top of Schoenberg’s, composing it with a series of structural layers whose relative independence allows their relations to vary: mise-en-scène in the classical sense and a critical analysis of the original text. These formal layers, whose source is the utopian desire for a work containing its own critique, doubles the opera without (ideally) changing it just as the cinematic machine superimposes its basic discontinuity on the continuum of reality. Connections can be generated in the audience’s eyes and minds through apposition, therefore allowing, even forcing it—violence or brutality—to judge for itself. The analytic posture—achieved through an emphasis on form, whose stylistic results must not be underestimated—keeps the spectator observing the (power) relations instead of the protagonists. Nature and the divine or people, machine, and thought take place in the unrolled, unfolded space: the human disappears. The film’s movement towards objectivation makes the abstract motions of the frame bump against the stones or against the men transformed into stones, the machinery of language against people transformed into a mass, history against itself in the juncture. The human must bump into, as well as hold onto, objectivation. Is it objectivity that is inhuman, or the remains of a subjectivity lacking the strength to relinquish enough to find itself? It is ideology that is hard to relinquish here. Or, rather, the logic that remains and that it would have been necessary to try eliminating through tenderness or the structure. The form can f ind its limits. Perhaps in this way, it fails to leave a very powerful binary whose proposed third term it has already foreseen and pushed away. The only way out is by making a hole in every term: through the lacks themselves, the intervals the film is crammed with. The people 60 Straub-Huillet, Moïse et Aaron, p. 126

122 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

are not the way out of the Moses/Aaron opposition. Together, at least as they exist here, the three form a Borromean knot: if one is undone, they all disappear. A people created by the idea of Moses and the words of Aaron cannot be endowed with the weapons needed to do away with the idea and the words: without them it heads towards destruction—which it has the right to prefer. The work forms an impasse and implodes; it is this implosion. The opera is a critique of the subject even in its form. Huillet and Straub multiply its objectivity through the form and cinematic processes they establish. The vertiginous shot in the “burning bush” episode launches or causes the destruction of the subject in its view. The mystical knows it is nothing in the face of God, who is not very important either. By being free from itself, it sees a chance to be saved. Benjamin’s pages on the “expressionless” in “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” appear curiously unavoidable here, as close as possible to a work they anticipate and extend almost too literally: [N]o work of art may seem wholly alive, in a manner free of spell-like enchantment, without becoming mere semblance and ceasing to be a work of art. The life undulating in it must appear petrified and as if spellbound in a single moment.61

Immobility is a very concrete part of the film, which the mise-en-scène emphasizes at certain moments. For example, after Aaron takes Moses’ staff, the moment when the situation is crystallized as a revolution. Maintaining the opera as a work of art within the film means it must be immobilized. The analytic position is a corollary to this. In order to present itself as an objective work, the film tends to objectify the opera from within: What arrests this semblance, spellbinds the movement, and interrupts the harmony is the expressionless. […] The expressionless is the critical violence which, while unable to separate semblance from essence in art, prevents them from mingling.62

The expressionless is not the truth. It is the moment truth can emerge, a moment that is pure disappearance. It is what maintains a gap. For Benjamin, the expressionless is the joint between the objectivity demanded from a 61 Benjamin, Selected Writings, I, p. 340. 62 Ibid., p. 340.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

123

work of art in his earlier writings and the dialectical image as interruption and blockage in his final years: The “occidental Junoian sobriety”—which Hölderlin, several years before he wrote this, conceived as the almost unattainable goal of all German artistic practice—is only another name for that caesura, in which, along with harmony, every expression simultaneously comes to a standstill, in order to give free reign to an expressionless power inside all artistic media.63

Benjamin finds “the silence that strikes the hero” of Greek tragedy to be one of the most obvious manifestations of this force: rather literally Moses’ silence. As we have seen, Lacoue-Labarthe finds that the passage from the end of Act II to Act III is the exact equivalent of this definition of caesura. It is the precise location where Huillet and Straub establish and maintain the gap, divergence, or juncture at its highest tension through which the work manages not to end, not because it lacks a solid conclusion (a lack of music), but because the ending is a tear that doubly articulates two terrifying possibilities. The expressionless—the “critical power” at play within and against the work—is also what can or must provoke an explosion: “For it shatters whatever still survives as the legacy of chaos in all beautiful semblance: the false, errant totality—the absolute totality. Only the expressionless completes the work, by shattering it into a thing of shards”.64 A work, like historic time, must have holes in it to allow the revolution or the Messiah to arrive: language and the subject cannot escape this breach. The task is “almost unattainable” yet inevitable since the issue is nothing less than attending to things in the world, happiness. “Sober” expresses the brilliance of the day better than “bright”.65

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Quasi una fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1992. Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Bernstein, Charles, “Hinge, Picture”, Ironwood 26, 13:2 (Autumn 1985), pp. 240-244. 63 Ibid., p. 341. 64 Ibid., p. 340. 65 Ibid., p. 352.

124 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Biette, Jean-Claude, “Le Jeu du bec”, Jean-Marie Straub. Danièle Huillet. Conversations en Archipel, ed. Anne-Marie Faux. Paris: Editions Cinémathèque française/ Mazzotta, 1999, pp. 10-11. Bonizter, Pascal, “J.-M.S. et J.-L.G.”, Cahiers du cinéma, 264 (February 1976), pp. 5-10. Bontemps, Jacques, Bonitzer, Pascal, and Daney, Serge, “Conversation avec JeanMarie Straub et Danièle Huillet (Moïse et Aaron)”, Cahiers du cinéma, 258-259 (July-August 1975), pp. 5-26. Bresson, Robert, Notes on the Cinematograph, trans. Jonathan Griffin. New York: New York Review of Books, 2016. Cinemateka Group, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, Cahiers du cinéma, 223 (August-September 1970), pp. 48-57. Derrida, Jacques, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Engel, Andi, “Andi Engel talks to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is there too”, Enthusiasm, 1 (December 1975), pp. 1-25. Genet, Jean, “Violence and Brutality”, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Koch, Gertrude, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, “La Césure de la religion: Adorno et Schönberg”, L’art moderne et la question du sacré, ed. Jean-Claude Nillès. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf/CERIT, 1993, pp. 107-133. Laroche, Hadrien, Le Dernier Genet. Histoires des hommes infâmes. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Maimonides, Moses, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Neighbour, O.W., The Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., ed. Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, 1992. O’Brien, Flann, At Swim-Two-Birds. Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Poirier, René, “Analyse de l’œuvre” in Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Hans Hildebrand. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1993. Revault d’Allonnes, Olivier, Aimer Schoenberg. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1992. Rosen, Charles, Arnold Schoenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile or on Education, trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Schoenberg, Arnold, Arnold Schoenberg Letters, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.

THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND A ARON

125

—, Moses and Aaron: Opera in Three Acts, trans. Allen Forte. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1957. Seguin, Louis, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet: “Aux distraitement désespérés que nous sommes…”. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2007. Sitney, P. Adams, Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Straub, Jean-Marie and Huillet, Danièle, Moïse et Aaron (Moses und Aron). Toulouse: Ombres, 1990. —, Ouvriers, paysans. Toulouse: Ombres, 2001. Straub, Jean-Marie, Huillet, Danièle and Jousse, Thierry, Entretiens [CD]. Paris: Les Discques du Rectangle, 1999. Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle. New York: Schirmer Books, 1978. Walsh, Martin, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema, ed. Keith M. Griffiths. London: BFI Publishing, 1981. Zukofsky, Louis, Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

4. Speech against Power, or Poetry, Love, and Revolution: “A”-9 Abstract This chapter analyses Louis Zukofsky’s poem “A”-9 from his major work “A”, a poem published in two parts over eight years. Like the film Moses and Aaron, Zukofsky’s work consists of verbatim quotations of pre-existing texts—Karl Marx’s Capital and Value, Price and Profit, H. Stanley Allen’s Electrons and Waves: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, and Spinoza’s Ethics and botanical writings—which are applied to a complex and pre-existing poetic structure, Guido Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi priega”. The chapter examines the publication history of the poem as well as the implications and difficulties of such a structure on the poem’s reception, the continuities Zukofsky is suggesting by connecting Marx, Allen, and Spinoza, and the poem’s politics. Furthermore, it deepens the comparison between Straub and Huillet’s work in Moses and Aaron and in general and that of the Objectivists. Keywords: “A”-9, Zukofsky, Straub-Huillet, Objectivism “Where there is life, there is soul. Wherever there is soul, there is mind. […] Nothing in the world is devoid of life.” ‒ Pico della Mirandola 1 “At that time, a tragedy was written with less effort than quarries used to cut cobblestones out of the rocks in Fontainebleau.” ‒ Théodore de Banville2

The opposition of Moses and Aaron is not false, but it plays out on a common stage with a shared frame and rules, whose gap will not be crossed. This 1 Mirandola, Syncretism, p. 341. 2 Banville, Petit Traité de poésie française, p. 95.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_ch04

128 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

may be the stage of tragedy: a third term is on the edge of it, a pivot and concern. Tragedy implies a certain state of this axis, an unstable balance or shift: double, choir and people, two tempos never to be confused. Dangerous twists are produced, substitutions as exciting and surprising as in a game of three-card Monte or Catholic theology. The third term—the one hidden by the title beneath the comfort of a duality—is both unique and triple: God, the people, and nothing. And it is possible that the victory will ultimately be for nothing. The threat is to be conjured—a fine word: exorcism or sedition. In La Fleur inverse, Jacques Roubaud describes another dichotomy that is also disturbed by nothingness: the dichotomy among troubadours between trobar clus and trobar leu. Trobar clus is the art of difficult poetry; leu, the other one: “Clus means closed. Leu, light.”3 The two conceptions are completely antagonistic, but and precisely because of this they both want to be a way for poetry (language, love, life) to stand against nothingness: The response of [leu to nothingness] is a response that appears positive: there is love, there is joi. And this is good; love exists. It is possible to love, to be loved, to sing of it. The “different eternities” of love and non-love, singing and silence, joi and sofrirs do not meet, do not mix. […] [Clus] has a very different strategy. 4

In order to qualify this strategy, Roubaud makes a detour through texts by “negative theologian” Nicholas of Cusa. In them he discovers a state of language (of thinking) in which the double negation is not resolved (not not, A≠A), in which a negation can be denied “without returning to the point of departure, meaning without resolving the logical antinomy, maintaining its paradoxical character.”5 The heart of the trobar clus strategy is: “Love exists not because it is this and that, but because it is more than everything that is not the opposite of this and that.”6 Roubaud finds this model crystallized in the form of the sestina: The sestina is entirely “created” by this “not not A” movement: a cobla esparsa where no rhyme rhymes, rhyming from cobla to cobla by wordrhymes that are antonyms of rhymes; an indivisible cobla esparsa that the movement of [Arnaut] Daniel’s permutation tends to organize around 3 Roubaud, La Fleur inverse, p. 316. 4 Ibid., p. 328. 5 Ibid., p. 329. 6 Ibid., p. 329.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

129

a fictional diesis that is, moreover, underlined by another “non-rhyme”, assonance; and so on.7

In 1934, Zukofsky wrote the sestina “Mantis”. Roubaud includes it at the beginning of a short text entitled “La destruction de la sextine”. Roubaud considers Zukofsky someone who knew how “to make the formal memory of the troubadours reappear” in another way than Pound.8 In his essay, Roubaud associates “Mantis” and “A”-9—the only two poems for which Zukofsky wrote glosses and that reuse the form of two of the most important 13th-century texts: Daniel’s sestina and Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone “Donna mi priegha”. They both display manifestly political content as well. Roubaud, however, highlights a common point: the form is also political: “The reflection on the formal status is connected to the social context. It is the exact opposite of ‘the cult of the author.’”9 In another text, he emphasizes and regrets, regarding Zukofsky, “[t]he main reactions of critics and poets, almost all agreeing to minimize the impersonal aspect of the (non-individualist) work in its double manifestation as ‘politics’ and ‘technical reflection’.”10 This book is an attempt to study this ‘double manifestation’ in order to understand specifically what of the impersonal is involved. In an exceptionally subtle manner, “A”-9 involves the related use of politics and poetic technique—involves it, stages it, and perhaps throws it into crisis. As in the previous chapter, only a precise analysis of this poem will help us understand. Only a precise analysis can bring out the techniques shared with Huillet and Straub’s film work. This will involve playing a little with the meaning of the word “reflection” in Roubaud’s quote.

A Poem, History Two Halves “A”-9 is the ninth “movement” (Zukofsky’s term)11 of his major work “A”, whose writing extended over a large part of its author’s life, from 1928 to 1974. 7 Ibid., p. 329. Curiously, from another angle and with very different implications, Walter Benjamin was also sensitive to the unvoiced connection between the via negative and “closed” poetry—later called “hermetic”—, that of Mallarmé. 8 Roubaud, “La destruction de la sextine”, I, p. 76. 9 Ibid., p. 77. 10 Roubaud, “A 10 (fragments)”, p. 12. 11 Zukofsky, An “Objectivists” Anthology, pp. 112-ssq.

130 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

“A” has a strange particularity among the long poems that mark 20th-century American poetic creation (Pound’s Cantos, Williams‘ Paterson, etc.): it is finished. Its ninth movement is a poem in two “halves”. The textual material in the first half, composed from 1938-40, is taken from Marx—Capital and Value, Price and Profit—and modern physics—H. Stanley Allen, Electrons and Waves: An Introduction to Atomic Physics—; the second half, which waited eight years to be written (1948-50),12 from Spinoza’s Ethics and botany. Many have tried to see the transformation of Marx in 1938-40 into Spinoza after the war as revealing Zukofsky’s turn away from politics, the second half becoming the response and disavowal of the first part, crossing it out.13 It is important to remember several things: 1) from the beginning, Zukofsky planned a second half, since in 1940 the f irst half was called “First Half of ‘A’-9”; 2) Zukofsky had already confirmed in 1928 that he had discovered that “Marxian economics is instinctively bound to Spinoza’s natura naturans”. 14 It was therefore in the 1930s that the project of the poem was conceived in its entirety, very likely as it appears today—at least in its idea. Forgetting this prevents us from understanding the work’s architecture. Later in the above-quoted letter to Pound, Zukofsky clarifies—a little—the link that will establish the game of mirrors—Judaism: “The resultant ‘ebrew humility […] does not make for an immediate realization of proletarian triumph.”15 Years later—the fragment dates from around 1950, during or after the completion of the second half—he wrote to Lorine Niedecker: “He reproves the Jews for not having religion as a cultural drive: he shd. read Rezy + ‘A’-9!”16 Conceived at a time when the threat against the Jewish people was worse than it had ever been, Zukofsky’s poem—that of a young leftist, Jewish, and atheist intellectual—appears to be essentially an interrogation of history and the articulation of a certain Jewish way of thinking. Zukofsky presents himself as the inheritor of two renegades, discovering in their 12 Dates given by Celia Zukofsky, “Year by Year”, pp. 603-610. 13 Mark Scroggins cites this movement as “the favored emblem” of a reading of the poet’s evolution as “reflecting the education of a young man realizing his youthful follies as he comes to maturity” (Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky, p. 143). 14 Pound and Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky, p. 9. 15 Ibid., p. 9. 16 Unsigned fragmented, undated (c. 1950), Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. “He” probably refers to T.S. Eliot, although Niedecker‘s cutting of the fragment makes things ambiguous (it could also be Pound); “Rezy” is Charles Reznikoff.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

131

mutual reflection the cultural drive that they ultimately shared—or perhaps the schizophrenia that characterizes this thinking at its deepest levels. Although the relation between the two parts is clear and strong, while reading them their referents could not be more different. The first half evokes the industrial world, the theory of value, and the alienation of things and lives in the law of exchange; the second half, using equally complex language but softer sonorities, deals with love and flowers. Only the formal aspects seem to assure the poem’s coherence. Huillet and Straub have also set up strongly disjunctive forms, the cohesion of whose separate parts can seem unlikely: The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, History Lessons, From the Cloud to the Resistance, Too Early/Too Late, etc. One Half It is all the more suspect since we should be able to read the f irst half independently—which most critics do—since, as noted, it was published separately. It is at once the outcome of a reflection on the possibility, role, and form of a political poetry that dates in its author’s work to at least the end of the 1920s, as well as its implosion under the combined effects of its own weight—as if it had reached what physicists call “critical mass”, an epithet to be understood in all of its senses here—and the world political situation; disaster. The political aspect must not be underestimated or invalidated by the inclusion of this “first half” in the entire movement; Zukofsky accepted this in 1940, and the additional layers created by the presence of Spinoza do not invalidate it: “As for the ultimate value of the first half of ‘A’-9 […]—a Briton pronounces capitalism with the accent on the second syllable: ca-pit’-al-ism. ‘A’-9 may mean more if it be taken also as a sign that capitalism will capitulate.”17 “A”-9 uses the form of Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone, which begins, “Donna mi priegha perch’i volglio dire”. Zukofsky’s poem begins, “An impulse to action sings of a semblance”.18 The lady is no longer asking for the song, the urge is no longer destined for her—unless… What is singing is an actual irresistible movement towards action. Politics and impersonality are related here. A double preoccupation for “politics” and “technical reflection” do not make a poet’s job easy, even less so in the late 1930s. “A”-9 constitutes and activates a moment of crisis in Zukofsky’s work. The titles of some of his 17 Zukofsky, The First Half of “A”-9, p. 1. 18 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 106.

132 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

poems from these years give a sense of the questions at play: “For you I have emptied the meaning”, “What are these songs” (1938); “The lines of these new songs are nothing” (1940). In 1940, just after finishing work on the first part of “A”-9 and before not returning to “A” for eight years, he wrote the tenth movement, marked by terror before the fall of France and the evolution of Europe, as well as the impossibility of speaking of this terror in poetry, the loss of our ability to sing: Poor songster so weak Stopped singing to curse A mess sucked out No substance […] Let a better time say The poet stopped singing to talk 19

Zukofsky calls on the people, insults the leaders, launches into obscene pseudo-limericks, cries for the dead in Spain and elsewhere. In some sense, Mark Scroggins is right to find this formally unfinished: after the refinement of “A”-9, the music is coarse, the engagement is naïve, and the sentimentality in bad taste. Disgust, exhaustion, and rage are not good reason to write poems: they are also the subject of this one.

The Form of “A”-9 On a Canzone Like some other works—including some by Huillet and Straub—“A”-9 is easier to describe than to penetrate. Of course, this suggests a particular form of description involving less a reading of the text than a certain pre-existing knowledge. This knowledge happens to have been provided by the author in a small volume entitled First Half of “A”-9, which he refused to republish. The knowledge has been repeated from one scholiast to the next for their own wonderment or irritation. Each of the two parts exactly reprises the formal structure of the dolce stil novo masterpiece and philosophical exposé on the nature of love that is the traditional canzone Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250-1300) wrote around 1290. 19 Ibid., pp. 113 and 120.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

133

In First Half of “A”-9, the young poet quotes Ezra Pound’s20 description of the form of the Italian’s masterpiece: E. Pound has explained Guido’s Donna mi Prega as follows: “The canzone was to the poets of this period what the fugue was to musicians in Bach’s time. It is a highly specialized form, having its own self-imposed limits… The strophe […] consist(s) of four parts, the second lobe equal to the first as required by the rules of the canzone; and the fourth happening to equal the third, which is not required by the rules as Dante explains them. “Each strophe is articulated by 14 terminal and 12 inner rhyme sounds, which means that 52 out of every 154 syllables are bound into a pattern. The strophe reverses the proportions of the sonnet, as the short lobes precede the longer.”21

Zukofsky therefore wrote a poem with five strophes of fourteen hendecasyllables plus a five-strophe coda that rhymes following the Cavalcantian trellis that Pound makes visible in the layout of the text in his edition, whose beginning I will reproduce, accompanied by the opening of “A”-9: Donna mi prega [sic] D’un accidente Ed é si altero

perch’i volglio dire

che sovente

é fero

ch’é chiamato amore22

An impulse to action sings of a semblance Of things related as equated values, The measure all use is time congealed labor23

20 Zukofsky‘s interest in the poem was certainly born out of Pound‘s passion for it. The latter devoted an important essay to it and translated it twice, the second forms almost all of Canto XXXVI. “A”-9 is, moreover, largely—as Roubaud evokes and Richard Sieburth develops in depth in “Pound, Zukofsky, Cavalcanti”)—a displacement and critique of Pound’s approach. 21 Zukofsky, First Half of “A”-9, p. 37. 22 Pound, Literary Essays, p. 163. Pound‘s misspelling of “priegha” as “prega” is intentional. Pound‘s translation: “Because a lady asks me, I would tell / Of an affect that comes often and is fell / And is so overweening: Love by name […]” (p. 155). 23 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 106.

134 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

This constitutes the first part of “A”-9, 75 verses. The second part mirrors it, reusing not only the rhyme structure but also the rhymed words themselves: An eye to action sees love bear the semblance Of things, related is equated,—values The measure all use who conceive love, labor24

One final aspect of Zukofsky’s formal work has hardly received comment: though he never translates Cavalcanti, he sometimes mimics him, reusing a word or rendering some passages almost homophonic with the original verses—following a model the poet later adopted for the translation he made with his wife Celia (very much a translation in that case) of Catullus. For example, lines two to five of the first strophe: Call a maturer day, the poor are torn—a Ch oltre misura di natura torna Pawl to adorn a ratchet—hope dim—eying Poi non si addorna di riposo maj Move cangues, conjoined the coils of things they thin to, Move changiando cholr riso in pianto With allayed furor E lla fighura25

This is not a restriction: Zukofsky abandons it when he feels like it. But his occasional desire for his words to echo the master is undeniable. We can detect an additional formal game: echoes of his own sestina “Mantis” in some of the vocabulary and the repetition of words: “things” and “labor” each return fourteen times in the first half, creating an effect of obsessional vertigo close to that achieved by the form created by Daniel. Moreover, as in Daniel’s form, the coda here reuses all of the poem’s key words. Superimposed Structures The extravagant formal framework within which Zukofsky inscribes his work therefore superimposes disjointed and neatly differentiated historical strata presented non-chronologically: a late 13th-century Italian structure with Marxist and then Spinozist material among words maintained from 24 Ibid., p. 108. 25 Ibid., p. 107; Pound, Literary Essays, p. 165.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

135

the first trellis. This mode of operation—the pseudo-independence between the “formal text” of Zukofsky/Cavalcanti and the “verbal text” of Zukofsky/ Marx/Spinoza—corresponds to what Martin Walsh describes about Huillet and Straub’s History Lessons: “So again we read two (at least) texts—Brecht’s verbal one, and Straub/Huillet’s formal one, the two co-existing, interdependent in fundamental ways, yet neither subjugating the other.”26 “Yet neither subjugating the other” responds to the Objectivist call for the absence of “predatory manifestations” between a poem’s components. The sprawl of history condensed in the poem is as such not to be neglected: in the preface to First Half of “A”-9, Zukofsky explains that he provides the historical sources before offering the poem itself, “so that if the intention to have it fluoresce as it were in the light of seven centuries of interrelated thought has at all been realized the poem will explain itself”.27 We should note his tendency to personify the poem and forget the author: offering itself as the remains of an otherwise dead light, the poem must explain itself, alone. All of these positions, games, and concerns organized on different levels of the work shape it as a series of structural layers whose relations are both extremely intricate and held together a priori by reason. Doubling the philosophical substance with the virtuous form gives it properties of an object whose solidity is great and unquestionable—accentuated by the displacement of authority towards earlier predecessors that is made by any work drawing so greatly on antecedents. It is difficult to locate exactly where Zukofsky’s responsibility lies. He adds another superimposition whose interferences become suspect if the elements are considered as “neither subjugating the other”: versification and syntax—a syntax that itself is arranged so as to preserve ambiguities whose possible variations in meaning as one reads become ever greater. In the above-quoted second line of the second part, for example, the appended word “values” can be a plural noun—possibly referencing things that represent love—or a verb in the third person—in which case the subject is “an eye”. The third line can therefore be read either as “valuates the measure all use who…” or “values serving as a measure to all those who…”. The ending of this same line, read initially without knowing what will come next, is “who conceive love, labor”—love as work. But the following line makes this reading uncertain: “who conceive love, labor / Men see, abstraction they feel”—more than the meaning, the syntactic rhythm suggests: men see work and feel abstraction… 26 Walsh, Brechtian Aspect, pp. 76-77. 27 Zukofsky, First Half of “A”-9, p. 1.

136 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Therefore, while Cavalcanti’s poem is, according to Pound, “a struggle for definition”, “A”-9 activates a conception of language where polysemy plays a fundamental role—a description that remains valid on the condition that “struggle” is emphasized and “definition” is considered as the activity of defining, not its result. Peter Quartermain relates an anecdote that remains famous because it reveals everything about Zukofsky’s poetics: Guy Davenport once asked Zukofsky what the “mg. dancer” is who dances in “A”-21, “a milligram sprite, a magnesium elf, a margin dancer, or Aurora, as the dictionary allows for all of these meanings. ‘All,’ he replied.”28

Zukofsky rarely joked.

Value and Meaning: Capitalism and Abstraction Making Things Talk The poem’s anecdotal point of departure—at least for the first part—is the end of the chapter on “The Mystery of the Fetishistic Character of Commodities” in Capital: If commodities could speak, they would say: “Our use-value may interest human beings; but it is not an attribute of ours as things. What is our attribute, as things, is our value. Our own interrelations as commodities proves it. We are related to one another only as exchange-values.”29

This strange rhetorical move—a moment of the “imaginative handling of fact”30 Zukofsky found in the first chapter of Capital, along with some other oddities in the history of thought—concretizes the question posed by John Duns Scotus about a dark possibility. In 1933, Zukofsky wrote to Pound, denying being “the purely old style capitalist era […] I believe with Duns in the possibility of matter to think , & that in Marx’s economy, of all economies, alone there is substance for doing the new canzone.”31 Zukofsky uses Duns Scotus’ proposal in “A”-8, 28 Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics, pp. 77-78. 29 Marx, Capital, I, p. 58. 30 Pound and Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky, p. 171. 31 Ibid., p. 154-155.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

137

framed by passages from Marx—and after the long, “re-edited” excerpt from Bach’s letter to the Leipzig municipal council: Whether it was “impossible for matter to think?” Duns Scotus posed. Unbodily substance is an absurdity like unbodily body. It is impossible to separate thought and matter that thinks.32

The second and third sentences are quotes just as much as the expression in quotation marks: Marx summarizing Hobbes inspired by Bacon; “substance” evokes Spinoza. We are among proud companions of radical materialism. It is only one step from thought to speech, but small changes have occurred between Marx and Zukofsky. The node of Zukofsky’s reuse is in the middle of the first strophe of the first half: So that were the things words they could say: Light is Like night is like us when we meet our mentors33

The rest of the poem is supposed to be said by things… It is no longer a question of “commodities”, but things in general. Not only do they speak, they are words. Marx dreamt of giving voice to the soul of commodities. The words he attributes to commodities are not the long-awaited beginning of their communication with humans. For them, words are addressed to no one: what they would say if they spoke among themselves. They become words outside of communication without entering into verbal exchanges. The inanimate, non-human world takes on a life of its own that does not look at us. To deny it this life would demonstrate predatory intentions; to allow it opens a breach in reality, destroys the traditional hierarchy privileging humans, and makes the world a presence whose secret is that it can be denied us. To touch this presence, Zukofsky—and we discover, through Marx, a kinship with Benjamin here—proceeds paradoxically, again relating to Roubaud’s “not not A” principle. In contrast, the method of an Alain RobbeGrillet, for example, regarding similar problems is simpler: he decides to refuse “these anthropomorphic analogies [that] are repeated too insistently, 32 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 46. 33 Ibid., p. 106.

138 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

too coherently not to reveal an entire metaphysical system”; doing so, he poses a non-problematic divide between humans and the world: “Man looks at the world, and the world does not look back at him.”34 It is in a mode of eminently problematic personification that Zukofsky—like Benjamin with allegory and long-developed metaphor, historically unacceptable modes from the perspective of orthodox literary modernity—turns the problem around, testing the possibilities and limits of language in general and human language in particular. For Zukofsky, things of the world, including words, do look back—a problem haunting his Bottom, as indicated by the quote from Shakespeare he uses as the title for the first part: “O, that record could with a backward look”. But as in Moses and Aaron, the question of “predatory intention” persists: how do we assure that the words leant to things do not subjugate them, that they come from the soul of things and not our fear before the opaqueness of the non-human? Nothing can assure this: such words are impossible just as Moses’ words are impossible, divine, and blasphemous. When they speak, things utter a contradiction (their language is different), say they are a contradiction, not in themselves but when they enter into relation with their masters: “Light is / Like night is like us when we meet our mentors”.35 The only way is to find a relation to language itself that is not predatory: as Aaron demonstrates, predatory intention always appears simultaneously vis-à-vis things, language, and power. Undoing the predatory form of language (which is also an alienated form) will immediately lead to the liberation of the relation to objects and politics—the three form a Borromean knot, so to speak. A Pulsion to Action Sings Let’s resume: An impulse to action sings of a semblance Of things related as equated values, The measure all use is time congealed labor In which abstraction things keep no resemblance To goods created; integrated all hues Hide their natural use to one or one’s neighbor. So that were the things words they could say […]36 34 Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, pp. 53 and 58. 35 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 106. 36 Ibid., p. 106.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

139

Marx is everywhere. Every expression, even every word, hides quotes or pseudo-quotes: We may put the matter thus. As values, commodities are mere jellies of human labour, and for this reason our analysis reduces them to value in the abstract, but does not give them any value form differing from their bodily form.37

Zukofsky did not write a “Marxist” poem whose thinking is inscribed in the master’s categories: he uses Marx’s textual material itself and manipulates it into an extraordinary syntax that the Cavalcantian form, “its music and emotion of intellect”,38 makes pulse with its own rhythm. In the end, it is not one sense but several that remain arranged in interference fringes. The heart of the discourse is the disappearance of things behind an abstraction: value. Value makes them commensurable and creates the possibility for a relationship between them as well as their entry into exchanges, but only at the cost of the disappearance of their own materiality, through which they are incomparable. Equated to a certain “time congealed labor”, their disappearance implies the destruction of the part of their lives human beings spent making them. But by considering them objects created by human hands, reconstituting them not for exchange but real use, which is enjoyment, creates a fissure through which utopic light can penetrate: Light acts beyond the phase day wills us into Call a maturer day, the poor are torn— […] men […] Disprove us least as things of light appearing To the will gearing to light’s infinite locus: Not today but tomorrow is their focus. No one really knows us who does not prove us39

The negations here are negations of negations. They point towards a riper tomorrow, which also means forgetting today, another trap. Real knowledge of things occurs through enjoying them, testing them, encountering them as a resistance, as Huillet and Straub would say. 37 Marx, Capital, p. 20. 38 Zukofsky, First Half of “A”-9, p. 1. 39 Zukofsky, ‘A’, p. 106.

140 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Things and Words The capitalist moment makes things disappear behind an abstraction: exchange value. It makes words disappear symmetrically behind another abstraction: their “value” through which they become tools of exchanges. This conception of language is impoverishing and predatory in that it implies monosemy and deprives language of its fundamental ambiguity—an ambiguity through which it lives, but which is eminently dangerous because it is a linguistic manifestation of the incommensurability of living and speaking beings. To forget this ambiguity in order to privilege an unambiguous, unproblematic meaning, however, ultimately results in losing this meaning, like obsession with profit and belief in unproblematic exchangeability end up destroying profit (“We affect ready gold a steady token”, “token” meaning both a symbolic or monetary substitute)—as an American who was 25 in 1929 knew well: […] things reflected As wills subjected; formed in the division Of labor, labor takes on our imprecision— Bought, induced by gold at no gain, though close eye And gross sigh fixed upon gain40

Like things, the world can only reflect the subjugated here. The division of labour introduces a language into the capitalist era characterized by imprecision, words not being used for their own pleasure but for communication between desires that are themselves alienated.

Love as a Poetic/Revolutionary Technique Love, Labour The solution is therefore working slowly, a labour of love. The coda of the first part ends: In these words which rhyme now how song’s exaction Forces abstraction to turn from equated Values to labor we have approximated. 41 40 Ibid., p. 106. 41 Ibid., p. 108.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

141

The poem’s formal difficulty, the amount of work it requires (from the author, perhaps from the reader), the time spent developing it (“2 years actual labor [on the first half] plus 7 years thought (?) and study”42) allows one to discover the words themselves, a non-predatory relation with them, and to construct a state of language and syntax that provides the words and things a chance to “ravish the senses”. It is therefore a moment of possible liberation. But this implies violence (“Forces”). The centrality of the relation to language in “A”-9 is confirmed by the fact that, while the first strophe of the first half gives the floor to things, the opening of the second half evokes another linguistic problem, that of “Benedict’s neighbor / Crying his hall’s flown into the bird”. 43 The anecdote is drawn from Ethics, where in a passage dealing with how “most errors result solely from the incorrect application of words to things”, Baruch (Benedict in Latin) Spinoza recounts how, “I did not think that person to be wrong whom I recently heard shouting that his hall had flown into his neighbor’s hen, for I could clearly see what he had in mind.”44 While in the first half things are words, now love bears their likeness. The word “love” is completely absent from the first part; it appears here in the second line appended to the word “labor”—we have already seen the ambiguities this creates—the first of 22 occurrences in the second part. The word “labor” at the end of the third line of the second strophe is found in place of the word “amore” in Cavalcanti’s canzone—where it is used only once. The first half substitutes labour for love, the second half returns to it but without making labour disappear (“values / The measure all use who conceive love, labor”). Love is labour, as well as that which justifies, transforms, and transcends labour. Marxist revolt is not abandoned, but indignation alone—anger, including metaphysical anger—leads only to vagueness, confusion, and powerlessness: “worms dig; imprecision / Of indignation cannot make the rose high”. 45 As indicated by the reference to Spinoza’s anecdote, the second half is also centred on the question of the mistake (and therefore the definition) of the proper application or not of words to things, and ultimately of referentiality, which we’ve seen is at the heart of Zukofsky’s questioning. To escape this generalized imprecision, the division of labour

42 Pound and Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky, p. 203. 43 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 108. 44 Spinoza, Essential Spinoza, p. 55. 45 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 109.

142 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

must be abolished and we must abandon ourselves to love, one and the same gesture: Love acts beyond the phase day wills us into— Hate is obscure, errs, is pain, furor, torn—a Lust to adorn aversion, hope—love eying Its object joined to its cause, sees path into Things the future or now46

Love sees—this is the theme of Bottom—and leads to things, mixing object and cause (result and labour). Future and present are f inally together, allowing nothing to be sacrificed for the supposed benefit of the other. Rather than the poem of a man regretting the past politicization of his work, what appears here is a commentary on Jewish thought—language and history, love of texts and love of the world—where Spinoza’s political power is tested and proven. But if it is through love that the very being of things (of words), their incommensurability, is given to us, there can be no communication or exchange in the sense(s) developed in the first half. And, in effect, love is above all distance, isolation: “Light is / The night isolated by stars”; “Elysium exchanges / No desires”. 47 Love presupposes distance and a gaze—“A”-9 is also a critique of Cavalcanti’s conception of love, which also finds its source in the gaze but is deeply marked by melancholy. The joy of love is deep and transcendent here. This does not prevent the poem from ending with a coda marked by a bit of historical despair: Love speaks: “in wracked cities there is less action, Sweet alyssum sometimes is not of time; now Weep, love’s heir, rhyme now how song’s exaction Is your distraction—related is equated, How else is love’s distance approximated.”48

Critical pessimism includes poetic writing itself and the possibility of “the emotion of intellect” that the poem constructs. It is also a reminder that the second half of “A”-9 was written from 1948 to 1950 in a time when “wracked 46 Ibid., p. 110. 47 Ibid., pp. 108 and 109. 48 Ibid., pp. 110-111.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

143

cities” still bore witness to the vigour of vileness in the landscapes of Europe and elsewhere. The Grammar of Love The amorous syntax that is the poet’s task—labour—must therefore be based on a principle of isolation through which the poem in its entirety as well as each of its words is returned to its primitive richness, its materiality, and its polysemy. Grammar is a mesh—Lacan and medieval theorists of love would call it an interweaving—of traditions and chronologies: it is traversed from one side to the other by the movement of history or rather recognizes itself as the site where history shows its full dimensionality. Every thought, every language, and all syntax are a remnant of purportedly dead lights whose brilliance can be maintained in a love that does not renounce any era. It is therefore a matter of placing ourselves in the warmth of these nodes, all while maintaining a distance that is not a refusal, but love. The method that amorous syntax uses is then “what might be called a ‘generalized practice of disjunction’”, 49 as Serge Daney wrote about Huillet and Straub. The incessant syntactical cuts have a rhythmic value—reading becomes choppy, as Anglo-Saxons say of Soviet montage. The constant, forced return to the materiality of the text, and the grammatical isolation of the word, as well as the ambiguities of construction, push us constantly to question its meaning, to rediscover its polysemy. Edward Schelb: “By the act of interruption, Zukofsky enacts meaning through the bodily, rhythmic disturbances of prior texts.”50 Isolation is one way of describing the poem’s necessary objectivation. The poem is a thing, love bears its semblance: worked on for a long time, its technical achievement is the fruit of a labour whose goal is ‘to ravish the senses’ and is therefore erotic—“Difficult rare excellence, love’s heir”.51 The labour it embodies dates back to an older conception of the reigning division of labour. Artisanship is a good model. In The German Ideology, Marx writes that in the Middle Ages: In the towns, the division of labour between the individual guilds was as yet very little developed and, in the guilds themselves, it did not exist at all between the individual workers. Every workman had to be versed in 49 Daney, “A Tomb for the Eye”, p. 395. 50 Schelb, “The Exaction of Song”, p. 339. 51 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 110.

144 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

a whole round of tasks, had to be able to make everything that was to be made with his tools. […] [E]very man who wished to become a master had to be proficient in the whole of his craft. Medieval craftsmen therefore had an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was capable of rising to a limited artistic sense.52

Aesthetes will appreciate this. But Cavalcanti’s form dates to this period and precedes both the division of labour and the formation of ‘literary subjectivity’—perhaps literary is superfluous. Michel Zink places the birth of subjectivity in the modern sense in literature in the “century of Saint Louis” (who died in 1270)—incarnated notably in a shift in poetic form away from the “great courtly song”, one characteristic of which is “generalization” and disinterest in the anecdotal of the simply subjective: The courtly song is of course a confession of love, but the confession is illusory. […] It is a confession in appearance alone, because the poem proceeds in a systematically generalized manner. It ignores the story behind the circumstances of the love in favour of considerations on the nature and effects of love, its requirements and its ethics, and more fundamentally in favour of rhetorical variations on the expression of love. The confession is not only illusory because of the generality of the discourse. It is illusory above all because the poem is a closed circuit. Not only because the proposition “I love” exhausts its contents, but even more because its discourse is to explain why the necessary corollary of this proposition is poetic creation itself and why poetic creation is more than the consequence, the equivalent, or the opposite of this proposition. Each of the two propositions, “I love” and “I sing”, only echo each other. As [Paul] Zumthor says, the “I” is only the grammatical subject of the process expressing the qualities of love and song.53

The “Donna me priegha” that opens Cavalcanti’s poem is a pure opening whose rules are rhetorical and where biographical authenticity is irrelevant. Moreover, it is a canzone; made to be sung. Michel Zink emphasizes that the shift to a writer-centric system led to the extinction of singing: To put it differently, generalized idealization and the past’s distance play equivalent roles in literary communication. If these two meditations 52 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, V, p. 66. 53 Zink, La Subjectivité littéraire, pp. 50-51.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

145

are replaced in the poem by a personal anecdote, we are dealing with the association of new factors: the present, the concrete, the poem’s I. This combination only echoes the poet’s self and no longer the receiver’s subjectivity, whose place has been conserved in courtly generalizations and an illusory projection in the common memory of amorous fantasy. One mark of this change is the disappearance of music, which had been a means for the singer to appropriate the poem’s subjectivity.54

Returning the poem to song—strangely performed here by Zukofsky, who is obsessed in his work with finding (trobar) a musical poetic form—echoes Huillet and Straub’s admitted task: working on diction and the text in the materiality of its enunciation: So that the inventor of printing, Gutenberg, is dispossessed, so that the text becomes part of oral culture again, meaning something that is said. Part of our work involves this: dispossessing Gutenberg.55

In a text on the “artisan form of communication”,56 praising both the spoken word and objectivity in the strongest sense, Benjamin comments: With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. […] It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while [the stories] are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of the work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself.57

Poetry as song changing into a spoken text expresses a return. Benjamin expresses this utopia: the dream of a community of self-forgetful people, where labour is artisanal58 and not the darkness of alienation, meaning a rhythm. If the self is born, the song is lost, as well as language. Let’s not 54 Zink, La Subjectivité littéraire, pp. 78-79. 55 Damerau, “Le chemin passait par Hölderlin”, p. 101. 56 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 91. 57 Ibid., p. 92. 58 Zukofsky‘s interest in artisanship is documented by texts written in 1936 for the Index of American Design. We read there, for example: “In objects which men made and used, people live again. The touch of carving to the hand revivifies the hand that made it”, Zukofsky, A Useful Art, p. 149.

146 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

forget, Zukofsky writes/quotes: “You must allow by ‘individual’ is meant / Middle-class owner, not nine-tenths of the people”.59 These tiger leaps into the past below the free skies of poetic and linguistic forms, among other things, make such a poem dangerous for our era; Zukofsky had already written in his poem “‘Mantis’, An Interpretation”: “Our world will not stand it, / the implications of a too regular form”.60 A form’s regularity, the labour of love it implies, the desire for perfection it supposes, the possibilities it unveils in language and things, the criticism it incarnates of the alienated relations we are trapped in, and the isolation it places itself in with regard to its author and reader—an isolation that is love—do a great deal of conscious violence to the world as it is. A Description of Zukofskian Techniques and Their Applicability to the Films of Huillet and Straub In “A”-9 and elsewhere, Zukofsky starts with pre-existing texts that he reorganizes in a formal construction whose origin is a priori unrelated to them. Structural levels are superimposed and produce meaning (among other things) through their mutual interference as well as by disturbing the primitive, rhythmic surface. The very high degree of constructivism ideally results in play between the strata without the author’s intervention and (therefore?) without predatory manifestations regarding each of the work’s components—earlier texts, language, things, etc. Each of these elements must maintain the greatest possible degree of freedom within the structure, no matter how “solid” (“objectified”) it is. This introduces a “generalized practice of disjunction”—a way of balancing the extreme, architectural complexity by working on the articulations, which must never be weak or soft, but non-restrictive—leaving the elements pseudo-independent, “neither subjugating the other”—even if a structure composed of non-restrictive articulations seems and is paradoxical. Nevertheless, it is only at such a price that a work can be conceived whose own objectivity—its “regularity”, objectivation—is achieved to the point that the work becomes dangerous for the world—while remaining without predatory intentions. The absence of any such intentions—of intentions?—is in turn the only way that the artwork, achieved in its highest conception (autonomy of the work as objectified, having become a thing whose semblance love bears and is therefore isolated), can “be taken for a 59 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 50. 60 Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, p. 70.

SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: “A”-9

147

sign that capitalism is going to capitulate as well” and participate in this victory or defeat through the elaboration or reminder of a form of labour (undivided, a form of love), of a link to language and things (inseparably) and to power (inseparably) that is real, not transformed into a value relation. This link is necessarily paradoxical since it is not a relation, but a distance: the absence of a link, love. It depends on forms of finely controlled contradictions that Euclidean-style geometries have trouble understanding, but certain ancient disciplines of thought—that state of language called negative theology—have provided examples of. The preceding two paragraphs describe equally well how “A”-9 and Moses and Aaron work, and many other works by Zukofsky, and Huillet and Straub. However, these ideas are not very popular, as the astonishment in critical reactions bears witness—criticism whose similarities in eulogistic or negative commentaries devoted to the poet and the filmmakers have been stressed. It was necessary that at one moment these artists who shared, it is true, some conceptions and tastes (leftist-Marxist tendencies, an immeasurable admiration for Bach, and a few others we will encounter later), would find themselves confronting similar problems and attempt to resolve them in analogous manners—all other things being equal. Only in this way can we explain why we can see similar techniques and common practices at work in the two oeuvres: use of pre-existing texts through interferences between semi-independent, superimposed structures, apposition, disjunction, quotation, etc., techniques always reflecting on problems in the relation between language and things, language and images, language and power, the gaze, love and art. The chosen procedures are the consequence of these interrogations and the resulting forms are their objectivation.

Bibliography Banville, Théodore de, Petit Traité de poésie française. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Damerau, Burghard, “Le chemin passait par Hölderlin”, Brecht après la chute, ed. Wolfgang Storch. Paris: L’Arche, 1993. Daney, Serge, “A Tomb for the Eye”, Der Standpunkt der Aufnahme – Point of View: Perspectives of Political Film and Video Work, ed. Tobias Hering. Berlin: Archive Books, 2014. Marx, Karl, Capital, 2 vols., trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. London: Everyman’s Library, 1942.

148 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, “The German Ideology”, Collected Works, 5 vols., trans. Clemens Dutt. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, pp. 19-539. Mirandola, Pico della, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486), trans. S.A. Farmer. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona State University, 2003. Pound, Ezra, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1935. Pound, Ezra and Zukofsky, Louis, Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn. New York: New Directions, 1987. Quartermain, Peter, Disjunctive Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Robbe-Grillet, Alain, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Roubaud, Jacques, “A 10 (fragments), Louis Zukofsky”, Action Poétique, no. 56 (Dec. 1973), p. 12. —, “La Destruction de la sextine”, Change de forme: Biologies et prosodies, 2. vols., ed. Jean Pierre Faye and Jacques Roubaud. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1975. —, La Fleur inverse: L’Art des troubadours. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2009. Schelb, Edward, “The Exaction of Song: Louis Zukofsky and the Ideology of Form”, Contemporary Literature, vol. 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1990), pp. 335-353. Scroggins, Mark, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Spinoza, Baruch, The Essential Spinoza, trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006. Walsh, Martin, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema, ed. Keith M. Griffiths. London: BFI Publishing, 1981. Zink, Michel, La Subjectivité littéraire: Autour du siècle de saint Louis. Paris: PUF, 1985. Zukofsky, Celia, ‘Year by Year Bibliography of L.Z.’, Paideuma, ‘Lous Zukofsky 1904-1978’, special issue, vol. 7, no. 3 (Winter 1978), pp. 603-610. Zukofsky, Louis, “A”. New York: New Directions, 2011. — (ed.), An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology. Le Beaussett, Var, France: To Publishers, 1932. —, A Useful Art: Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design, ed. K. Sherwood. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. —, Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. —, The First Half of “A”-9. New York: self-published, 1940.

5.

Cinema, Poetry, History: Immobilizations Abstract This chapter focuses on several of Straub-Huillet’s films including History Lessons, Too Early/Too Late, Cézanne, Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice, and The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, looking at them through the lens of poetic devices such as the ideogram, gaps, interruptions, and stops, and how these may relate to cinematic devices used by Straub-Huillet including long-duration shots, tracking shots, and abrupt cutting. The role these devices play in the poetry of Oppen and Reznikoff are also analysed, as well as the Bertolt Brecht’s, Straub-Huillet’s, and the Objectivists’ penchant for quotation, generally without citations in the case of the latter two. Louis Zukofsky’s essay on Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times proves a key text in developing an Objectivist view of cinema that is ultimately quite Straubian. Keywords: Straub-Huillet, Objectivists, Brecht, Chaplin, poetic devices, Mallarmé “A paragraph is a liberty and a liberty is in between.” ‒ Gertrude Stein, How to Write1

Bertolt Brecht was in some ways exemplary. Literally: an important part (though not all) of (leftist) thinking about the relationship between “theatrical art” and politics has been constructed in his shadow. He seems to have resolved contradictions and found practical and theoretical ways to maintain a demand for formal innovation and invent radical politics with aesthetic means. Epic theatre, the Verfremdungseffekt, and poetry based on popular forms (“domestic sermon”, song, operetta), which is therefore clear, readable, 1 Stein, How to Write, p. 139.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_ch05

152 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

and “accessible” to the “people” addressed, as well as aiming to transform their relationship to art and effect political change: this is all transparent. Brecht’s work is related to the trobar leu. In contrast, Arnold Schoenberg produced a body of work whose coherence could not be less obvious: it is difficult, complex, and “hermetic”, but after all the man was not particularly democratic and it probably did not displease him that he only reached a small “elite” of fifty people around the world. Of course, Moses and Aaron deals with more complex questions, but it seems rather easy to forget them. Huillet and Straub could simply have been Brechtians. They work in film of course, which means finding transpositions, but here again, it should not be too difficult not to look too closely. Their admiration for Brecht and his influence on their work is unquestionable. In 1965, they placed Not Reconciled twice under his patronage: the subtitle Only Violence Works, Where Violence Reigns is spoken by the dramatist’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards after her “conversion”, and the opening titles end with a quote about the principle of quotation: “Instead of wanting to create the impression he is improvising, the actor should rather show what the truth is: he is quoting”2—“discovered in Brecht’s writings after making the film”,3 Straub stresses. Something is already noticeable here: the sentence stays on-screen “a time commensurate with our vain and paltry life”,4 as Debord would say quoting Pascal. That is, too briefly to be read. Huillet and Straub twice adapted Brecht’s work. History Lessons (1972) from a little-known, unfinished work, which is moreover not a play, but a novel, The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. The second, from 1991, is based on a play, but one where Brecht was only the adaptor: Antigone, the film’s original title being Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht 1948 (Suhrkamp Verlag)— the Antigone by Sophocles (441 BC) in the version by Friedrich Hölderlin (18001803) reworked for the stage by Brecht in 1948, with a hat tip to the publisher. As Straub says, “the path passed by Hölderlin”—their long-term use of the poet’s theatrical work and the film adaptations of the first and third versions of his The Death of Empedocles. Straub insists: What would it be like if rather than saying we tried to orient ourselves in relation to Brecht and keep our emotions to ourselves, we instead tried, with a text in fact by Brecht, not to work with distantiation, to make our 2 Brecht, “Anweisungen an die Schauspieler”, p. 668. 3 Damerau, “Le chemin passait par Hölderlin”, p. 97. 4 Debord, Panegyric, p. 41.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

153

most emotional f ilm, our tensest f ilm next to Moses and Aaron with Schoenberg’s music? What would that be like? We tested the text. […] We didn’t try to make a Brechtian film, but a strong, classical film.5

The film includes the text of the play as written by Brecht in its entirety with the exception of what came from Brecht: the prologue, set in Berlin in 1945, where two sisters hope for their brother’s return but only see an SS soldier arrive. This scene, in rhyming verse (unlike the rest, in blank verse), has no connection with the play other than the vague transposition of the situation (two sisters crying over their brother). Because it forced the work’s actuality, it was too much for the filmmakers. This removal is (proportionally) revelatory of where the filmmakers’ and dramatist-theorist’s positions diverge, first, because removal is a very Straubian operation, but also because the prologue is presented as a cautionary tale. Brecht’s commentary aims to assure that his intentions are clear, that his exhumation of the play is not mistaken for cultural or philological work, but as absolutely political. Huillet and Straub have contempt for and banish any form of explication, affirmation of intentions, or, more largely, the author’s explicit intervention. Unless, that is, it intervenes in the form of the quote in the end credits, for example, taken not from a play but a 1952 political speech by Brecht, which has the advantage of having no anecdotal connection with the play’s content. It concerns “breaking the hands” of those who “in all openness” prepare future wars. The connection must be constructed, which is another form of didacticism. The play is therefore presented as a raw document. Only its impressive historical layers are called to mind: Pericles’ Greece, pre-Romantic Germany (under the shock of the French Revolution), post-World War II Germany, and late 20th-century Europe (Sicily?—the film was shot in an amphitheatre in Segesta)… Huillet and Straub wager that the work can only—palimpsest—conserve in its structure and language traces of its time and offer itself to the mind as a constellation: what might have interested Hölderlin in Sophocles’ Greece and his language? What interested Brecht? What interests Huillet and Straub today? In the preface to the Antigone Model 1948, Brecht and Casper Neher write: Even the prologue could do no more than to establish the topicality and sketch out the subjective problem. The Antigone drama then unfurls the 5

Damerau, “Le chemin passait par Hölderlin”, p. 99.

154 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

action in its entirety, objectively, on the unfamiliar level of the rulers. It was possible to portray such grand-scale intrigue in an objective manner precisely because (and this was in other respects fatal) the old play was historically so remote that identification with its principal figure was impossible.6

The theme of objectivity is an undercurrent in all of Brecht’s theories. The meaning of the word varies if Brecht is using it to criticize the New Objectivity movement whose beliefs had some weight in Germany during the 1920s and against which he fought—a “bourgeois movement” destined to fail because “the bourgeoisie has absolutely no interest in real objectivity”7—or if he makes it an element and problem of epic theatre. We find in the notes of the Journal: [N]ote: aristotelian dramaturgy takes no account (ie allows none to be taken) of the objective contradictions in any process. [T]hey have to be changed into subjective ones (located in the hero).8

The desire to keep exterior what is exterior and not to transform into psychological affect what demands a political solution must be called objectivity, even when this creates considerable epistemological (and aesthetic and political) problems. All of Brecht’s practices are tied to this—quotation, plagiarism, collective creation, the Verfremdungseffekt. At the end of the Little Organon for the Theater, he notes: Objection: What about the kind of art which gets its effects from dark, distorted fragmentary representations? […] If one knows a great deal and can retain what one knows, it may be possible perhaps to get something out of such representations; but we suspect that unduly subjective representations of the world have anti-social effects.9

This statement closely evokes Zukofsky’s own—“Strabismus may be a topic of interest between two strabismics; those who see straight look away.”10 But we can clearly see (!) that for Brecht, a “fragmentary”, “dark” 6 Brecht, Brecht on Performance, p. 166. 7 Brecht, “Das soziologische Raum”, p. 558. 8 Brecht, Journals, p. 82. 9 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 279. 10 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 12.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

155

representation is a “distorted” representation of objective reality: he believed in the clarity of the world or the possibility of shining light on it in and through a readable form. An unproblematic art exists: Brecht’s work is related to the trobar leu. He would probably find inadmissible what Roubaud writes about the Objectivists’ conception: “Trying to understand the world as it presents itself to us poetically without sentimentalizing it. Morally interpreting it, or commenting on it tends to result in hermeticism, lacunae, and ellipses.”11 Lacunae and ellipses are part of Brechtian form, up to a certain point (there is a Brechtian sense of measure), and these aspects are at the heart of Benjamin’s (heretical?) interpretation of it. But Brecht is never hermetic and his formal work does not become “formalism”. Brechtian objectivity is therefore real, but it backs away from its ultimate consequences. Huillet and Straub push Brechtian principles until they escape—from the playwright as well as themselves.

Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene”: Motion and Pause, Cinema as History Introduction to Introduction There is a third f ilm in the Straubian corpus where a text by Brecht is read on-screen and where the question of the author’s intervention is also posed: Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene”, which has the particularity of being signed by Straub alone and was directed in 1972, contemporaneous to History Lessons. The “film scene” it is supposed to accompany having never existed, the film was supposed to illustrate Schoenberg’s opus 34, the “Musical Accompaniment” for an evening TV programme, commissioned by Süd-West-Funk in Baden-Baden. There is little about music and a lot about politics in what “Straubians” call “the little Schoenberg”. The film needs to be described the way it would have been seen: on television, without any foreknowledge, in a state of confusion. There are no opening titles: the f ilm begins with a shot of a terrace overlooking a sunny city. A rather young, blond man sits casually on the railing. He lights a cigar. For the only time in the film, he is in no hurry. After a short pause in profile, looking at something faraway but precise, 11 Roubaud, “La Tentative objectiviste”.

156 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

perhaps concentrating or gathering his energy, he turns towards us/the camera and speaks. He speaks fast and that’s not all. The man is Jean-Marie Straub, but one would have to know that. He says that when composing, Arnold Schoenberg did not want to let the “new rulers of the theatrical art, the producers see in his place, accusing them of ‘almightiness […], lack of culture and […] impotence’.” Opus 34 is an exception to this. The composer describes nothing in it. We do not see this man again. In his place, several easily discernible blocks follow one another. First, three portraits of the composer accompanied by Straub’s voice providing a handful of precise dates (birth of a work and a man, the exact day of his death) and introducing Wassily Kandinsky at the moment—1923—when a conflict between the men began. Next, intercut with short black leader, another man reads at length the text of two letters from Schoenberg to the painter (at one moment, over black, the music begins). A woman sitting on a sofa pets a cat while also speaking to the camera, which she faces calmly. She talks about Brecht, fascism, and capitalism (it is Danièle Huillet, which might change something). In the same location as the previous man, a third man reads what is clearly the continuation of what the woman was reading. A (famous) photo shows corpses lined up in open caskets. A man in a factory prepares bombs that are put into a bomber plane; the plane takes off; the bombs are dropped; they explode and burn the earth. An Italian and a German newspaper announce the acquittal of the architects of Auschwitz, found innocent by a unanimous jury. To an “innocent” (TV) spectator, the form might not look so strange at first: it is not so different from certain educational or propaganda films that traditionally combine didactic voice-over (a love of dates) with archival and original footage. But this is spoiled rather fast. The excessive speed as well as its insistence is striking: the man reads too long, his head obstinately bowed, looking at his text (we do not see his eyes—but we do see the microphone) in an austere-looking location. Then come the interruptions of black, music that is mixed too loud—for a “music film” (“accompaniment”), but it is the “subject”, so this is excusable—a woman answers a question she has not been asked with Brecht, more reading, and the unidentified shots that have no clear relationship with the subject. After two photographs that we must suppose represent Schoenberg (the commentary leaves little doubt), the fourth shot 12 shows a painting of a man viewed from behind walking down the street. Logically, this must also be Schoenberg: the painting is in fact a self-portrait. The camera tilts 12 Shot numbers from the published script in Ça cinéma.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

157

down, showing only the person’s legs before cutting to the man reading. The only other camera movement in the film is in shot 14 after the woman finishes speaking: we see a sound engineer press a button and the camera pans diagonally to show the third man reading. The photograph of the lined-up corpses has been attributed to Disdéri (1819-1889), but there is room for doubt. It shows the Communards shot in 1871. It is rather famous. It might therefore be recognizable, but the film does not say anything about it. The bomber plane is an American B-52 and it is dropping bombs on Vietnam. The black smoke filling the screen comes from napalm. We might guess this or not. It should have been obvious in 1972. Today it is a little less so. All of these documents are presented raw without any explicit commentary about their contents or the reason they are together. This must be constructed. As indicated by the title, it is supposed to be connected to the “Musical Accompaniment for a Cinematographic Scene” that Schoenberg composed, we are told, “from October 15, 1929 to February 14, 1930”. The relationship between Schoenberg’s two letters to Kandinsky, dated 1923, that take up most of the film and opus 34 is not blatant and also needs to be developed. It is mainly related to the one direction the composer included in his score, its subtitle, which Straub repeats three times at the beginning of the film: “Threatening danger, fear, catastrophe”. The art of not explaining is not only modern—choosing Herodotus as his example of dryness, Benjamin writes: “[I]t is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation. […] There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis.”13 Ezra Pound found it in the Chinese ideogram, as understood in the writings of Ernest Fenollosa. The “ideogrammic method” that Pound deduces is the foundation of what Derrida calls his “irreducibly graphic poetics [that] was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound’s writing may thus be given all its historical significance.”14 On Ideograms For Pound, the ideogrammic method represented a solution to the limits established by Imagism and, in a different manner, Vorticism. It is a poetic 13 Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 89-90. 14 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 92.

158 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

method, but, in the Poundian spirit, its application extends beyond the strict composition of poems—it concerns everything touching on perception and thought. In his Guide to Kulchur, he defines the ideogrammic method by explaining an exercise practised at the Japanese Imperial Court called “Listening to Incense”: “The interest is in the blend of perception and of association.”15 At the beginning of ABC of Reading, Pound provides an example of an ideogram: the ideogram signifying the east—the cardinal point, an idea—is deconstructed into the superimposition of the ideogram representing a tree and the ideogram representing the sun (= “sun tangled in the tree’s branches, as at sunrise”,16 therefore the east). Only concrete, nearly visible things are invoked. And as Fenollosa writes: “Chinese poetry […] is in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.”17 This objectivity—a recurrent theme in Fenollosa’s essay—results from the concreteness of writing—concrete signs representing concrete objects—and also from its mode of organization through systematic apposition without explanatory, discursive commentary: Poetry agrees with science and not with logic. The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective inclusions, poetry evaporates. The more concretely and vividly we express the interactions of things the better the poetry.18

Grammar is constantly threatening to fall into subjectivity, abstraction, and death. The ideogrammic method therefore functions through the raw juxtaposition of concrete facts, which Pound calls “luminous details”—a process Hugh Kenner describes: Pound’s structures, like Jefferson’s plough, were meant to be useful: to be validated therefore not by his opinions but by the unarguable existence of what exists. No more than Zukofsky, then, does he expatiate […]. Rather he constellates Luminous Details, naming them, as again and again in the Cantos he names the signed column. For the column exists; what it 15 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 80. 16 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 8. 17 Pound and Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character, p. 45. 18 Ibid., p. 57.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

159

proves about forgotten possibilities it proves by simply existing. […] It is not necessary to prove that the possibility was ever widely actualized; only that it exists.19

“Constellation” belongs to Straubian vocabulary. Ideograms come from what Kenner calls an “oriental aesthetic of intervals”;20 they are “lacunary bodies”, as Straub described Not Reconciled in 1966, quoting Littrés definition: “Lacunary body, body composed of agglomerated crystals that leave intervals between them.”21 By using intervals, joints—always susceptible to subjectivity, opinion, and intention—can be avoided. Assembling concrete elements at a distance, the ideogram is verifiable through what exists. The “luminous details” are similar to Zukofsky’s “particulars”: if “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”, 22 the luminous details condense history. “Listening to Incense” is a non-explicit def inition of the ideogrammic method, but it is also a concrete fact that reveals an entire civilization’s ref inement. Pound makes an underground connection between the method and the historical utopia of sharpened delicacy that founds it, justif ies it, and makes it possible. Ideogram, Cinema Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” presents or functions as an ideogram. The film juxtaposes a series of concrete events—texts, facts, images—forming a constellation without any explicit connection besides the fact that they are simply affixed in a form whose coherence—maintained rhythmically, in spite of and through their heterogeneity, which is clearly marked by the intervals—is all that guarantees an intellectual connection. Seemingly the solution for apparent continuity, the cinematic cut allows the technique of apposition to be easily used. In Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method, Laszlo Géfin emphasizes that “The montage technique of the cinema is the purest visual realization of the ideogrammic form.”23 Eisenstein would undoubtedly have approved of this line, having written an article in 1929, in which, describing 19 Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 325. 20 Ibid., p. 319. 21 Straub-Huillet, Writings, p. 66. 22 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 14. 23 Géfin, Ideogram, p. xvii.

160 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

how ideograms work in Asian languages in a strikingly similar way to Fenollosa/Pound, he exclaims: But this is—montage! Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content—into intellectual contexts and series.24

Leaving aside for a moment the thorny question of whether the shots are “single in meaning”, we can see that the idea is exactly the same (or almost) for Eisenstein and Pound. Huillet and Straub accentuate the effect of apposition by slightly off-setting the place of the cut, sometimes making it “abrupt”, making it noticeable and signalling it as a break. This may require a few frames. Shot 13 of the woman reading is edited a bit too “loosely”: we wait a few short seconds before she speaks (her eyes lowered), then after she has spoken (her eyes staring at the camera). From shot 14 to 15—an axial cut through the recording studio window on Peter Nestler reading—the cut is too short: Nestler has hardly finished pronouncing his last word in the shot when the cut intervenes and he begins speaking again in the following one. Likewise, the photo of the Communards (shot 16) is edited very abruptly just after the film’s final spoken line, Brecht read by Nestler: “Barbarism becomes visible as soon as monopoly can only be protected by open violence.” Through their juxtaposition alone, it suddenly becomes obvious that the photo “responds” to the text: visible barbarism. This confirms the autonomy of each shot. Elements are linked by the lack of a link (a form of love) through intervals and constellated into an idea. But do the ideogrammic interval and the interval in film—as theorized and implemented by Vertov or under the name of “lacuna” by the Straubs—work the same way? And first of all: what is it like in principle (the textbook case never having been achieved, we may regret) to read a text composed with the ideogrammic method? We read sequentially lines and groups of lines—fundamental elements of the ideogram—which appear to have no obvious transition or connection. Once all of the elements have been understood, the reader sums them up, mentally juxtaposes them, and the ideogram forms fulgurously in a flash, an emotional and intellectual complex presented instantaneously that is an “Image” in Pound’s sense and a thought (or the image of a thought). 24 Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 30.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

161

The idea that a text is something to be looked at is at the heart of the ideogrammic method, as Géfin recalls: For Pound, the setting side by side, without copulas, of verbal pictures will perforce establish relationships between the units juxtaposed. Such juxtapositions he called images. The image is the basic form of ideogrammic composition; it is not simply a visual impression but a union of particulars transposed onto the conceptual plane.25

On the (fixed) Image The idea of a text that creates images has implications, especially due to the main demand for a fulgurant flash, which is not exclusive to Pound’s definition, but is ancient, echoing, according to Michel Jourde, what “the Greeks call enargeia and the Latins evidentia or illustratio”: Located between a stylistic figure and a quality of style, enargeia is the orator or writer’s ability to arouse the listener or reader’s imagination. Enargeia has often been defined as the passage from the rhetorical to the poetic. […] The valorisation of the aptitude to see and be made to see through writing is associated in [Guillaume] Budé’s work with the definition of a sublime style that he calls uranoscope, meaning to be lifted up to heavenly contemplation, a clairvoyant style. […] In the aesthetics of enargeia, the image draws its power from its fixity. But for Budé, fixity is always relative and provisory.26

Fixity and/is power: the ideogram—Pound’s poetry—has trouble tolerating flow, and it is considered a weakness to accept this threat. This is touching in his poetry, the way the opposite desire, the reclaiming of this weakness, is touching in Zukofsky. In Introduction, fixity has sharp effects—at least during its first two parts. After Straub’s introduction, the film shows us two kinds of shots. The series of static photographs and paintings, and the men reading in a dubbing studio, a dark room with a window and a sound engineer in the middle, the camera placed where the projector would be. The readers face us, immobile and seated as banally as possible, their eyes invisible: everything that could make an image—in spite of the fixity, in spite of everything—is 25 Géfin, Ideogram, p. xii. 26 Jourde, “Menaces pour les yeux”, pp. 180-181.

162 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

ostensibly removed, suppressed; and the two men have their backs to the screen, which is itself white, nothing being projected. Everything here designates itself as an image that is missing, cannot be made, or is unmade; the f ilm is intended to make words and music heard. It refuses to be the film scene that Schoenberg’s work would have accompanied, just as it cannot be the representation of what the music itself brings into play historically. The final interruption of the shot of Straschek reading with black leader is also the longest (202 frames, or slightly longer than 8 seconds): during this time, his voice recites some lines addressed from Schoenberg to Kandinsky: “But where should anti-semitism lead, if not to violent deeds? Is it so hard to imagine this?” The images of Straschek speaking Schoenberg’s words are always on the verge of falling into black, the image of the absence of an image, which ties into the problems developed in Moses and Aaron. The texts do not in fact set off a movement belonging to the film; they are not perceived as unrolling a temporality. Instead, their heterogeneity makes them appear to be located to the side, waiting for something to connect them, place them in a context, or give them a conclusion. In 1969, Rivette said about Huillet and Straub’s films that “the film must be over before its reading (its re-reading) can be started; the telling of the dream must be finished so that the analysis, setting aside all non-literal matter, can discover the recurring, genuinely significant elements, together with the slips of the tongue, the masks, the metamorphoses, the censorships.”27 The elements are thus presented to our minds as possible components of a future ideogram. The historical documents presented in the film’s final section are truly images this time, even purer in that they are detached from their ‘natural’ soundtracks, as only Schoenberg’s music is heard. They are absolutely “moving” (spectacular). Only the f irst one—the photo of the Communards’ bodies—remains static, confirming that the film’s movement is still waiting to be triggered. On a certain level, these shots and their montage confirm how ideograms work as described above. After seeing the film, the question lingers in the spectator’s mind: how does this make a constellation (if it all)? What ties together the different materials I’ve been shown? The end of the film is therefore characterized by the summation implied by the ideogrammic form, time and movement cancelling each other out so that the work creates an image whose power is supported by its fixity. 27 Rivette, Rivette, p. 88.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

163

The ideogram—image and form of the sublime—dreams it is a way out of history. Sublimely, it dreams it is a way out of the individual. In fact, one leads to the other, as Adorno and Eisler suggest: “The fear expressed in the dissonances of Schönberg’s most radical period far surpasses the measure of fear conceivable to the average middle-class individual; it is a historical fear, a sense of impending doom.”28 Huillet and Straub admire Schoenberg for having been able to do something more than express his personal anxiety, for having been able to inscribe the historical moment into the musical material, and for having been able to make a “luminous detail” out of the darkest of times. Image/Movement: Problem—Rhythms in Introduction It would be unsatisfying to stop here, though. If there is an exceptional status to the shots showing Straub and then Huillet, it is not only because it gives us a glimpse of the authors in person. They are also the only two shots in colour29 (the rest are in various types of black and white depending on the source: new stock for the readers and various archival footage);30 the only two in daylight, even if Straub is in shadow on the balcony and Huillet inside; the only two where a text is recited without being read and where the eyes are visible—the camera is also addressed and (more or less) looked at directly; and the only two where the filmed people move (outside of the archival footage). The movement is always marginal: Straub lights his cigar slowly, but stops moving as soon as he begins to speak; Huillet lightly pets her cat Misti, who walks gently across her knees—the most noticeable action. These shots obviously organize the film’s two major hinges, since one introduces Schoenberg and the other Brecht’s text. They are presented as germs of mutation that ultimately remain static. At the centre of Introduction, however, is the treatment of time. Sketched during Othon, the use of caesuras placed in the diction at points that are not grammatically justified becomes systematic here: Straschek and Nestler fill their texts with unforeseeable pauses that are given rhythmic value by the rapid and imperturbably uniform flow of their speech. To be precise, the diction’s cadence is strongly marked and has singular consequences for the film’s overall functioning, which is not the case in Huillet and Straub’s other 28 Adorno and Eisler, Composing, p. 36. 29 Except the shot of Disderi’s photograph, which is black and white but on a colour background. 30 This is Huillet and Straub’s only film to mix colour and black and white in this manner—a mixture that, curiously, no critic has seemed to have noted.

164 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

films. As I discussed earlier, the refusal to create images seems intended to leave spectators dependent only on their ears, not preventing them from hearing by demanding their attention for what is shown. The opposite happens here. Very quickly, nothing happens in the images—aside from the intrusion, striking in itself, of moments of black. The spoken text is caught in its rapidity and the surprises the pauses create, redirecting our ears to the grammar. It becomes difficult for a spectator to follow the content of the text in its entirety. Eyes and ears find themselves simultaneously absorbed by two superimposed rhythms, both at work on the f ilm’s surface and bringing the spectator back to this surface: the rhythm with which Straschek’s shots are increasingly intercut with black leader as the film goes on (during one of these moments, the first chords of music are heard); the rhythm with which his words are mixed with strange pauses. Still, these cavities foreground a certain organization of temporality. Something happens at the moment when we come to the series of archival shots of bomber planes over Vietnam. These shots are in motion. First, we see close-ups of workers in an American weapons factory busy building and attaching bombs to airplane wings. These images are absolutely exceptional in Huillet and Straub’s films: it is the only time we see people at work who are not actors, musicians, or dancers—that is, performing alienating labour (the butchers cutting the throat and carving up a calf in shot 55 of Moses and Aaron, the shepherds leading their animals in shot 53 of the same film or in From the Cloud to the Resistance, do not belong to this category for Huillet and Straub). And the exception is made for the production of “weapons of mass destruction”, death at work everywhere. The bomber moves and takes off, an indicator light blinks, the bombs are dropped and explode—seen from the plane. The editing is too quick for this to look like a Hollywood war film, but the break from the extreme stillness of the previous shots is radical. And spectators quickly notice something: the images and music are synchronized.31 We might have doubts at first about the synchronization we notice or think we notice, but the last shot in the sequence, the longest—the earth seen from a plane and suddenly drowned in smoke by the explosion of a napalm bomb at the exact moment that the music makes a loud, tragic crescendo—is too striking to leave any room for doubt. The effect is absolutely poignant—in fact, probably sublime. The music therefore brings about the return to the movement of history. Schoenberg’s atonal harmonies represent nothing and a “film scene” 31 As Böser notes, recalling how little earlier critics have done so, The Art of Seeing, pp. 101 sq.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

165

accompanying them is, Straub says in the first shot, “unimaginable” other than through the subtitle, “Threatening danger, fear, catastrophe”, which leaves nothing to the imagination but describes a double but identical movement of the work and history. This overly-fast film is racing towards catastrophe—or rather attempting—through incessant rhythmic interruptions and by masking what it claims to show, to refuse a course whose secret and whose barbarism it wants to denounce. Schoenberg and Brecht tried each in their own manner to refuse it—Benjamin too: “The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.”32 The catastrophe is not what looks like will happen, but the collapse that opens at every instant. Dealing with it prevents history from becoming an evolution or progress, transforming it into a discontinuous series of events, pure rhythm. Through the music, the movement itself becomes an event. And a new break is born out of this movement: the climax marks the moment when the image, invaded by the black smoke from the incendiary bombs, returns to the darkness of the catastrophe caused by the introduction of movement into the film.

From Ideogram to Fugue: Poetry/Cinema Image/Movement: Problem—Zukofsky and Cinema The text expressing the full complexity of Zukofsky’s conception of cinema is certainly his 1936 essay on Chaplin’s Modern Times. Benjamin was of course not the only one to believe in the double superiority of revolutionary Russian cinema and American silent comedies,33 but Zukofsky establishes new proximities. The Louis Zukofsky collection of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas has a first, typewritten draft dated 18 March 193634 (the film had been released theatrically on 5 February of the same year). Prepositions contains a slightly revised version. Chaplin’s f ilm made the poet move. The essay was supposed to be included at the end of Zukofsky’s planned 1939 collection Sincerity and Objectification and it can in fact be read as a vast reformulation of the Objectivist conceptions of 1930-32—a reformulation that also shifts the 32 Benjamin, Selected Writings, IV, pp. 184-185 33 See “Chaplin in Retrospect”, Benjamin, Selected Writings, II, pp. 222-224. 34 15 pages, signed and dated (‘Mar. 18/36’). Item E16a in Booth, A Catalogue, p. 204.

166 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

emphasis, while maintaining in all of its demands the essence of the task assigned to the Objectivist poet (and artist). In fact, it is as though Modern Times proves by example the validity of Zukofsky’s project, like Diogenes the Cynic proved movement was possible by standing up and walking. Chaplin f inds himself placed in a history including f igures no less than Dante—through quotes from De vulgari eloquentia and the epistle to Can Grande dealing with “adornment”, which Zukofsky makes synonymous with “technics” and movement—and Joyce, as well as a certain animal: There exists probably in the labors of any valid artist the sadness of the horse plodding with blinkers and his direction is for all we don’t know filled with the difficulty of keeping a pace.35

Horses are a recurrent motif in “A”, evoking the artist in general and Zukofsky in particular. The difficulty is therefore to keep pace: we have seen that this is precisely the domain in which the filmmaker works. In its final form, the essay offers an enigmatic subtitle: “Mark Twain (over the embalmed Egyptian): ‘Is he dead?’”36 The manuscript version clarifies this somewhat while laying out the essay’s main problem and preceding it with “Did Chaplin intend?”37 The article aims not only to reject this question as irrelevant, but moreover to show that an author with intentions—which are always predatory—is the worst thing for an artwork. Several fundamental and related themes are explained in the f irst paragraph. Their connections form the subject in the musical sense—if the design of a fugue can be transferred to the writing of an essay, something Zukofsky would continue to try until Bottom. Impersonal, faster than the audience knows, international Chaplin in Modern Times is found at the head of a demonstration, the red flag of DANGER in his hand. Not by chance, because the scene is in the film. What Mr. Charles Chaplin (himself) thinks should be nobody’s business.38

Nowhere else is this aspect of objectivity (the refusal to construct a work on the author’s “ideology”) expressed more directly: it does not matter what an 35 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 63. 36 Ibid., p. 57. 37 “Modern Times”, HRC, p. 1. 38 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 57.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

167

author thinks. Zukofsky had earlier combined considerations of anonymous art and cinema by quoting Pound. These ideas appropriate for the poet’s own requirements older considerations about cinema and photography as being objective and impersonal by nature. Political Objective: Modern Times as Objectivist Model In a letter by Zukofsky to Poetry in defence of An “Objectivists” Anthology, he quotes Lenin: “This party rejected Marxism, stubbornly refused to understand (it would be more correct to say that it could not understand) the necessity of a strictly objective estimate of all the class forces and their interrelation in every political action”. (Lenin—Left: Communism, An Infantile Disorder.) In a word, this statement is the concern of the editorial presentation and the poetry of An “Objectivists” Anthology…39

Objectivity has a political value. But the article on Chaplin is where these concerns are first specified as aesthetic. Zukofsky starts with two counterexamples, René Clair and the surrealists, whom he had never particularly appreciated in spite or because of his attachment to Apollinaire, but with whom he was never so violent as here. They both make the mistake of placing other interests above the formal work: they follow personal vagueness instead of sticking to technical demands. The surrealists opt for regressive facileness (in Un chien andalou all that exists in the end is the “obsession […] congealing all movement”40) and a “laughable” and “ridiculous” morality of “absolute good and bad”. 41 To render aesthetic brilliance as the coarsest morality is wrong to both intelligence and art. It is the only wrong since Zukofsky feels they cannot be dissociated. Clair is accused of another shortcoming: For the most important art, an attitude toward history is not enough. Pervading the work of René Clair is the attitude of a synthetic judgment of the times, disturbing the movement of the films at their best. […] [T]he judgment of the French director seems more personal than if he were present to speak with his own gestures. The most complete moments in 39 Quoted in Schappes, “Correspondence: Objectivists Again”, p. 117. 40 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 58. 41 Ibid., p. 58.

168 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Clair are history of the manners of different strata of society presented without the overemphasis of his attitude […]. 42

This is fundamentally an accusation of stupidity (or the separation of art and thought) because they sought to include an explicit (moral or political) judgment in the film, therefore simplifying the filmed events (for Zukofsky, cinema is an art of organizing events—“the composition of action on the screen”43), abstracting them and turning them into illustrations. Their attitude is predatory. They prioritize intentions over form and the “design” of the film’s movement. Interpretation wants to pass itself off as intelligence, which it is not. But having become “little Dutch shoes which danc[e] of themselves as no feet could ever dance in them, [meaning] the perfection of dancing shoes, without interpretive feeling throttling the lilt”, the dance of the rolls in The Gold Rush is pure desire for objective perfection, pure rhythmic research, pure intelligence freed from the weight of interpretation and intention. Personal judgment upsets the f ilm’s movement and diminishes its aesthetic force while damaging its political validity. Cinema (and poetry) is only important if it makes historical events understandable in their full complexity. This is only possible if one renounces passing judgment in order to focus on technical questions alone. Cinematic (and artistic) intelligence is concrete and rapid: the movements of bodies develop rhythms that respond to each other and destroy all general ideas—moral simplifications or political schematism. Every consequence is at play simultaneously: The girl whose father has been shot down in the demonstration is shown in close up, grieving with the air around her. The satire, if one wishes to bring home a point, is that any director would have shown the close up of a star and omitted the air. The city in which the girl’s father has been shot is not named in the film. But if the spectator sees more than one thing at a time he sees 1. the girl 2. the air around her 3. the fact that it was filmed in America. 44

Spectators must also move quickly—seeing a film is no easy task—but if they manage, an ideal of thought and art can be constructed: concrete 42 Ibid., p. 59. 43 Ibid., p. 57. 44 Ibid., pp. 61-62.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

169

(never falling into abstract generalities), rapid to the point of simultaneity, in motion, able to perceive the entirety of a historical context in the relations between facts without abandoning any of its complexity. One must simply accept a prerequisite, to abandon oneself: “Charlie the actor never revealing his natural self is also Charlie in the set, an intelligence working itself out in the concrete.”45 Speed is the secret of this objectivity. At the end of the film and the essay, the two heroes walk off in love: [A]nd their arms bend up at the elbows, their f ists are clenched, too powerfully fast for the spectator to speculate what Mr. Chaplin means. If the spectator is intent on the film and not on his own thought, what can the action of the shot mean but what it does—i.e. performs. 46

Speed and rhythm are not accidents of thought, but thought’s necessary attributes. They go in tandem with attention, an eminent quality for Zukofsky (and the Straubs), as well as with objectivity: one must forget oneself and abandon one’s own speculations in order to allow the work to act on its own. The film moves “faster than the audience knows”; it is excessively quick, cannot be circumscribed, and flees. This is how it reveals its objectified character, that it belongs to the things of the world and shares in their opacity. A proximity to Huillet and Straub’s work is beginning to appear. The speed of their films is striking. I’ve already noted (and connected to Zukofsky’s writing) the incredible density of Othon’s plot, which the film exacerbates with diction that allows no rest and that an attentive listener can barely follow. The narration and editing in Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach are also extremely rapid and dense, contrasting violently with the sequences where entire pieces of Bach’s music are performed in static shots—sequences that are equally rapid in their own way in terms of the constant attention the music demands from the eyes and ears. Not Reconciled and History Lessons are equally striking in this respect. A work must certainly appear fleeting—recalling its own weight and thwarting the spectator’s tendency to desire to be master or proprietor. But the issue is also that of the rolls or the fists clenched “too powerfully fast” as the couple walks off in love: the need to keep pace (“To yoke oneself to the world of the facts and to keep apace is of an altogether different order of decision than trying to swim in 45 Ibid., p. 60. 46 Ibid., p. 64.

170 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

one’s poverty”47). The film is so fast that we can no longer speculate about what the author means, cannot even manage to see in the fists the sketch of a communist salute that Zukofsky evokes in his first version, just as in the beginning of the first draft, “the red flag of DANGER” in Charlie’s hand is more explicitly “the flag of revolution”. In the gap between the two versions of the essay is the appearance on the surface of a current carrying the text as a whole: it is less important politically to locate (see or find, which are not synonymous) traces of leftism in the film than it is to evaluate, stunned, the pace and to feel the depersonalized movement in itself. By accumulating symbols and references, Eliot manages to overwhelm his readers. Zukofsky works to make them lost by playing with speeds, translating the Bunting-Poundian “Dichten = condensare” into cinematic terms, speed and density not exactly being equivalents. But the result is also concentration, to which is added the intoxication of freedom. The characters move with their own energy, imprinting it onto the film, which becomes subjected to them: The rapidity with which they move as of themselves it would seem from incident to incident in the crowding number of events in each Chaplin film compels sequence, and concentrates their cinematic action many times that of the single historical meaning in the personal continuity of attitude of René Clair. 48

The dissipation of one man’s authority—Clair—to the multitude—Chaplin’s people and events—complicates things, better rendering the work of history. Opting to maintain a formal pace and rigour rather than interpretative feeling, Chaplin finds himself opposing the necessity for extremely close attention to the synthetic judgment of others, the stakes of which are again the formal and political whole: Charlie’s devices and “types” live with material thoughtfulness and thus historical meaning. […] [T]he sportsmanship of the montage—the cinematic equivalent of material thoughtfulness […]. The phrase reduces itself to the fact that nothing is fair on the screen unless shown in relation (or a strained relation) that has the amplitude of insight impelled by the physical, to be found in actual events themselves. 49 47 Ibid., p. 64. 48 Ibid., p. 59. 49 Ibid., pp. 59, 60, 61.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

171

The heart of Chaplin’s greatness is in the “thus”, which summarizes the task Huillet and Straub assign themselves. Something of cinema becomes forgotten as an image. The events themselves—historical and contemporary singularities—are organized on-screen, following their own pace in a dance that is not an interpretation but the world itself, suddenly become intelligible as laughter or “laughably intelligent”. A major concern reappears here, almost a fundamental Objectivist fear: a work not having a reference to an exterior or objectively real world must be avoided at all costs. Zukofsky: “The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference.”50 A mesh is made from the air around a face and the fake tears of a girl that tie into the historical situation of the United States of America in 1936. Four years earlier, in his preface to An “Objectivists” Anthology, Zukofsky had argued that this is precisely what the poem-object can do and that an entire context—a historical moment—can find its way into it: A poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and capillaries—The context—The context necessarily dealing with a world outside of it—The desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars—A desire to place everything—everything aptly, perfectly, belonging within, one with, a context […].51

Zukofsky sees another aspect joining speed and objectification: by only filming concrete elements (particulars), cinema has the ability—and poetry exemplifies this as well—to understand much vaster (historical) situations without sacrificing (when the technique is at its best) anything to abstraction, metaphor, or symbolism. In this respect, the Chaplin essay also explains the “Mantis” project: “World interaction of events today forces people to think in relation instead of discretely, and the speed of interaction on the part of an audience with the facts conveyed in a film is more immediate than whatever quibbling as to the director’s ‘real’ intention.”52 Throughout the text, Zukofsky insists on the necessity of seeing “free relation[s]” between singularities, a necessity cinema fulfils perfectly.53 And the very possibility of this mode of free relations—which might look like a 50 51 52 53

Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 58.

172 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

contradiction in terms—between a work’s elements may have been caused by a shock from cinema. A film presents a group of events (gestures, movements, objects, light, and sound events) in a very particular manner: they are either juxtaposed simultaneously in the same frame or diachronically. But if the filmmaker’s techniques surpass ideological judgment, the events are simply connected through their co-presence. They are not hierarchized through syntax, grammar (cinema is not a language), or even narration (this is complicated: editing begins where narration stops, but the site of this “where” cannot be located). Thus each element can maintain its freedom and all of its polysemy without being reduced to the work’s discourse: their relationship is not non-existent (or loose: Zukofsky’s concern for form keeps watch), but it is free, and the multiplicity of mechanisms producing the meaning they unleash drowns “the director’s ‘real’ intention” in a richness that is also speed. The fact that the poet measures Chaplin’s importance by the air with which he knew to surround the face of “the girl” echoes a conception of cinema in which a frame cannot be reduced to the face or another human attribute being shown. Its edges and proportions are as important as its centre. The entirety of Huillet and Straub’s work is built on this presupposition. It is the foundation of their cinema, as Straub recalls regarding Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach: Every finger is moving, we even the feel the air [in the shot], and besides, that’s the essence of cinema. They say that when people saw Lumière’s Le déjeuner de bébé [sic] or L’arroseur arrosé, they didn’t scream, “Oh, the baby is moving”, or “the waterer is moving”. They said, “the leaves in the trees are moving.” They had already seen the baby moving with the magic lantern. What was new was that the leaves were moving. The “leaves” in the Bachfilm are the musicians’ fingers and hands and Leonhardt’s unbelievable conducting gestures that are precisely not repetitive.54

The blockage of the “centre” of the image—what filmmakers or spectators normally focuses on—can be understood not as a minimalist effort, but as (forcing) spectators to turn their attention to marginal movements, small gaps, and the tempest in the teapot. In Moses and Aaron, Antigone, and Workers, Peasants, the actors and choirs do not move. There are already far too many things to see, movements to notice, and flowing air to feel. In Workers, Peasants, the tightest shots of the actors are framed above the 54 Färber, Patalas, Grafe, and Linder, ‘Gespräch’, pp. 689-690.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

173

shoulders, and maintain much more space above the heads than would be tolerated anywhere else: deep in this forest, the light on the leaves and earth dances differently in each shot and frame, since it does so differently at every moment of the day. Moreover, when Zukofsky affirms, “The desert in today’s films is not felt as then [The Fugitive, Thomas Ince, 1916], though much more reel is covered with it”,55 he is not only echoing the Straubian obsession with the desert or Griff ith’s complaint that they sometimes quote (“There is a very beautiful sentence by Griff ith, ‘What the modern movie lacks is beauty, beauty from the moving wind in the trees’.”).56 Zukofsky’s line also refers to the problem in Too Early/Too Late, about which Jonathan Rosenbaum asks: “Is there any other f ilm about the countryside and landscape—barring only such special cases as James Benning’s work and Snow’s La Région centrale—in which something is always happening in the shot?”57 Fields, highways, roofs, walls, sign and fence posts, clocks, and clouds: Too Early/Too Late is a film where human figures remain absent or rare and distant, fleeting. They have left only their traces, which Huillet and Straub’s high formal demands bring into a plastic system devoid of intention—the formal and rhythmic composition of the shots, the precision of the editing—even if explicitly political elements appear—the graffiti: “The peasants will revolt” at the transition between the two parts, creating a possible equivalent to the “red flag of DANGER”. If explicit statements are not detrimental to the flow of the film, it is because they are present not as synthetic, pre-existing judgments, but as elements in “free relation” to other elements in a structure where generalized apposition is the rule. The images are not subject to commentary: the image and soundtrack are in free counterpoint, where notes are occasionally heard in clear harmony. Zukofsky discusses counterpoint in his essay: His music counterpoints his action, as in the climactic sequence of his upright waiter’s hand carrying a tray above the heads of the churning crowd of dancers. The music might have bolted the action just as the tray carried high might have failed as a feat. Moving intrinsically, and against each other, both come through together.58 55 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 58. 56 Engel, “Andi Engel talks to Jean-Marie Straub”, p. 10. 57 Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line, p. 195. 58 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, pp. 63-64.

174 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

As an art where events can happen simultaneously, cinema is essentially polyphonic. According to Zukofsky, the primordial concern for gestural precision— that Huillet and Straub, like Chaplin, obtain through long rehearsals and many takes, providing them with suff icient material for multiple versions—is primarily rhythmic. A film is a cadence or a superimposition of cadences in contrapuntal “free relation”: its true meaning is nowhere else but in the realization of this. The use of rhythm is a central obsession for Huillet and Straub, who, in the fourth page from the cover of their edition of The Death of Empedocles, quote Bettina von Arnim relating some words of Hölderlin: He said that […] the laws of the spirit are metrical […] [S]o long as the poet is seeking the accent of the line and is not led by the rhythm, his poetry remains without truth, since poetry is not vain, meaningless rhymes that no deep spirit can enjoy. Poetry is this: the fact that only the spirit can express itself rhythmically, that its language lies in rhythm alone, while the non-poetic is also spiritless and without rhythm.59

For Huillet and Straub, questions of rhythm and form are practically equivalent. Both are original. One of the concrete implications of this is their use of diction. Speech should never present itself as an informal fluctuation; it should appear structured since it issues from a thought—and a situation and a historical state of language, etc.—which only appears through very precise use of rhythmic modulations, where a combination of accentuations and caesuras transform the elocutionary development into a differential system of speeds and pauses. The soundtrack also becomes intermittent. As in Zukofsky’s work, cadence holds a prime place in the production of meaning. In Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, certain sequences show a series of pans over handwritten or printed title pages or the beginning of one of Bach’s handwritten scores. But the speed of the editing often makes reading them impossible. Straub explained the reason for this haste to Frieda Grafe: “Precisely because the forms are more important than the content. And above the forms, the sequence has an internal cinematic rhythm.”60 Nobody would dream of describing Huillet and Straub’s films as non-f igurative, they do not give up showing something resembling 59 Arnim, Werke und Briefe, I, p. 544. 60 Färber, Patalas, Grafe, and Linder, “Gespräch”, p. 690.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

175

reality. And yet, this reveals an important complication; their concurrent or complementary tendency towards abstraction, in which the affixing of rhythm, form, and structure to things disturbs our view of them, allows access to a new perception and provides the work a source of existence. This is a specifically Straubian and Objectivist position that does not imply giving up being referential or figural, but that instead helps make things visible (Straub continues: “I think we see more when less is shown; more is suggested”61). For his part, George Oppen writes in his only essay published during his life, “The Mind’s Own Place”: It is part of the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth. It is possible to say anything in abstract prose, but a great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem.62

Huillet and Straub’s elaboration of diction is incarnated on the page as a versification. The structural, rhythmic shaping created on the page presents the substance of the original while also testing it. Formal work with texts, ideas, and things is the test that puts their truth into play, as well as our thinking and perception. “Recording and objectifying good writing wherever it is found” (Zukofsky)63 is an Objectivist task; and it is what Huillet and Straub spent the greater part of their time doing: recording and objectifying other people’s work, submitting them to the “test of truth”, which is what part of the function of the form consists in. The test is rhythmic, and maintaining the pace is in itself the test of the final work’s structural solidity, just as it is the site where its historical meaning is played out. The “free relation” between elements in a work implies a refusal to burden them with a commentary or encumber them with an interpretation: it means a generalized practice of affixing elements together. Each part keeping all of its degrees of freedom (as much as possible, as much as the artist’s technical accomplishment allows) and the entirety of its polysemy, there follows a density in the production of meaning and a speed of thought that is a form of escape. “A”-9 provides a radical example of this. Relating to a work in all

61 Ibid., p. 690. 62 Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place”, p. 133. 63 Zukofsky, An ‘Objectivists‘ Anthology, p. 205.

176 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

its complexity requires very intense attention, the result of the “material consideration” behind it. How is this consideration—whose content appears political—incarnated concretely? Zukofsky perceives it in the “sportsmanship of the montage”, the capacity to show things “in a relation” in such a way as to sacrifice nothing of the real situation in which they were recorded.64 For a girl to lose her father in a demonstration, a vast group of conditions must be assembled which describe a historical state. The task of the editing and framing is to find the means to show one thing without neglecting anything of the other. In the mass scenes of Modern Times moving with the newsreel immediacy and swift timing of Jakob Blokh’s A Shanghai Document, the direction realizes: the strike, the hunger demonstration, the unemployed crowding the gate to get a job in the factory. To have filmed these things for the facts they are would seem to be a more difficult job than the one Eisenstein faced in Ten Days that Shook the World—his documentation and his cast already backed by the conviction arising from events of past history.65

To manage to “have filmed these things for the facts they are” is quite a task. It implies considerable historical work—and in his movements, the Tramp does not forget the “Indians”.66 Less consideration, less technique, more personal judgment and they become moments of an ideological edifice, their relations being simplified, neglected, and falsified. For Huillet and Straub, material considerations must intervene on every level: respecting every connection—physical, historical—in which things present themselves occurs at every step from découpage to framing to editing. The construction of Not Reconciled re-establishes the supposedly severed relationship between Germany in 1964 and Nazi Germany. The films are shot with direct sound in order to respect the indivisibility of a face and a voice, a gesture or material and the sounds they produce. The découpages are written in such a way as to respect the relations between the characters, as well as—through the method of the “strategic point”, for example, to which I will return—the space itself, meaning the architecture of the sets as well as the form of emptiness. 64 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 61. 65 Ibid., p. 62. 66 See ibid., p. 62.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

177

Interruptions Regarding Mallarmé “There, under the cobblestones now ringed with grass, the Commune’s blood had poured forth, masses of men had been shot down; the flaking plaster of the façades still had the bullet marks and children, digging holes to play marbles sometimes still found a human bone. The place was bourgeois and terrible.” ‒ Camille Mauclair, Sun of the Dead (1898)67

I have stated that Huillet and Straub have never—or almost never—sought “cinematic equivalents” for techniques in the works on which their films are based. One of their films, however, is, in its entirety, an exception to the rule. Excluding dramatic poems, it happens to be their only foray into bringing “pure” poetry into cinema. Shot in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris on 9 and 10 May 1977, Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice constructs a constellation based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poem: A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance. The film has a simple principle: seated on the small hill near the plaque commemorating the dead of the 1871 Commune—shown in an opening pan—four women and five men recite the poet’s words one after the other. After the first shot shows them together and reveals their arrangement on this small patch of shaded grass, each of the readers is isolated in the frame long enough to say their lines. The final shot is a wide shot of Paris from a nearby perspective. This basic description already suggests part of the aim. The title—which the title card credits—is a quote from Jules Michelet, a historian who published, notably, from 1847 to 1853 a major History of the Revolution that he re-published in 1869. Perhaps by chance, he suffered two attacks of apoplexy during the Commune on 30 April and 22 May 1871. “Every revolution is a throw of the dice” ties together the poem—which ends with the famous (unpunctuated) line: “Every Thought emits a Throw of Dice”—and the Commune. Their apposition calls attention to their contemporaneity and encourages us to see how they might be coherent, how they could perhaps be called one historical moment. Mallarmé’s friendships in anarchist milieus—Fénéon, Viellé-Griffin—come to mind as well as the fact that he wrote “I know of no other bomb than a book” (a 67 Mauclair, Sun of the Dead, p. 256. Description of the Tertre square in Paris.

178 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

line repeated and sometimes distorted) and that he spent the first months of 1871 in Avignon (where he had been teaching since 1867) somewhat terrif ied by events in Paris and the fate of his friends who were more attracted to the rioting. Added to this is something that the f ilm does not announce but Straub and his critics do: under this hill are buried the bodies of the last Communards executed against the wall where the plaque is now hanging. The film is therefore a tomb offered to people who did not receive one—an eminently Mallarméen practice and a Straubian obsession. But this tomb does not announce itself, does not present itself as a tomb, because we have no way of knowing that anyone is buried beneath the ground. An unmarked grave is thus being invented, signalled by its absence, and none of the names of the people are pronounced who were once too dangerous to have their names marked. A close comparison of the poem and f ilm—or reading some of the commentaries the film has inspired—reveals another aspect of the filmmakers’ approach. The text is split up among the nine speakers based on the typography: each “(re)citer”—as they are called in the credits—is given one of the nine typefaces used on the pages. Huillet recites the lowercase Roman letters for example. The film attempts to take some of Mallarmé’s principles seriously: And this bare use of thought, with retreats, prolongations, flights, or its very design, becomes a musical score for those who would read it aloud. The typographic variation—between dominant, secondary, and adjacent pattern—dictates its importance for oral recitation, and the range—middle, top, or bottom of the page—will mark the rise and fall in intonation.68

While this principle is very important and gives the impression that we are witnessing the unfolding of the poem, the flattening out of its events, the diction itself does not entirely follow Mallarmé’s directions: the men charged with the uppercase letters speak louder, but we do not hear the vertical use of the page in their intonation. This represents a formal gap for the film: the Straubian scansion is earthy, heavy. Its beauty is in the weight it gives to the words, in how it makes the text carry stones. Mallarmé’s sounds are adamantine, all muslin or foam and ballet. Introducing one on the other confuses the poem in the same way that the numbered, left-aligned lines 68 Mallarmé, A Roll of the Dice, p. 1.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

179

in Huillet and Straub’s Italian translation “dismantles” the poem, but also shows how suffocating Mallarmé’s density can be without the blank spaces. For example, Huillet pronounces all the silent “e”s and inserts diereses everywhere possible, but this prosody causes the many female endings in the text to lose a bit of their fundamental quality of suspense. This film knows the blue of the sky and the green of the trees, but not the white of the page, a space where the scattered black of the letters trace the negative of the constellations. Pauses between words are rare, only caesuras are frequent. The intervals and spacing of the writing act as cuts. The pauses in the film are nothing in proportion to what the white on the pages leave for breathing room. The film’s rhythmic machine is “objective”, dictated by the poem’s structure. The cuts come only when changing between characters/(re)citers. The jumps are all the more noticeable since the film always cuts between seated, immobile people who are not looking at each other: nothing smooths out the editing—quite the contrary. This makes the structure/cadence of the partitioning of the letters in the poem noticeable. This aspect alone can be felt, creating a constraint for the film’s structural development—for example, the film’s structure does not include the double pages as a foundational unity of the text’s book-like appearance. The play of symmetry/opposition in the postures of the bodies, the directions they look, and in the framing creates a structure superimposed on top of this one, digging deeper in another direction based on the words and their dispersal. Because of the hill, the horizon in the frame is crooked, perhaps like the boat in the poem, “vessel / leaning to one or the other side”. It is even possible that the position of the reciters on the grass at the end of the first shot is an attempt to visually mimic something of the text’s movement on the pages. As the context already suggests and as we might expect, Huillet and Straub’s reading is of course political first and foremost. While reciting, Huillet holds her fist clenched visibly on her knee and slightly lifts it while evoking “this conflagration at his feet / of the unanimous horizon / that there prepares itself / is tossed and mingles / with the fist which would grasp it / as one threatens a destiny and the winds”. The related semantic field begins to flourish. For example, on this page: “THE MASTER”, “the head”, “submitted”, even “agitated”, “corpse”, and “refold”, or at the top of the following page, “ancestrally not to open the hand / clenched / beyond the useless head”… To see a simple gesture (the slightly raised fist, made very visible because it is the actress’s only gesture) at a certain moment while hearing a text can transform how we hear it and draw out previously buried qualities.

180 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Simultaneity, a cinematic quality of which a poet like Zukofsky can be jealous, was also a Mallarméen preoccupation, and to describe his project, the French poet finds many expressions evoking the then nascent cinema: The paper intervenes whenever an image, of its own accord, stops or withdraws, accepting the others that follow […]. The literary advantage, if I may call it such, of this copied distance, which mentally separates groups of words or single words from each other, is that it seems to sometimes accelerate and slow the movement, articulating it, even intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the Page: when considered as a whole, as is the Verse or perfect line elsewhere.69

The poem’s very materiality, its typography, supports the film and—without any “intervention” from the filmmakers once the device has been set in motion, of course—produces the film’s montage. The value of the experience is perfectly differential: how do the concrete cuts in the flow of the reading caused by the typography equate or not (rhythmically, for perception, even for thought) to cuts in film? And: what kind of relationship can exist between the unity of a shot (or frame), the unity of a line, and the unity of a page? How does the formal layout of text on a page and its interaction with the “content” relate to the possible articulations of a spoken text and the composition of the shot seen simultaneously? Consequently, Huillet and Straub are ultimately not trying to put “cinematic equivalents” into place, since no supposed similarity of effect between the film and the poem ever tries to establish itself. Instead, the filmmakers rely heavily and as concretely as possible on the poem’s material form, establishing a simple dispositif that isolates some specific aspects that the experience should handle—typography and montage, composition of the frame and the page, simultaneity—and confront with each other. In a way, it is a matter of using the cinematic machine to “test”, as Oppen would say, the cadence of the changes of the printed characters and, in return, perhaps cinema’s capacity to render such effects. The preface to A Roll of the Dice announces a dialectic between mobility and stasis: “The fiction will flow and evaporate, swiftly, according to the mobility of the writing, around the fragmentary interruptions of a capitalized phrase introduced as title and then continued.”70 And while Mallarmé affirms working “without novelty save for the way in which the reading 69 Ibid., p. 1. 70 Ibid., p. 1.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

181

is spaced” in the form of a blank space that, becoming immense, does not “disregard this method, merely disperse[s] it”,71 the silences introduce a mad play of syncopations into the flow of the reading from which nothing escapes unscathed, neither subject nor time—the latter suspended in the very moment when the dice, thrown, have not yet fallen. Burton Hatlen considers “interruption” one of the essential processes in the poetry of George Oppen, among others who all: [T]end to block or deflect the forward movement of discourse, either by breaking off this movement before it can “complete” itself (interruption, negation) or by folding discourse back upon itself, forcing it to become recursive (repetition, interrogation, dialogue). In either case, such ruptures in the continuity of discourse force upon us an awareness of the linguistic medium in which we have been moving.72

Some of Mallarmé’s “fragmentary interruptions” become short silences or caesuras in Every Revolution, or those special forms of cinematic inter-images known as cuts. Huillet and Straub’s films particularly use this cinematic style of structuring through continuity and interruption, sculpting in blocks and lacunas. Visual Pedagogy: History Lessons “YOU CANNOT DABBLE IN BUSINESS OR FINANCE AND ALSO BE A SCHOLAR OR A POET or, for that matter, sane.” ‒ George Oppen73

History Lessons is a film based on interruptions, but in a different way than Introduction. The title is eminently programmatic: it could apply to each of Huillet and Straub’s films and serve as a lens for studying their entire output, obsessed as it is with and organized around the articulation of the issues of education and history. The film might seem even more radical than its immediate predecessor Othon. It was nevertheless better “received”— undoubtedly because adapting Brecht was less sacrilegious, “Brechtians”

71 Ibid., p. 1. 72 Hatlen, “Opening up the Text”, p. 266. 73 Letter to John Crawford. Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 175.

182 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

were a more “prepared” audience, and Othon ended up discouraging certain people who were still hesitant about Huillet and Straub. A young man in a modest suit drives a car aimlessly and at length through the complicated streets of Rome and talks to men dressed in ancient togas who are presented as contemporaries of Caesar, asking them questions about the great man. At length: three times, the static camera is in the backseat of a car driven by the protagonist for shots lasting around ten minutes, all three shots making up about 30 minutes (or 35%) of the entire film. These shots are adventures in the city: meditative wandering or trajectories motivated from one point to another. The streets and people, walls and cars, fleeting words and the humming of cars appear and disappear through the frames of the windshield. We are lost in a maze. But “lost” is perhaps the wrong word (confused?): while we do not in fact have any reference point, and the trajectory seems completely random, the anxiety of finding a path never arises. We feel surprise—at the shot as much as for what happens—and a very particular kind of presence. As Benjamin suggests in connection to Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “My Cousin’s Corner Window” (the latter failing to see from above at home, while “Poe’s narrator observes from behind the window of a public coffee-house, […] which finally lures him outside into the whirl of the crowd”74) the possibilities of looking at the city through a window is a subject charged with history. In this sense, the car is an intermediary site, between ‘home’ and the whirl of the crowd, which becomes a maze. We are not high up, but we are behind a window and perhaps protected. In 1972, Straub described how other shots had been planned and abandoned before these ones were conceived: Fiction then entered, meaning the young man at the wheel, separated from the world, since that is also decisive: not only is the world of artisans being suppressed, he is also in a glass cage separated from life in the street, even if the windows and the roof are open.75

The camera also acts as a window and the movie theatre as an additional intermediary site—unless TV or video brings the film “home”. Oppen uses the car as a motif for this kind of ambiguity as well, questioning the shape of the modern city (which, as we know, changes faster than 74 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 129. 75 Roth and Pflaum, “Gespräch”, p. 66.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

183

the human heart) and of the contemporary being together or numerous (which are not synonymous): How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak.76

Between the “tracking shots”—in the sense of the Lumière brothers’ cameramen, who would place the camera on some means of transportation that created the “tracking” (a Venetian gondola, for example)—the young man leads an investigation, interrogating different witnesses about Julius Caesar’s character, listening to responses that he does not want to hear. The presence of these shots underlines an extremely firm structure that, excluding the opening credits, can be broken down: 1. Four introductory shots: in a beautiful rhythmic flow, three maps depicting the decline of the Roman Empire and a statue of Caesar (approx. 15”) 2. First tracking shot (8’45”) 3. Discussion with the banker Mummlius Spicer (21 shots, 26’1”) 4. Discussion with the peasant and former soldier (11 shots, 4’1”) 5. Second tracking shot (10’20”) 6. Discussion with the jurist Afranius Carbo (3 shots, 5’53”) 7. Discussion with the writer Vastius Alder (1 shot, framed by two establishing shots filmed from a boat, 2’4 1” total) 8. Third tracking shot (10’40”) 9. New discussion with the banker (9 shots, 13’4 4”) 10. The fountain (‘the face of a woman in stone who is spitting out water’,77 1 shot, 1’16”) 76 Oppen, New Collected Poems, p. 171. 77 As described by Huillet and Straub in the French script, Cahiers du cinéma, 241 (SeptemberOctober 1972), p. 66.

184 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

The third part of the film is subdivided into two interviews of similar lengths (10 shots each, 11’20” and 11’4 1” respectively), separated by a long shot (3’) of the young man walking on a sunny path and telling his (“official”) version of an event in Caesar’s life. The three shots of the discussion with the jurist are all from one angle. The discussion with the writer consists of one tight shot of Alder, framed by two shots where his house (supposedly, but also the actor’s real house) is seen from a boat on the sea—and the boat can be felt: the frame is very rocky and a zoom-in only adds to it. And the sequence with the peasant is framed by two shots of a stream close to his farm, which were not planned in the script.78 The entire structure is based on an ABA pattern: placing a central element between two similar motifs. This is superimposed on a ternary rhythmic movement announced by the three maps and extended by the three tracking shots. The shot of the young man walking leads to a cut that makes the interviews with the banker form not two but three blocks of nearly identical numbers of shots and durations. This aspect is reinforced by the fact that these three groups are shot and edited differently. The staging is similar, aside from a few variations: the two men sit and talk in the shade of flowers on a garden terrace overlooking the plains of Rome. Spicer is always in the same place on the bench, the young man adopts different positions—in fact, he moves away, “keeps his distance”. Each shot and edit decision explores possible variations on the principle of interruption. In “‘History Lessons’: Brecht and Straub/Huillet”, Martin Walsh describes the camera positions in the first block centred on the banker, stressing their symmetry and how they foreground the cutting. Another manner of describing them might take the following form. The young man asks his first brief question in shot 14. Previously, shots 6 to 13 form a first group. Shots 6 and 13 are high angle shots showing both characters side by side on the bench, shot 6 from behind facing the banker on frame left, shot 13 from the opposite angle, facing the young man. These two shots surround the group 7-12 (returning to the ABA form) and are connected to it by axial cuts—forward for 6-7, back for 12-13. Only shots 7 to 12 show the banker alone—except for his hand on his antagonist in shot 12—and from a high angle. In fact, they represent six stages of an (imaginary) 78 The pre-shooting script was published in French, Cahiers du cinéma, 241 (SeptemberOctober 1972), pp. 46-66. The post-shooting script was published in Italian in Filmcritica, 242-243 (February-March 1974) and English in Screen, 17:1 (March 1976), pp. 54-76.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

185

circular tracking shot turning around the character—showing him in a semicircle from a high angle. This produces a very strange effect, accentuated by the abovementioned Straubian methods: hard cuts on the soundtrack, the lack of continuity in the directions of the gazes, etc. The banker, whom we see for the first time in the film in shot 6, talks during the entire sequence. We see him from literally every angle without ever really managing to see him: the high angle, the framing, and the fact that his eyes remain lost in a void prevent us from grasping his facial expressions or finding a way into his character. He remains there, his presence obtuse, hard to read—hard to pin down, all the more so as that is exactly what we are trying to do. The second block is also divided into subsections. The first has three shots, 17-18-19. 17 and 19 are of the banker, and 18 is a shot of the empty terrace they are facing, overlooking the distant plain (ABA). Next comes an important shot where for the first time the young man expresses his anger and disgust, or incomprehension—expressed with the full Straubian art of litotes and more. Now seated further from the banker (off-screen) who he is looking at on frame right, a leaf falls unexpectedly on his thigh. He brushes it to the ground with a brief gesture, but his exasperation is visible. The gesture is the only real one that the otherwise motionless young man makes—even if the development of his positions and postures makes sense too. But this is how something else happens. Benedikt Zulauf, who plays the young man, is surprised by his own gesture: he glances quickly to frame left, close to the camera—undoubtedly at the directors—and smiles. He resumes his composure, pauses, and says his line: “I don’t understand how by then he already had the power for all that.” This momentary interruption of the actor’s performance is short and its manifestation is small enough to go unnoticed during some viewings. It is however unique in the Straubian filmography. While their actors are always physically present (breathing)—the unexpected has an important place (animal noises extending shots, changing light) and traces of the dispositif remain visible (script pages covered with marks from rehearsals, visible and read on-screen in Workers, Peasants)—the actors’ performances, as stylized (non-realist) as they can be, always remain homogenous. Huillet and Straub do not authorize breaks with or moments of indecisiveness between character and actor that voluntary or not make up the beauty of certain moments in cinema—in Chaplin all the way through Monsieur Verdoux, for example, in Gilles Groulx, and elsewhere. If such a moment can happen in History Lessons, it is less because of an “alienation” effect

186 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

(and therefore because of Brechtianism) and more because it constitutes yet another possible form of interruption. The following block consists of six shots (21-26), but this time the framing is the same. Black leader separates one shot from the other f ive times. The whole can therefore be recomposed as one imaginary shot regularly intercut with black—an operation that is however made difficult by the changing light from shot to shot. It should be noted that in this film, unlike what happens in Introduction, the black does not correspond to an ellipsis made in the initial text. The words spoken in these six shots are done so continuously in the novel. The “black” cannot hide that it is Huillet and Straub’s intervention for uniquely cinematic reasons. The third block works according to yet another dispositif, which is in fact a development of the first one, whose system has already been established during the first encounter with the peasant. Here again, Martin Walsh’s description is diagrammatically correct without drawing any conclusions. Huillet and Straub in fact combine the principle of the interrupted circular tracking shot with shot-reverse shot: a frontal shot of the banker (46) is followed by a profile shot of the young man (47); at the end, a frontal shot of the young man (53) is followed by the banker in a close-up, three-quarter view from behind (54, the final shot in the film before the fountain). Between the two, the camera is moved at a regular angle towards the right from one shot to the next—every shot being static of course. The same thing has already occurred between the young man and the peasant (shots 28-36), but that occurrence brought us from frontal to profile on the young man and alternatively from profile to a three-quarter view of the peasant. The movement thus materializes an off-centring/ re-centring between the two protagonists, where the ‘proletarian’ of the two (f irst the peasant facing the young man, then the latter facing the banker) establishes his presence each time, passing to a frontal angle when the other is increasingly seen in profile. Even if for the young man this presence is merely pure resistance to hearing, refusal: his head tilted slightly forward and his dark, unshakeable eyes are signs of his silent revolt and even disgust. The double dispositif also implies a kind of relay from the peasant to the young man. At least the first two modes of interruption have a clear theoretical value: the black leader makes the inter-image or obturation visible, the dark but necessary part of the illusion of movement in cinema; the tracking shot of an immobile subject broken up into six static shots exasperates the dialectic between the single frame and continuity normally perceived as movement. These two processes participate in transforming the underground, usually

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

187

invisible (repressed) foundation of the cinematic mechanism into potentially rhythmic qualities. The Interruption of History History Lessons must be understood as working very closely on the mechanics of cinema. Classical historiography is served to the cinematic machine, allowing the latter to enter history in the sense of penetrating how it is told. The dislocation cinema creates, the holes it leaves through which things may pass can then be observed. The first—the “rawest”—dispositifs of interruption: the tracking shot broken up into a series of static shots and the insertion of black leader in the course of a series of identical shots—both applied to the discourse and image of the banker. In contrast, the young man is handled using continuity and movement—the shots in the car and his long story about the “history of the sea brigades”, told while walking along a sunny path. And yet it is his discourse that is outdated and false, under an illusion constructed by classical historiography. He believes he knows Caesar the way he believes he is the one in motion, the way he believes cinema is the art of rediscovered continuous movement. The banker is almost always immobile. His discourse is calm and lucid, often menacing, and sometimes abject (even very funny)—for example, the very Kafkaesque: “[A]nd the mountain valleys, which at that time were filled with the noise of weapons and the moans of the wounded, resound today once more with peaceful hammering in the ore quarries and the merry cries of the slaves” (end of shot 51). Yet Brechtian irony gives the speech of the “ruling class” itself the power to break the young man’s idealistic/naïve conceptions, resulting in another discourse produced by the same class. The processes of interruption that Huillet and Straub apply poke holes in the discourse of the master (the banker)—creating intervals that may allow for “taking a position”—and use film to reveal the fissure at work deep within this language, attempting to project it onto the spectator. The black leader signals both the moment when the words become intolerable and the moment when, intolerability having been reached, an interruption is created through which something new becomes possible. As we have seen, interruption is a poetic principle and one particularly at play in the work of some of the poets concerned here. Bernstein and Hatlen consider it characteristic of Oppen’s writing. Discrete Series and Primitive, his first and last books, both proceed in different ways by a generalized use of interruptions through which syntactical connections are not undone but

188 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

are thrown into doubt, rendered ambiguous and unstable. The following poem (first published in 1974), begins and ends: Semite what art and anti-art to lead us by the sharpness of its definitions connected to all other things this is the bond sung to all distances my distances neither Roman nor barbarian […] the instant in the open the moving edge and one is I79

All of late Oppen is here: from the complete absence of punctuation to the joint reflection on historical experience, semantics, and language. The systematic spacing of the verse never coincides with syntactical cuts. Not fixed by punctuation, these cuts become uncertain, implying the irresolution of the meaning. The connections between the identifiable parts of sentences are difficult to grasp since the generalized use of interruption prevents the organization of the bits into a non-lacunary group, a coherent whole (“war in incoherent / sunlight it will not // cohere it will N O T that / other // desertion / of the total”80). History, war, and Judaism are present everywhere in the poem, but only through allusion—the “neither Roman nor barbarian” echoes Reznikoff’s poem “Hellenist”, where the Jewish poet defines himself as a “barbarian” at the moment when, having hardly learned Greek, he feels Athena’s contempt:81 he says “Jew” without ever saying it.

79 Oppen, New Collected Poems, pp. 251-253. 80 “The Speech at Soli” in Oppen, New Collected Poems, p. 239. 81 Reznikoff, Poems, p. 93.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

189

The poem explicitly addresses Oppen’s own experience during World War II and the Nazi barbarities—all the horror that is slowly forgotten in the amazement before present things. Like language and the contemplation of the world, memory is collective, a depersonalizing absorption in the living. Oppen could never affirm an “I” that was entirely separate from a “one” that was anything other than infinitely unstable (the generalized interruption contaminates the ego’s formation). Zukofsky also strives in his final works to use cuts systematically at an even vaster scale without it appearing so on the page. 80 Flowers consists of 81 poems (80 flowers and an epigram) each consisting of eight five-word lines. The relationship of each “flower” to its model whose name serves as the title is enigmatic. Description? Definition? Evocation? Love, no doubt, through which the words share the immediate and mysterious beauty of the plants that are evoked, things in the world that likewise escape the tense opacity of the material through their extreme density. The disconnection works on every syntactic and formal level of the structure, incessantly posing problems and multiplying the levels of possible meaning in a layered construction that superimposes semantic and historical strata. This is due to the fact that Zukofsky bases his poems on a series of underground operations founded on every possible kind of word relation: mind, ears, eyes, memory, and imagination constantly interfere. In the book’s f irst line, for example: “Heart us invisibly thyme time”.82 Only the eye can tell the difference between “time” and “thyme”. The “us” makes “heart” seem like a verb, which is unusual. Read aloud, its proximity with “hurt”, a verb, resolves the problem for the ears. Age being a constant theme for the aging Zukofsky, we could understand this as “Time hurts us invisibly”, but “thyme”? And the absence of a third person “s” on the singular “heart” suggests the imperative instead… In her monumental study of the book, Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, Michele J. Leggott clarifies aspects that provide a key to the poet’s working methods. “Heart us” is in fact, besides what I mentioned, a “transliteration” in the Zukofskyian sense: it echoes the Greek artos, bread. “Flowers” signals that it is linked historically and sonically to flour. Artos also echoes anthos, from which anthology is derived.83 If we perhaps need to hear “hurt” in “heart”, we also need to see “hear” and “ear”, which evoke listening. All of these compacted layers turn the poem into a treatise about the botany and geology of language. Beginning with “A”-8—a vast montage 82 Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, p. 325. 83 Leggott, Reading Zukofsky‘s, pp. 74 sqq.

190 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

of quotes referring to political and artistic (musical) history, from Henry Adams to Bach—Zukofsky shifts to natural history—the way Huillet and Straub went from Not Reconciled to The Death of Empedocles, from the life of Schoenberg to the work of Cézanne. This shift is accompanied by a conception of language as having historical weight, a geological stratification where each layer must appear in the meaning and through the meaning in the finished object—this relationship to language as an accumulation of history is moreover rather typical of the Objectivists: Jacques Darras locates it in Basil Bunting’s work, appearing in its own way “as the lifting up of an ancient poetic, geological, and historical memory”.84 In Zukofsky’s work, this is also accompanied by the unparalleled use of interruption brought to a paroxysm, and language’s capacity to designate, and its ever-problematic relationship to referentiality and perception. Huillet and Straub use the means of cinema to examine similar issues.

Continuities Long Shots 1: Tracking Shots (in History Lessons) “To wander is the miller’s delight; To wander! A poor miller he must be Who never thought of wandering, Of Wandering.” ‒ Wilhelm Müller85

Parallel to using interruptions, History Lessons lets the cinematic machine act on another level, giving it a different axe to grind: the applicability of the theory of epic (even dialectic) theatre to the other “art of the spectacle”. This problem is not related to interruption, but the interval—in the sense Benjamin gives to the Brechtian concept: [T]he principle of Epic Theater, like that of montage, is based on interruption. The only difference is that here interruption has a pedagogic function and not just the character of a stimulus. It brings the action to a halt, and 84 Darras, introduction to his translation of “Briggflatts”, p. 4. 85 Schubert, Complete Songs, II, p. 807.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

191

hence compels the listener to take up an attitude toward the events on the stage and forces the actor to adopt a critical view of his role.86

In a way, Huillet and Straub apply the dramatist’s instructions to the letter—with a vengeance. Tableaux shots, interruptions, stasis—everything is there. And between certain tableaux there are regular, enormous intervals, filmic holes devouring a third of the film: the tracking shots. History Lessons is the Huillet and Straub film that introduces shots we could qualify as “of very long duration”. These shots are either tracking shots or panning shots covering a very wide angle or retracing their movements, and more rarely static shots. They can often be several minutes long or even an entire roll of film. They obey a unique economy. In a 1972 interview with Filmkritik, Straub declared: I think [the car rides] work because they are long. […] It’s like this: the attention is there at first, then it gradually decreases, then it increases because the shot goes on. It’s just like the shots in the Bach film, where at f irst we hear the musical blocks attentively, then we get tired and only perceive confusedly, and then, if we pay a little attention to the film, we can notice the exact relationship between what we are seeing and hearing.87

A large part if not all of Huillet and Straub’s films could be understood as studies of attention—how it works, its limits, and its stakes. Confronted with these very long shots, spectators are placed in a situation of feeling and becoming aware of how their attention is inscribed in duration as well as the relationship between their perception and thought. Important factors need to be taken into account when describing in detail the transformations undergone in the spectator’s relationship to such shots: if it is one’s first viewing, if it is in a theatre or on a small screen, if there are any preoccupations with eventual problems or outside pleasures, familiarity with Huillet and Straub’s films in general, etc. The element of surprise is not negligible. The first “tracking shot” comes early in the film (the fifth shot, or about fifteen seconds after the opening credits). We don’t know who the young man is or anything about the dispositif. After three maps of the Roman Empire and a statue of Caesar, we see from behind an individual at the wheel of a 86 Benjamin, Selected Writings, II, p. 584-585. 87 Roth and Pflaum, “Gespräch”, p. 68.

192 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

car driving through the streets of a sunny city—likely Rome. We have seen shots like this before: the hero goes from one place to another, soon arriving at his destination. We try to watch the images, to see what happens and understand what the situation will be, to draw information from the shot. But the shot goes on: fifteen seconds, 30 seconds, one minute, one minute 30, two minutes… Several movements occur for the spectator. First, surprise: why are they holding this shot so long? They want me to see something here… But—and this is characteristic of all of Huillet and Straub’s long shots—there does not seem to be anything to see. The “hero” is facing away, streets are passing by that I don’t know, they don’t present any notable characteristics—they are streets like those in any other city: walls, cars, people, sidewalks, intersections, buildings, etc. In terms of perception, the situation also has no remarkable attributes: we have all had the experience of being squished into the backseat of a car, sometimes for a long while, and having nothing to do but look around. These characteristics produce several kinds of concurrent reactions in spectators. One is surprise, even shock. The shot’s prolonged insistence can transform surprise into annoyance and then anger, or not. Moreover, as Straub notes, at a certain point, attention decreases, one’s perception of the screen becomes distracted, we begin to think of other things without necessarily wanting to—to pass or kill time—due to the mind’s natural inclination to wander. After some time (of a literally incalculable duration), we suddenly realize that our mind was elsewhere but in spite of the time that has passed, the shot is still going! So our renewed surprise causes our attention to increase because of how strange the shot’s persistence is. And if during the entire first part we could somehow anticipate the moment of the cut, it now becomes absolutely unpredictable: the shot might last another five frames or five minutes. No viewing habit can help us determine this (not only mentally, but through our senses). This disrupts both our viewing and our sense of duration—and the one through the other. Our sense that the shot could be interrupted at any moment becomes physically explicit. Our need to see gains a new intensity. The physical nature of watching becomes apparent, susceptible to fatigue and pleasure like our other organs. And our sense of time passing shows the traces it leaves on our bodies, how deeply it affects them. Seeing proves to be inscribed in duration, dependent on rhythm. The transformations of perception nevertheless depend strongly on the construction of these shots, temporally and formally. For example, if the shot lasts longer than the above-mentioned state of excitement, the spectator can return to a state of distraction and begin a new cycle again.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

193

In History Lessons, the second and third tracking shots are not perceived like the first one. The element of initial surprise is abolished in favour of a feeling of repetition. Distracted perception takes over until it causes a state of distant presence, the sensation of simply being there, “with” the driver, without any notion of narrative comprehension or perception of the formal system it is. This rarely happens in film. We stop watching the shot: we see it. These tracking shots are Benjaminian in at least two senses. First, they are the exact concretization of one of the German thinker’s ideas: Couldn’t an exciting f ilm be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different?88

This dreamed-of film provides “temporal succession” with what looks like spatial contiguity but has in fact always been historical stratification. The flâneur and cinema can manage this: to bring to the surface of the visible what constitutes it as history, what forms it as geological weight. Benjamin considers the “distracted perception” created by tracking shots to be one of the fundamental aspects of film. As a mode of being receptive to the work, distraction opposes contemplation: [O]nly by being able to manage certain tasks while distracted, do we prove they have become habits for us. Through the distraction that art offers us, it establishes the degree to which our apperception is capable of responding to new tasks. […] Increasingly noticeable in every area of art and a symptom of deep-rooted changes in perception, reception through distraction has a central place in cinema.89

But do these shots form intervals in the sense he sees in Brechtian theory, which, by preventing illusion and the spectator’s identification, “are provided so that the audience can respond critically to the player’s actions and the way they are preserved”?90 Creating intervals and making them visible through systematic interruptions is one of the fundamental writing principles in History Lessons. 88 Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 83. 89 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I.2, p. 466. 90 Benjamin, Selected Writings, III, p. 306.

194 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

By diving into the machinery of cinema and allowing it to work alone on the Brechtian material and the material of the world, the filmmakers emphasize that their art is entirely a process of disseminating intervals. But once these interstices are dispersed, fragmenting gestures and the (continual) future of things or history, can they conserve their previous role to which theatre—perhaps following cinema, but in theatre—had assigned them? It is no doubt time for me to be a bit subjective. The mind follows strange paths during these tracking shots, which are just as labyrinthine as the streets of Rome and the banker’s discourse. In any case, I have always found it almost impossible while watching these tracking shots to reflect satisfactorily about what I am seeing. I’m stopped by the fact that a shot is unfolding at the same time—even while this does not prevent my mind from wandering. The shot attracts too much of my attention for me to think about the blocks of images, sounds, and words that I am perceiving—and this is so even during repeated viewings or in a state of “distracted perception”. Yet the shot seems to be entirely constructed to achieve nearly complete visual neutrality; its very construction is “charming” like the serpent in Moses and Aaron, as is its neutrality and the possibility of new attention to what is happening. Moreover, to unpack the great density of the blocks of discourse—by memory or interpretation—demands a finesse in our attack that monopolizes all our attention. Our memory has to support interpretation and allow us to “sort through” the information. Memory is however too closely tied to the imagination (the faculty of turning things into images) for the perception of new images not to block it. And this perception is always new, because the composition of the images is so neutralized that all that appears is what is in the margins, always changing, and irrecoverable. The problem is also related to the uniquely dynamic sensation of time’s flow in the shots. It is even more difficult to begin a close evaluation of what we have already seen since the loss of temporal markers and the unpredictability of the editing makes it impossible to know if in the coming second the shot will not stop and the block of speech continue. These shots are intervals in the sense that as they are unfolding, the action (interpretation) the film develops is interrupted. But they still partake in the f ilm’s movement, signal its incomplete structure, and extend its energy. It is consequently very difficult to apply the Verfremdungseffekt, the theoretical principle of Brechtian “intervals”, to these passages. Would this be any different if the shots were black leader? But their temporal instability, the permanent threat of the cut, and what we still see in black leader would still disturb

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

195

the possibility of interpretation. In a 1987 interview, Straub made a crucial return to the possibility of “distantiation” in cinema: There’s an idea of Rivette’s that we should go back to. It’s the idea that there is no distance in cinema. What counts is the potential distance, that there is none: what Rivette called fascination. The proof that the history of alienation is absurd is that John Ford is the most Brechtian of filmmakers and, with the actors, uses the least distantiation.91

The primary issue with these shots is rhythmic. The film is held together by balancing several types of densities: the density of the long shots—more stretched out, playing on the perception of marginal details—and the density of blocks of extremely compressed, elevated discourse, the way an athlete balances a measured succession of breathing and not breathing, with both being essential. The tracking shots also allow for the great speed of the other blocks. Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach works with the same contrasts between the musical performances, shown in a single shot, either static or using one simple movement, and the fragments of lives, edited into short, dense bits. The alternation is developed using the model of the St Matthew Passion, an intersection of arias and recitatives, choruses and narrative passages—a model that also served Zukofsky for the form of “A”. Both kinds of filmic blocks—sound and image—require intense attention, but in different manners (attention thus knows different modes as well, like rhythms). Should we conclude that there is no room for responding critically to the films of Huillet and Straub? Perhaps. With regard to John Ford, Straub raises the question of distantiation in the performances. Here, Gottfried Bold as the banker Spicer is very fascinating. The way he uses his eyelashes, the spark of intelligence lighting up his eyes, and his little smile—both gently mocking and tender towards the young man, or amused by what he is describing—make his character very “sexy”. This is even more striking since we only see his face progressively and his performance relaxes just as slowly. He belongs, moreover, to a long line of particularly dangerous men in Huillet and Straub’s films: manipulators with the gift of speech and gesture, politicians—Aaron, Vinius in Othon, Uncle Jakob in Class Relations, the part of Empedocles that he curses in himself. All are great seducers and what they have in common is that it is impossible to converse with them. The “lesson” here does not involve learning to counter the rhetoric of power, to respond to the banker, or even to “take 91 Aumont and Faux, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, p. 52.

196 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

hold of the contradictions of speech in order to take hold of political and social contradictions”92 (Jacques Rancière)—there are no contradictions in Spicer’s discourse: what the young man learns is to shut up. The tracking shots show this too. To learn to shut up and listen or to shut up and continue to think, or to shut up while waiting. But the insistent disjunction in the sightlines, the changes in timbre or ambient sounds at the cuts, and all of the above-described processes of interruption create punctual dissonances, sharp effects that create holes in the banker’s discourse and make it produce shocks, jumps, and oscillations. As this does not allow time for a critical response, it is therefore not ‘alienating’ in Brecht’s sense—but the banker’s words do not escape scot-free. Struck, their flow transformed into a discontinuous succession of images, the words can no longer overwhelm, but instead become a site of constantly rediscovered alarm. Discontinuity, rhythm, fascination, and shock are moments of the same energy. The banker’s discourse is not “alienated”—if so, it would become proof of the cynicism of the powerful and proof that nothing can be done. Through fascination and shock, through cinema itself, it is given back its destructive power (“alienating”, if you will). In Huillet and Straub’s work, there is a whole range of this kind of excessively long shot that works in a similar manner, but whose different constructions have important consequences. Two other examples will help provide an idea of this. Long Shots 2: Revolutions (in Too Early/Too Late) Turn! Turn! Turn! ‒ Pete Seeger

The first shot (after the credits) in Too Early/Too Late is also a tracking shot from inside a car in a city—but its form is extremely different from History Lessons. The car is not moving forward but is continually turning at a particular speed on the main route of a circular plaza—on the roundabout at Place de la Bastille in fact. The location is identifiable if one knows Paris, but its visually distinctive signs are minimized—the main column is not shown. Unlike in History Lessons, even the vehicle is not visible (or the driver or the car frame) and the camera is no longer filming frontally towards the 92 Rancière, “La Parole sensible”, p. 72.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

197

road ahead, but laterally, at 45° to the exterior. After the opening titles and black leader accompanied by rural sounds—cut—the car is already moving when the shot begins and still when it is interrupted—cut—again to black leader while the ambient sound continues. The shot is shorter than the complex peregrinations of the Roman film, even if it is still substantial: around five minutes and 20 seconds. After two minutes and 15 seconds, a voice-over begins—Huillet in the English version—which ends one minute 45 seconds later, while the rotation continues without commentary for another one minute and 20 seconds. The whole time, the car makes fourteen revolutions. There are subsequently many panning shots in Too Early/Too Late: the first shot is not one of them, even if a film rarely makes one so dizzy. To have done a true panning shot, the famous central column would have had to have been replaced with a camera. The column thus occupies the “région centrale” that we do not see. It does not commemorate the dead plebeians or bourgeois of 1789, but those of 1830, another revolution, a new layer of blood in the local geology. Unfortunately, its angel did not know the terror animating Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. It is the shot’s form that is initially striking. It is rooted in a confusingly banal perceptual situation: looking out the window in the backseat of a car on a roundabout. This banality is nevertheless important and is tied to something for which the work of the Objectivists has often been criticized: writing poetry without poetry about red wheelbarrows or washstands (Zukofsky: “To my wash-stand / in which I wash / my left hand / and my right hand”93), not excusing themselves by piling on pretty ornamental phrases but striving for pitilessly rigorous compositions. This shot has no “stylistic effects” either: the camera remains immobile as the car moves at a constant speed; the editing does not intervene. If a transformation occurs through these images, it is therefore not by adding ornamentation to the surface, but by exasperating the structure, turning what should only be a passing lane into something inescapable. The repeated revolutions in this shot, the pace, and the strange perception they imply—the interactions of the relative speeds of the approaching cars, the perspectives, and the figures—establish a fact: there is a rhythm to perception. The shot first establishes the rhythm through the uniformity of the car’s speed. But only the buildings remain the same: in the foreground, the circulation of the other cars creates a strange ballet (mécanique), an interaction of colours, f igures, relative speeds, the superimposition of 93 “To my wash-stand” in Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, p. 52.

198 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

unpredictable, mostly random lines—even if they are regulated by traffic laws—superimposed on the repetitive regularity of the horizon line like a series of melodies and figured bass in counterpoint. As Zukofsky recalls in his essay on Chaplin, counterpoint is a formal structure that exists in film. But the lines remain traffic, vehicles moving in the same direction, and a square in Paris. A relative masking effect occurs: as much as the actual speed of the camera movement, through which what happens immediately disappears, it is the rhythmic regularity—established through its visual force as the actual material of the shot—that causes a disturbance—and/or renews our relationship to what is being shown through a form of “rendering strange” which would be the Brechtian explanation. What is seen may be rhythmic first and foremost, but it is difficult to maintain a cadence in the movement of the story. Perhaps cadence is, moreover and exactly, the revolutionary element. That is what Zukofsky claims about Chaplin, and it is the nail Huillet and Straub hammer repeatedly. The “pure” horizontal pan in the first scene in Moses and Aaron functions in a very similar mode to the one in Too Early/Too Late, but with some differences. The shot in Moses and Aaron appears as an independent structure superimposed on what it is showing—not indifferent to the objects in its path but feigning indifference to better create harmonies with the things of the world that are richer because of the distance and opacity the shot maintains. In a sense, this already worked contrapuntally: the camera movement is one line and the succession of things is another, both developing independently, aside from the clear meeting points that are sometimes encountered when text echoes image (or vice versa). This corresponds rather exactly to Marcel Bitsch and Jean Bonfils’ description of counterpoint in their book La Fugue: No matter how many there are, the voices are obligated to periodic consonance at certain points determined by the composer. Between these more or less distanced harmonic reference points, the intermediary notes are left complete free and considered purely melodic.94

Unlike Moses and Aaron, the points of consonance in the shot in Too Early/ Too Late do not appear in the same way and are not ruled by any fortuitous coincidence between text and image. Echoes are only created in and between the formal construction of text and image and the site they depict. The harmonic interactions only occur in the image, in what is visible, instead of

94 Bitsch and Bonfils, La Fugue, p. 7.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

199

being formally constructed by affixing the shot and its effect to the libretto and creating meaning against it. According to the title card, the voice-over text in Too Early/Too Late is by Friedrich Engels. Just as the car is moving as the shot begins and ends, the voice recites a series of propositions from a sentence whose beginning and end are not heard: that the bourgeois / here / as always / were too cowardly to stand up for their own interests / that / from the Bastille onwards / the plebs / had to do / all the work / for them / […] / but that this / did not come about without the plebeians attributing to the revolutionary demands of the bourgeoisie / a sense which they did not have / […] / that / this plebeian / equality and brotherhood / had to be a pure dream / at a time when / it was a matter of establishing the exact opposite / and that as always / irony of history / this plebeian version of the revolutionary catchwords / became the strongest lever / in imposing / this opposite / the bourgeois / equality before the law and brotherhood in exploitation

The “here” is thus literal: the Bastille. The intrusion of a voice-over after more than two minutes without any speech causes a shift, a shock almost—because of the contents of the text, but also doubtlessly because of the appearance of speech, which the ear and the mind orient themselves to differently than the eye. The text is clear in any case: history erupts. The Place de la Bastille, from actual roundabout to amusing film experiment, brutally returns to being what it has always been: the site where this took place, one of the most symbolically-charged place names, a kind of synonym for the word “revolution”. The construction of this tracking shot raises questions that can somewhat be summarized as: what are we being shown here? What am seeing when I watch this shot? Can I affirm that this shot makes the Place de la Bastille visible? If not, then what? Or should I consider it abstract? I have already pointed out how for Zukofsky the “Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars”95 is also, and inseparably, “a desire to place everything—everything aptly, perfectly, belonging within, one with, a context.”96 The shot shows us the Place de la Bastille, but the problem, because of the form, is showing it as a “historical and contemporary particular”, finding a way to 95 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 207. 96 Ibid., p. 207.

200 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

show not only its geography, but its history as well, or to show it as layers of history (a flâneur shot). Engels’ history that Huillet recounts in the voice-over is not the history of a mythicized, revolutionary energy—liberation, the dual birth of a nation and an idea, happiness new to Europe and directed at everyone, but the history of a vast deception. And Huillet and Straub’s shot specifies, contrary to what classical historiography claims, this revolution did not exhaust the massive, potential energy accumulated over centuries of misery. To the contrary, this energy has increased and it is shown here. This is because the use of perceptual rhythm in these images has strong, energetic implications. The shot speaks less to the circularity of history than to the resulting extreme tension. The camera is pointed towards the exterior of a disc that does not stop spinning, an exterior towards which the centrifugal force of the rotation should lead it and which it resists. The non-liberation of this force and its concentration create an enormous amount of potential energy that the spectator can physically feel. In the above-cited 1987 interview, Straub declares: It is essentially an erotic story. 95% of films today are absolutely not erotic because they are ejaculatory. Here, before showing something, we turn around it for an hour and suddenly we see it.97

The ‘suddenly’ is missing here, dissolved into the “too early/too late”; the possibility of interruption is lacking. The tension at play is also a “frustration of violence”.98 The speed of the car carrying the camera is dizzying: yet is it moving forward? A panning shot would be more relaxed: is the movement of history anything more than useless fatigue bringing no real progress? And yet motion, moving without moving is the heart of the “explodingfixed” that is the revolutionary moment itself, the dialectical image—or as Cézanne/Gasquet expresses it in Huillet and Straub’s film: “this ascent of the earth towards the sun [in the colours], this exhalation from the depths towards love. Genius would be to immobilize this ascension in a minute of equilibrium while suggesting nevertheless its energy.” The accumulation of blood beneath the pavement is what prevents any escape and forms the basis of the nearly explosive cold rage to which this shot gives shape (“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in 97 Aumont and Faux, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, p. 53. 98 Straub-Huillet, Writings, p. 66.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

201

the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.”99). The perpetual motion—neither started nor finished—that makes up this shot is also what inhibits history in the absence of these interruptions, blockages, and stoppages through which revolution (a real revolution, the Revolution) can occur. It is (dialectically) compensated by the tension compressing it to the point of implosion. But the leap can only happen outside the terrible continuity of this shot. For the moment, it is too early and too late. Seeing this shot silently turns it into a visual rhythm—with the tension created by superimposing a strong rhythmic structure on an initially banallooking perceptual situation. Hearing the voice-over brings this structure and tension into a highly politicized meaning-producing system. We can imagine someone choosing between a “formalist” exegesis of the film, ignoring Engels, or a directly political one, only hearing him. The film stands in the singular relation it establishes between these two poles—“form” and “content”—and the interval between them always problematizes their junction, making it and us tend to consider them apart, while what actually ties together the voice-over and the images remains particularly opaque… Deleuze, moreover, considers this opacity characteristic of Huillet and Straub’s writing: What constitutes the audio-visual image is a disjunction, a dissociation of the visual and the sound, each heautonomous, but at the same time an incommensurable or ‘irrational’ relation which connects them to each other, without forming a whole, without offering the least whole.100

Earlier, Deleuze calls this problematic connection that asks whether we can be attentive to what we see and what we hear at the same time the “interstice between two framings, the visual and the sound, the irrational cut between two images, the visual and the sound”.101 Another form of the interval or another form of the link as the absence of a link that is love. In “Mantis”, Zukofsky describes how he suddenly and fortuitously saw a praying mantis lost in the New York City subway that ended up jumping on his stomach with imploring eyes. It describes this and the group of related 99 Benjamin, Selected Writings, IV, p. 391. 100 Deleuze, Cinema II, p. 263. 101 Ibid., p. 258.

202 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

thoughts that this sight induces, interconnected thoughts all born simultaneously at the fulgurous moment when the event occurs. The first two stanzas: Mantis! praying mantis! since your wings’ leaves And your terrified eyes, pins, bright, black and poor Beg—‘Look, take it up’ (thoughts’ torsion)! ‘save it’ I who can’t bear to look, cannot touch,—You— You can—but no one sees you steadying lost In the cars’ drafts on the lit subway stone. Praying mantis, what wind-up brought you, stone On which you sometimes prop, prey among leaves (Is it love’s food your raised stomach prays?), lost Here, stone holds only seats on which the poor Ride, who rising from the news may trample you— The shops’ crowds a jam with no flies in it.102

Roubaud explains that “[t]he secret [of the sestina] is that the shifting of the rhymes from cobla I to cobla II, and the movement and permutation of the words is the same as that moving from cobla II to cobla III and so on”.103 The entire poem must be quoted for the effect to be felt. The rotating rhyme words create a dizzying effect of moving in place, of an image arising in a moment of time, but, simultaneously and paradoxically, a pure movement in the image and in thought. Jacqueline Risset writes that in Dante’s sestina “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra”: [T]he increasingly insistent repetition at the end of the verse creates little by little an excessive rhyme. […] The intensity spreads from back to front, from the rhyme towards the beginning of the verse. The poem also gains its force from this movement against the grain of the phonic weaving to such an extent that the last word appears like an “idée fixe”, at the limit of delirious obsession.104

Moving against the grain is a way to discover the revolutionary cancellation of time without abolishing the physical sensation of the flow of its duration. Risset underlines the erotic character of Dante’s obsession—the 102 Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, pp. 65-66. 103 Roubaud, La fleur inverse, p. 296. 104 Risset, Dante écrivain, p. 63.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

203

impossible-to-see région centrale around which the poem revolves, before declaring: “For my sake, who would sleep away in stone / My life, or feed like beasts upon the grace, / Only to see her garments cast a shade”.105 For Zukofsky, the shock at the origin of the poem is the mantis’ sudden vision of the entire movement of history and the unwatchable political situation. In the poem’s “gloss”, “‘Mantis,’ An Interpretation”, the young virtuoso explains the ramifications of his formal choices. Initially, an event seen and— Thoughts’—two or three or five or Six thoughts’ reflection (pulse’s witness) of what was happening All immediate, not moved by any transition.106

For Zukofsky, the question of movement is thus crucial. Thoughts arise simultaneously and without transition, they are pure movement, fixed and arising, “exploding-fixed”, the site of an extraordinary tension that belongs to history, objectified in the singularity of the mantis, “inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars”: The sestina, then, the repeated end words Of the lines’ winding around themselves, Since continuous in the Head […] Perhaps goes back cropping up again with Inevitable recurrence again in the blood Where the spaces of verse are not visual But a movement, With vision in the lines merely a movement.107

The vision in the verses is a pure movement winding onto itself—playing once again with the dialectical opposition between continuity and variation, even and jolting: the even rhythm of riding underground, and the sudden jolt are also of these nerves, glandular facilities, brain’s charges108 105 Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, p. 365. 106 Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, p. 67. 107 Ibid., p. 67. 108 Ibid., p. 71.

204 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Even and jolting rhythm, nerves, glands, and charges: electrical and sexual semantic f ields are combined here into something like a theory of the poem’s position in history. The poem’s coda reuses all the rhyme words, as is usual (leaves, poor, it, you, lost, stone)—all but one, lost, which is replaced by strength: Fly, mantis, on the poor, arise like leaves The armies of the poor, strength: stone on stone And build the new world in your eyes, Save it!

Zukofsky’s comment on the final line is: 38—‘in your eyes’

the original shock persisting— So that the invoked collective Does not subdue the senses’ awareness, The longing for touch to an idea, or To use a function of the material: The original emotion remaining, like the collective, Unprompted, real, as propaganda.109

As in Benjamin, the force of the shock echoes the collective, the masses. All of these aspects and the “simultaneous” rendering the poet seeks display the traces of cinema. This passage also recalls the need to refuse all “predatory manifestations” in relation to concrete facts, not to submit to preconceived ideas: But the facts are not a symbol. […] No human being wishes to become An insect for the sake of a symbol. But the mantis can start History etc.110

109 Ibid., p. 72. 110 Ibid., p. 70.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

205

If the mantis echoes, reflects, or brings forth the fate of the poor as an image, it does not symbolize it. It is the possible departure or start of a new history, like simultaneous pure movement and a pause, a movement turning in place infinitely, arising, jolting. If it is related to objectivity it is also because the poem is the story of something deeper and darker: “I think” of the mantis “I think” of other things— The quotes set repulsion Into movement. Repulsion— Since one, present, won’t touch the mantis, Will even touch the poor— but carefully. The mantis, then, Is a small incident of one’s physical vision Which is the poor’s helplessness The poor’s separateness Bringing self-disgust.111

The “I” only evokes its presence to be condemned—the guilt of not belonging to the class one wants to see win and from which one suddenly feels infinitely separated. There is something of this in Straub, who in a 1975 interview responded to the suggestion that Moses and Aaron or the filmmaker could express a demand through a film: [I]’m not demanding anything. I’m an individual who belongs to the middle class and I’m not the one making a demand. Only the proletariat, peasant class, or working class can demand something. I’m not demanding anything.112

This feeling is also the foundation of the individual’s entire relationship to oneself in Oppen’s late poem: “How talk / Distantly of the ‘The People’?”, responding to the haunting question asked him by Rachel Blau DuPlessis: 111 Ibid., p. 71. 112 Cervoni, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub”, p. 48.

206 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

“Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase” I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place113

Oppen’s response is the choice to be “numerous”—to find a tension between subjectivity that goes to the point of dispersion and membership in a community perpetually on the edge of pure disjunction. For Oppen, this untenable tension is the only tenable position—his self-shame intensified by what haunts him, what he believed was a denial of his Judaism: when he buried his dog tags during the war. Zukofsky brings this pressure to an implosion in “A”-9, while attempting something else. Love—defined in a mystic mode or by negative theology—as a link that is the absence of a link provides him with some keys. These are related to principles that are also Straubian: the generalization of gaps, disjunctions, and intervals. A poet encounters a mantis. An “imagist” poem, perhaps a very successful one, could have resulted. But something remained unsatisfying about returning back to a rather elevated conception of the possibilities of poetic art. The “desire for what is objectively perfect” pushes the text to be not the painting of an anecdote but the tissue in which an entire situation in history, a moment of history, and a conception of history are interconnected. The poet therefore chose an old form that he considered particularly apt to objectify the interlacing of the concurrent thoughts and issues in this “emotional and intellectual complex presenting itself in an instant” without introducing predatory intentions. The formal density makes perception of the situation less immediate, for it appears as it is, complicated by a state of historical evolution. Of course, being a poet or a filmmaker, a spectator or a reader implies absolutely different functions, unrelated means and ends. As anyone who has written about the plastic arts knows, they always remain between the order of the visible and the linguistic order of the irreducible. This is therefore not to claim that Huillet and Straub’s shot is an equivalent of Zukofsky’s poem or would have the same effect or act in the same way—the gaps are still striking. Yet—and this “yet” is the crack into which this book wants to slip—just as Chaplin was a model for Zukofsky, common preoccupations, ambitions, conceptions, and concerns can come to light between poets and filmmakers. Here, for example, the formal demands combine with a sense of history as both geology and vertigo. These affinities must have consequences for their methods and thus for the form of their work. It remains for us to measure how much opacity persists between the incommensurable results. 113 “Of Being Numerous”, Oppen, New Collected Poems, p. 167.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

207

Long Shots 3: Fixity in Cézanne “The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly—miraculously—it will look like something we have never seen before.” ‒ Cesare Pavese114

The third kind of long shot providing an example of the Straubian range deals less with the question of rhythm since it is static and of a fixed object. Cézanne: Dialogue with Joachim Gasquet has a two-part structure. The longer first half shows only one of the painter’s paintings, La Vieille au chapelet (1895-1896). The rest of the section shows photographs of the artist, the places he lived, and quotations from other films. The second half consists only of paintings, aside from the final shot, where we see the gate to the studio where Cézanne worked in Paris’ 18th district. The first segment involves a series of shots of mountains. At the beginning, a slope appears on the horizon behind Aix-en-Provence. Two long shots then frame Mount Sainte-Victoire, the second closer than the first, in the rosy light of a late afternoon. The first movement ends with the 127th shot from The Death of Empedocles, remaining static for almost five minutes on the slopes of Mount Etna. The second segment shows three of Cézanne’s late watercolours of Sainte-Victoire. The beauty of these film images of Mount Sainte-Victoire is certainly formal at first: the framing and light—or lights, since the variations are palpable—offer a feeling of “satisf ied fullness” deeply tied, equally, to their duration. They are not long enough to create unease or tension, but sufficiently to allow our eyes time to become lost in the obtuse presence of the rocks and sky. But a kind of stupefaction is involved in the spectator’s relation to these shots, how they are seen. The images show Sainte-Victoire; in voice-over, Huillet reads lines supposed to have been said by Cézanne, who painted this mountain in a way it had never been seen. He talks of the “incarnation of the sun across the world” incapable of being painted, of “blocks” that “were fire. There is still fire in them”, of “imagining the shadow concave, like the others who do not look, whereas, hold on, look, it is convex, it flees from its center”.

114 Pavese, Dialogues with Leucò, p. vii.

208 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

This is therefore no longer a mountain in Provence, but a gap that the insistent filming transforms into questions which develop in a series and above all are constructed in echoes: what do we see when looking at Mount Sainte-Victoire? What does the camera film when pointed at it? What did Cézanne see during all those hours in front of these rocks? Can shots in a film allow us any access to what he saw? What can Gasquet’s words, digging into the film image, show us that is in the things or the paintings and that Cézanne, in/through his works, could make us see? These shots function differentially: their existence is based in the intervals—gaps, differences, aberrations—between all these modes of vision. Just as the film adaptation of A Roll of the Dice ultimately only highlighted the differences between cinematic and poetic interruptions and just as History Lessons applied Brechtian principles to film in order to show (among other things) the irreducible difference between cinema and theatre, in Cézanne, the recording on film of a pictorial motif questions the place of cinema—and the primary cinematic tools, photographic, without (subjective) effects—in regard to seeing. Everything else being equal, this interrogation is not so far removed from the questions posed by Zukofsky in 80 Flowers about language’s descriptive capacity. To avoid confusion about the purpose of these shots, it is important to remember that they appear in the f irst part of the f ilm before any of Cézanne’s paintings of Sainte-Victoire are shown. The photographic image does not directly confront the image made by the painter—a process that would only have led to the glorif ication of the Painter’s mythicized, subjective intervention or, instead, to the realization of Nature’s unattainable superiority. By listening to and remembering the artist’s words, it is instead an attempt to understand how seeing is work (and a mystery?). The shots of the paintings that we wait for over 30 minutes to see also introduce the use of gaps into the film. The film is famous—so to speak—for its clear position on the way a painting “must” be shown: whole, frame included, in a static shot. If this seems very “Straubian”—they transgress this somewhat in A Visit to the Louvre (2003)—it is perhaps foremost for what we feel about “morality” or austerity: if Mr Cézanne decided his motif should be composed this way, who am I to cut into it? And: a painting has no existence beyond its concrete materiality, from which the frame and lighting are inseparable. Removing them would be idealist naivety. The “Who am I?” is the secret: this manner is the most “objective”, when the filmmaker’s intervention is minimal, when the integrity of the pictorial work as object appears most scrupulously maintained. Remaining attacks

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

209

on this integrity seem attributable to the film stock itself: the partial loss of textures, modifications of the colours—Henri Alekan’s work was very rigorous in this regard, but sensitometry, like the science of museum lighting, has limits—, and the sometimes important format modif ications: the film frame makes every painting the same scale, their relative sizes are equalized, even if they are actually very different. Many spectators were frustrated by the refusal to ‘enter’ into the paintings, establishing a fixity in our relationship to them that seems artificial. The eye seems unable to “wander” in a movie screen like it does in a painting. This all demonstrates how much the “mechanical reproduction” of works of art is not self-evident in a film context. The differential approach draws the shots of Mount Sainte-Victoire into a critical inversion, unveiling what they make us see and what they lack. They are present both “naïvely” as images of what inspired the artist, but also as a primitive state of vision—the underground stratum, the foundations on which the painter constructed his work—and the irreducibly different, which only gives access to an impossible-to-fill opening. This separation—the remains that must be left to black, in the interval— is also the actual site where the possibility of the objective is established. Panning shots are the heart of the Straubian machine and the objectivity that paradoxically characterizes their writing. Based on an excessively simple dispositif, they are almost entirely stripped of signs of intervention, subjectivity, and virtuosity aside from the always-striking precision of the framing and rhythms. But their play with duration has other implications. As these shots stretch out and as our attention comes and goes, something else escapes: the self. Withdrawal wins. In “Bottom, a weaver”, Zukofsky defines his book on Shakespeare as “A long poem built on a theme for the variety of its recurrences. The theme is simply that Shakespeare’s text throughout favours the clear physical eye against the erring brain, and that this theme has historical implications.”115 One of these implications is a definition of love: love: reason  ::  eyes: mind Love needs no tongue of reason if love and the eyes are 1—an identity. The good reasons of the mind’s right judgment are but superfluities for saying: Love sees—if it needs saying at all in a text which is always hovering towards The rest is silence.116 115 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 167. 116 Zukofsky, Bottom, p. 39.

210 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

The position of supremacy accorded to the gaze is clearly dangerous, the work being haunted by the command: “No tongue! all eyes! be silent”117—to which Zukofsky adds: “But no artist in words dares act the six words of this command, unless he desires not to exist.”118 The possibility of this desire is the question at the root of the Objectivist posture. It is tied to love and the gaze. It has historical implications. The panning shots also form studies of the conditions for the appearance of this “moment” where it is ultimately the self—more so in Huillet and Straub than the body: perception has its rhythms, the body is related to them—that is missing dispersed in the All eyes! that Gasquet’s Cézanne expresses: “his willpower must be silent. […] So on his sensitive plate, the entire landscape will inscribe itself.” This form of depersonalization is absolutely erotic and directly political. The first part of Cézanne ends on a static shot of a mountain, pierced by the voice of Andreas von Rauch and Hölderlin’s words. The slopes are Etna’s and the German poet’s Empedocles is expressing the utopia to which he aspires (“then out of the bliss of a beautiful dawning / the green of the earth will glisten anew for you”), but these words are a final testament: the Agrigentian can only speak them as his legacy, having decided to finish here and in this way, dissolving into nature, disappearing into the entrails of a volcano without a tomb. The shot’s construction and its length are this loss through the eyes in the material of the world. If Empedocles kills himself this way it is because he has lost—through pride—a state of presence to, in, and with nature that is perhaps not very far from the “oceanic feeling” Freud borrows from Romain Rolland,119 a state, in any case where the border between the subject and the world are not very precise and authorize one to feel within oneself the currents circulating through the cosmos, so much so that, in return, nature finds itself united to the living through something other than domination. This is already political, but so is the possible condition of togetherness proposed by the new society of which the doctor-philosopher can only dream. It is ultimately possible that the appearance of the figure of Empedocles signals a certain quality of self-hatred as a fundamental point shared by the Objectivists and Huillet and Straub on which they based their writing and that they defended as a political value, the way Benjamin defended the political value of kindness and Genet that of delicacy. Empedocles’ name has been erased from history as he desired. 117 Shakespeare, The Tempest, p. 72. 118 Zukofsky, Bottom, p. 77. 119 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 3.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

211

History Without a Name Anonymity and Lessons The title, “History Lessons”, works on yet another level. The film is based on Brecht’s unfinished novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar, written between 1937 and 1939. If Huillet and Straub’s choice of title makes explicit (one of) the problem(s) the film deals with, it has another advantage: it makes the name of the “hero” disappear—a name that still appears in the credits, since the title of the novel is included in them. The disappearance of the name is part of the “lesson”. While nearly the entire film is about Caesar, his name is rarely spoken. Spicer the banker, whose words constitute nearly a third of the film, only calls him by the nickname “C.”; Carbo the jurist calls him Caesar once, but Gaius Julius twice, accompanying the first two occurrences with a salute of his bent arm whose echoes are rather sinister; neither Alder the writer nor the peasant say his name—and the peasant has no name in Brecht’s book either. The word “Caesar” is heard for the first time in shot 16, 20 minutes into the film. But the above-mentioned characters are also not named in the film and neither are their functions, whose importance in putting their words into perspective is not negligible. It is only in the film’s second to last shot, as he says, “My confidence in him had proved well-founded. Our small bank was no small bank any more”, that the position of the protagonist whose discourse has “deconstructed” the figure of the Roman Emperor is revealed to us, demolishing the statue shown at the beginning to which the young man turns his back in the first shot of the car that is cut to immediately after. This reticence to name does not initially have a dogmatic effect: rather it accentuates the script’s “detective film” aspect (like Citizen Kane, as Martin Walsh has suggested120), requiring us to construct a personality and events that have left only marginal traces and whose absence remains obstinate. The film’s proximity to Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder may be even greater, where the only “truth” we have is from the words of protagonists who have their own interests in the case. No outside discourse, no tangible image or proof support any version. In fact, a transcendent discourse is also missing, as is the thing the film critiques: history. Like the young man, we think we

120 Walsh, The Brechtian Aspect, pp. 67-69.

212 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

possess the truth about Caesar. The discourses bump against one another and make them unstable, perhaps even breaking them. That we are not told before the end of the film that the one named Spicer is a banker and close to Caesar does not mean that the source of his discourse is indiscernible. The man speaking is wearing a beautiful toga; he is seated on a bench in a pleasant garden; he has an assured posture and discourse. His knowledge of the most hidden mechanisms of the highest spheres of power, his position as witness due to his proximity to the master, as well as his language and some of his lines (“You will grasp what I mean if you take as an example the Punic War. We had conducted it on the best grounds there are—namely, to beat down African competition; but what came of it?”), all place him as, if not quite a banker, at least (and with all the implied anachronism) an “exquisite flower of the bourgeoisie”121 as Pasolini would say, situating him quite precisely. The others are also all clearly typed: the writer seated casually in his chaise longue and the jurist with his very expressive hand gestures (of a lawyer) are just as clearly members of the “bourgeoisie”, whereas the old peasant, standing, has the accent, face, arms, and even humour of his class. Only the young man escapes this: he is only localized historically—his contemporary suit in sharp contrast to the togas—and is otherwise “neutral”. But as I said, the young man does not speak much: he listens, which is not easy. Zukofsky included the first seven “movements” of “A” in An “Objectivists” Anthology. In general, he rarely corrected himself: in this case however, the first seven parts of the major poem are slightly different in their definitive state in the 1959 edition of the poem. The changes he made largely consisted in omitting proper names. For example, the quotes lose their authors—which were already given in a largely allusive form: “Carlos” for William Carlos Williams, “Estlang” for e.e. cummings (Edward Estland), etc.122 The beginning of the second movement, which initially began: The clear music— Zoo-zoo-kaw-kaw-of-the-sky, Not mentioning names, says Kay, Poetry is not made of such things, […]123 121 Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, p. 181. 122 “A”-1 in Zukofsky, An “Objectivists” Anthology, p. 116. 123 Ibid., p. 118.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

213

becomes: —Clear music— Not calling you names, says Kay, Poetry is not made of such things, […]124

Zukofsky plays on his own name, then on the word itself, disrupting the meaning of “name”—the author’s own, deformed so it is heard without being said—through a context suggesting the sense of an “insult”. And while in A Test of Poetry, the poet presents most of the texts to the reader without naming their authors—except nevertheless in the final pages—he persisted in this direction until the end of his life. The final two movements of “A” Zukofsky wrote are the 22nd and 23rd, in 1970-1973 and 1973-1974 respectively, in which the New Yorker takes the English language to a level of density perhaps never before attained, prefiguring 80 Flowers. Scroggins summarizes the principles of these two movements: Each is comprised of one thousand five-word lines, and each winds within it six thousand years of history: in “A”-22, that history is geological and botanical; in “A”-23, literary. […] Many of these lines are clearly transliterated or translated; most of them, one suspects, are quotations.125

Neither text uses, at least explicitly, any proper name, which the poet explains in the first pages of “A”-22: History’s best emptied of names’ Impertinence met on the ways:126

History as a series of proper names is depopulated: those who want to enter history do not want to make it. Oppen’s poems are also crammed with quotations and references. Through anonymity, some things disappear, while others emerge, like the depopulated shots in Huillet and Straub—the Apuan Alps in Fortini/Cani (1976), the locations in Too Early/Too Late and Lothringen! (1994)—the absence of people in the image is the trace in the margins of their presence beneath the earth. 124 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 6. 125 Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky, pp. 39-40. 126 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 511.

214 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Oppen was traumatized by his terrible experience fighting in France in World War II: […] Fought No man But the fragments of metal Tho there were men there were men No man but the fragments of metal Burying my dogtag with H For Hebrew in the rubble of Alsace

Fought

I must get out of here127

His terror is still palpable. Lost in Alsace, Oppen, wounded, hidden in a mortar hole with a comrade who died next to him, decided to bury his identification tag which bore the inscription H for “Hebrew”. 128 This act deeply marked Oppen and leaves traces everywhere in his post-war poetry. The fifth poem in the “Route” series—the only one in prose—reports that the Alsatians, threatened with being drafted in the German army, hid in holes, sometimes for two or three years. Moreover, Oppen often recalled that, while all of Reznikoff’s work was precious to him, one poem in particular helped him make it through the war, which he recited while crying during his hours in France—a poem he always quotes as: the girder, still itself among the rubble129

Reznikoff’s original reads: Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies a girder, still itself among the rubbish.130

Commenting on Oppen’s misreading—his slip of the tongue—Robert Franciosi alludes neither to “Of hours” nor to the war in general:131 the same 127 In “Of hours”, Oppen, New Collected Poems, p. 218. 128 Anecdote told by David McAleavy, editor of his complete poems and a friend of the Oppens. McAleavy, “The Oppens: Remarks Towards Biography”, p. 309. 129 Reznikoff, Poems, p. 3. 130 Ibid., p. 121. 131 Franciosi, “Reading Reznikoff”, p. 257.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

215

rubble is nevertheless in question. Reznikoff’s lines respond to Oppen’s shame at having chosen to save himself at the price of denying the sign of his Judaism: the tags are buried, sure, but among the rubble they remain the same, unchanged. It is a sign of an infamy—perhaps personal infamy for Oppen, but an infamy of the times too—yet it is also a commemorative plaque, a tombstone for an absent body, a living person—an invisible tombstone. Shame at having survived—shame whose terror also remains in the feeling of no longer being “no man but the fragments of metal”—because the grammatical ambiguities in “Of hours” (typical of Oppen’s poetics) force us not to conclude: is the narrator opposed to no man or only the fragments of metal, or is he himself no longer a person beyond the fragment of metal that defined him, a lost combatant with no identity? Feelings of fragility and the self’s extreme instability are at the core of Oppen’s enterprise. They are tied to fear and the intensity of perception, to the abandonment of the self in the face of the violence of the world, but also simply to abandonment in the face of the presence of things. This takes us back to the idea of a subject dating from World War II, a subject disintegrated by the level of terror introduced by the Nazi exactions and the barbarity reached in this conflict. A subject that might be related to the fact of being Jewish in history as it is—a history that, as a Jew, it is difficult to ignore, that it is difficult not to be completely filled with. A certain method of working to make oneself disappear is clearly connected—in a way that cannot fully be explored here—to Judaism: all things being equal, it is common to the Objectivists and, for example, Walter Benjamin. It is also central to the problems raised by Huillet and Straub in their films about the “Jewish question” (Moses and Aaron, Introduction, Fortini/Cani, perhaps From Today Until Tomorrow (1996)). And Oppen’s poem relates to a number of Straubian themes, a particular instance of which we have seen in Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice, a tomb for the dead who have none, but a tomb refusing to appear as such— that these dead continue to have none may be the only possible homage to give them, the only way to attest to their real place in history. Like Huillet and Straub’s film, Oppen’s poem only raises questions about the buried inscription, the continuous presence in the subsoil of traces of old wars and the nameless dead whose identities have been destroyed. The idea that these traces are palpable (and must be: more than a moral imperative, more than a belief, a necessity) even while invisible, that we can count on their presence (even if the presence is in the dialectical form of absence: because it is invisible it can still be there) and that we must do so (this alone provides continuity, places us in history, and maintains our name).

216 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

While names have almost vanished from A Test of Poetry, they are also singularly absent in A Visit to the Louvre: if “Cézanne” says them, which he does do occasionally, then we hear them—but no title card or subtitle underlines an authority or provides dates. The paintings are there to be seen for themselves. Louis Seguin quotes Straub on the statue shown at the beginning of History Lessons: “We then see a Caesar on a pedestal, which is already mythologizing because it’s a fascist statue, one that is a copy of a Roman statue, but a Roman statute from 24 years after Caesar’s death.”132 The same question raised by Othon remains: to understand the shot, do we need to know this? Or is this visible? Cézanne saw that the rocks of Sainte-Victoire had been fire. It is always a question of historical strata, of an image where the subterranean becomes not visible (it has to remain underground), but palpable, in a certain manner… Or does it make no difference to know this or not? In any case, the ambiguity in the jurist’s gesture between a Roman and Nazi salute remains and increases in resonance. Not only are names removed, commentaries and transitions are too. During and after each encounter in The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar, the young man makes explanations and comments specifying for readers what they might have missed (“I must admit that I was revolted to no little extent by the irreverent way the old man described this manoeuvre”,133 or “I was finding the man’s inability to recognize greatness when faced with it more depressing than ever.”134). These remarks do not appear in the film. The filmmakers therefore deliberately seem to refuse any explicitness, any way of “facilitating the work” for spectators, allowing them to access the “meaning” of what is on-screen. Even Godard, not particularly inclined himself to excessive clarifications, was bothered by this aspect of Huillet and Straub’s work. The latter said, “[Godard] saw Chronicle at the Locarno Film Festival. He found it to be lacking a little in something politically. I laughed and said, ‘You didn’t want me to put “Everything is political” at the end?’ And he said, ‘Ah! Maybe that would have been enough’.”135 It initially appears Huillet and Straub’s films are caught in a strong contradiction between being overtly didactic and flagrantly withholding information. In the filmmaker’s conception, this is not information that must first be transmitted—that should be reserved for lower forms of communication, 132 Seguin, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, p. 66. 133 Brecht, Business Affairs, p. 38. 134 Ibid., p. 43. 135 Jousse and Vatrican, “Entretien”, p. 49.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

217

such as interviews. This information can play a role in understanding the film, but it is not the film’s role to provide it and the film must function without it (we must simply be able to see and hear it). The work must provoke a shift in our relationship to the information itself and to perception. A conception of both art and history is at play here. The dates are dealt a similar fate as the comments: the only ones remaining in History Lessons seem incoherent and contradictory: in shot 23, Spicer recounts that “C.”, whom he knew personally, was “almost lynched” in year 87, in shot 40, the jurist evokes a scandal that happened in the Senate “in 620—more than a century ago”—dates clearly corresponding moreover to a different calendar than ours. Not Reconciled is also structured on passages like this, which lack clear transitions between several different time periods—Germany in 1964, 1934, and 1914. The film performs a vast demolition of Heinrich Böll’s book Billiards at Half-Past Nine, in which each chapter is told “by” one of the protagonists, justifying and clarifying the flashbacks. Ignoring the subjective viewpoints and equalizing them, the film’s narrative density brings the novel’s to the edge of implosion: we pass—cut—from a shot of a character in 1964 to the same one 30 years earlier—the voice-over allowing us not to become too lost, although it never specifies the date. The abundance of characters and contexts further complicates this phenomenon: when the first thing a boy says to his friend without any time period having been defined or noted is “Are you Jewish?”, something can be felt. Thus names and dates—reference points through which history is fixed, through which the past is fixed as the past—disappear: either as a catalogue of the dead or an illusory story about a continuous movement, history is felt as a weight, as a simultaneously present superimposition of layers. In 1910, Pound wrote: “All ages are contemporaneous.”136 In his 1929 essay on the Cantos, Zukofsky goes further: Pound may pass safely and at once […] from the subject matter of one canto to that of another comprehended in instant entirety because all new subject matter is ineluctably simultaneous with “what has gone before.” Postulate beings and there is breathing between them and yet maybe no closer relation than the common air which irresistibly includes them. […] The immediacy of Pound’s epic matter, the form of the Cantos, the complete passage through, in and around objects, historical events, the living them at once and not merely as approximation of their statistical 136 Pound, Spirit of Romance, p. 6.

218 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

historical points of contact is as much a fact as those facts which historians have labeled and disassociated.137

Connections established by history are strange: not simplifying and transforming them into abstractions through predatory intentions means respecting the deep disjunction hidden beneath their simple, simultaneous coexistence, beneath their sharing of the same air. The sensation of history as weight throws doubt on the obvious causal relations invented by classical historiography. Time periods must not be disassociated, but experienced all together. They must be formally juxtaposed in a simple co-presence with no other link than the minimal ones at the base of the structure. The conception of a link that is almost the absence of a link created by a non-predatory view of history must become the model of the formal construction of the work—or love. It must therefore be lacunary or made as much of blanks as the rest. Pound writes in Canto XIII: [“]And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean for things they didn’t know, But that time seems to be passing.”138

The refusal to label and the replacement of names and dates by blanks should not be understood as a desire for hermeticism, but as a means towards several ends: the possibility of throwing spectators off-balance through distantiation effects that would be blocked if the past perfect were used; and respect for that which presents itself as opaque, fleeting, and hermetic for unclear reasons—before the classical historian intervenes to save it. Based on a juxtaposition of blocks with minimal connections, the work and the history it is trying to implement are returned to their fundamental discontinuity, as if to please Walter Benjamin. In the same text on The Cantos, Zukofsky defends the idea of Pound’s objectivity, which the poet defines as disappearing before the material, and then develops it into a relationship to history: Try as a poet may for objectivity, for the past to relive itself, not for his living the historical data, he can do only one of two things: get up a most brief catalog of antiquities (people become dates, epitaphs), or use this 137 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 77. 138 Pound, Cantos, p. 60.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

219

catalog and breathe upon it, so that it lives as his music. This latter action need not falsify the catalog.139

Objectivity involves the past coming back to life, which it can only accomplish on its own: any intervention on the author’s part can only bring back dead bodies. The catalogue can be brought back to life—without being modified—on the condition that the poet withdraws. History Without Authors Pound, Zukofsky, and Oppen all make abundant use of quotation as one means of this withdrawal. In all of their work, the text tends to be composed of an interlacing of quotations and palimpsests from various sources—preexisting works or similar words—sometimes indicated but often working anonymously below the poem’s surface. The “neither Roman nor barbarian” or the “it will not cohere” already encountered in Oppen are not really quotes, but his poetry is constructed in constant dialogue with other works and statements, which it includes in its movement and brings into contact. If Zukofsky’s fundamental principle of objectification describes the poet’s attention to shaping his own text rigorously and ‘solidly’, this covers an entire practice of working with texts written by others, of literary origin or not. Thus, the third and final part of An “Objectivists” Anthology is composed of rearrangements (by Zukofsky) of previously presented poems, justified by a paragraph where he vaunts the use of pre-existing texts: It is more important for the communal good that individual authors should spend their time recording and objectifying good writing wherever it is found (note the use of quotations in Marianne Moore from Government guide-books, Pound’s translations and quotations in the Cantos, Carlos Williams‘ passages out of Spanish and early American sources in In the American Grain; cf. Reznikoff’s The English in Virginia in Pagany IV 1930) than that a plenum of authors should found their fame on all sorts of personal vagueness—often called “sophistication.”140

Communal good merits communal work and forgetting fame of little value. A poet is nothing without “sincerity”: remaining in abstractions—sincerity acquired without objectification—the poet’s poetry remains second-rate. 139 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 73. 140 Zukofsky, An “Objectivists” Anthology, p. 205.

220 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Zukofsky writing sonnets for “A”-7, reusing Cavalcanti’s canzone form and the sestina is in keeping with Mallarmé who told Gustave Kahn, the self-proclaimed inventor of “free verse”: “What a delicious liberation! For take good note that I don’t consider you as having put your finger on a new form in the face of which the old form must withdraw. The old one will remain, impersonal, for all and for whoever wishes to choose a different form of isolation, the choice is our own.”141 Old forms have the immense advantage of already being accumulations of history and anonymous. Zukofsky’s work contains a complete refusal, perhaps terror, of anything informal, placing him on Schoenberg’s side of the scale: his works executed within strict formal frameworks—old forms, translations, and strong constraints—where he clearly pushes the English language to its furthest limits. His poetic work itself thus immediately takes on a historical dimension. Objectification is the complementary procedure to this: reusing in a different context not the form but the words themselves on which the poetic technique is practised and to which the test of structure is juxtaposed. Zukofsky draws an example from Reznikoff: The English in Virginia, April 1607 They landed and could see nothing but meadows and tall trees— cypress, nearly three fathoms about at the roots, rising straight for sixty or eighty feet without branch. […] In the twilight, through the thickets all tall grass, creeping upon all fours—the savages, their bows in their mouths.142 141 Mallarmé, Selected Letters, p. 151. 142 Reznikoff, Poems, pp. 122-123.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

221

A footnote indicates, “Based upon the Works of Captain John Smith, edited by Edward Arber.”143 Among Reznikoff’s work, this poem may be the one with the shortest lines and the most deconstructed—the most “modern”, the one where the use of versification is the most visible. His process involves selection and versification, the exact processes Huillet and Straub apply to the texts they use. Not a word comes from the filmmakers, but the manner of breathing the text, introducing caesuras into it, and giving it rhythm does. They objectify the works they start from, apply an additional structure to them, an extra formal layer, excessive in a sense in relation to the original. Affixing an assembly of modulated interruptions, pauses, and deletions to the text is therefore the only means that the Objectivists—poets and filmmakers—allow themselves when “objectifying” a text, testing it through the imposition of a form and testing the form’s solidity through the material’s resistance. There are problems in applying the term “quotation” to film. Littré’s definition—his dictionary quotes often and without quotation marks—is interesting because of the balance of its quasi-repetition: “Passage borrowed from an author who could be an authority.” The texts in Huillet and Straub’s films can all be considered quotations—and they have always spoken of them as such: they are borrowed passages, unmodified, as is necessary, through which the filmmakers discard the necessity of being the authors of what is said. They transfer authority, refuse to assume it. Moreover, a large part of the texts Huillet and Straub have published in various magazines and books only consist of montages of quotations: from the “Status of the New Filmmaker” (1959)—which uses slightly modif ied texts from the Encyclopédie and the Livre des statuts des horlogers de Paris—to a text for Cicim in Munich (1988)—an arrangement of words by Cézanne, Hölderlin, Benjamin, Schoenberg, and Bettina von Arnim—as well as a 1971 letter to Cahiers du cinéma (questionnaire from Filmcritica, texts by Eisenstein and Brecht, two brief interventions by Straub) and “On the Business Affair of Mr. Julius Caesar” (adapted from Klaus Völker’s Brecht Chronicle) from 1973… And the music Huillet and Straub chose for Antigone, from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Musique pour les soupers du roi Ubu, also works as a montage of quotations, in a way whose parallels with the filmmakers’ own work François Albera describes: One could compare this process with that of Alois Zimmermann who, refusing the “tabula rasa” of some of his contemporaries, makes recourse 143 Ibid., p. 122.

222 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

in his music to the superimposition of heterogeneous layers, dismissing the idea of “style” as well as “organicity”, and creating a new spatialization of the instruments. Constantly referring to Joyce and Pound, he loved to quote the latter’s main principle that “All ages are contemporaneous.” Thus in the same historical present, different cultural layers coexist, are deployed, and redistributed. This is how he uses “quotation”—that difficult art, unjustly despised, said Brecht—and even collage.144

I have already described some of the structure of Cézanne. Three times, the film makes room for shots from other films. First, after the shot of the Vieille au chapelet, in which, according to Gasquet, Cézanne found “a Flaubert tone” that made him think of “the description of the old servant at the agricultural fair” in Madame Bovary, Huillet and Straub use an excerpt—one reel—of Jean Renoir’s film Madame Bovary (1933) covering the fair episode. Towards the end, a very short shot does in fact strikingly evoke Cézanne’s painting. After this block, we return to a shot of Mount Sainte-Victoire. The two other heterogeneous excerpts are taken from one of Huillet and Straub’s own films, but the authority passes by Hölderlin: to Cézanne’s question, “The chance of the rays, the progression, infiltration, incarnation of the sun across the world, who will ever paint that?”, Huillet and Straub offer the painter lines from The Death of Empedocles as filmed by them a few years earlier. Then the German’s Trauerspiel returns in a second block.145 These excerpts are incontestably quotations: the way a writer steps away for a moment to leave his tools to someone else, the shots here are no longer of the film we are seeing, but come from elsewhere—and no “quotation marks” (frame within a frame, etc.) indicate them as such. They are each clearly ruptured from the images surrounding them (colour/ black and white, French/German, different sound textures, etc.): the cut causes a real shock. Only five shots in the film are not “images of images”—shots of paintings or photographs of the artist—and the “motifs” (in the pictorial sense) of these exceptional shots are equally static since they are more or less solely landscapes. Should the “reproductions” of images be considered quotations? If there is a change in the status of the images in Cézanne, should it be placed between the shots filmed by Huillet and Straub and those filmed by Renoir 144 Albera, Sophocle/Hölderlin, pp. 6-7. 145 The first excerpt is composed of five shots that combine two passages from the original: shots 34 to 37, then shot 43. The second is only shot 127.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

223

or between the shots taken from other films and those produced “for” this one, or between the images showing the “real world directly” and those showing works (representations)? In any case, the film explores possible kinds of visual equivalence of the principle of quotation, and it composes its heterogeneity from them. The eye perceives similarities, but does not respond to them as cinephilic references, like a reader of The Cantos or “A” would perceive that this or that line is likely a more or less distorted quotation without knowing anything about the sources. Objectivity plays a part here, in the sense that everything happens as if, under certain conditions, there are not an infinite number of solutions or shots that can be constructed. It is therefore inevitable that—working with a rigorous method—solutions are found that earlier artisans had discovered for theorems that are applicable to this context. To claim such a position requires strong objectivist tendencies, the belief that there exists something like a test of poetry with objective criteria. Benjamin also places an enlarged understanding of the principle of quotation in the 14th of his theses “On the Concept of History”: History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time [ Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a by-gone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past. Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution.146

This “tiger’s leap into the past” is moreover one of Straub’s favourite quotations. The revolution does not make the past a blank slate. It also refuses to consider it as a catalogue of dead antiquities. It wants to bring them back to life. It is related to the choice of the discontinuous that opts for “the tradition of the oppressed” over history written by the masters, with a certain distrust for dissociating eras and other kinds of labelling that assures the past is in fact past, and with cinematic montage and the shock that it makes possible. 146 Benjamin, Selected Writings, IV, p. 395.

224 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

From Ideogram to Fugue: The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp “Lenos! Joy procreates pimps so the world enjoys their downfall”. ‒ Louis Zukofsky, “A”-21 147

In 1969, Jean-Claude Biette wrote about The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp: “In Straub’s film we witness the systematic exploration of the powers of quotation and its multiple meanings.”148 If the Italian version of the article was called “Tema variazioni e fuga, Opus 4”, it was not only because Huillet and Straub’s previous film was Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach or that Bach’s music (and his texts, like in Zukofsky) is very present in this film too. This is one of Huillet and Straub’s most “disconnected” works. In Cahiers du cinéma, its director describes it as being composed of five parts—after the opening titles.149 The distinction functions somewhat differently depending if we privilege narrative or rhythmic concerns. One possibility presents itself as: 1. Opening credits, superimposed over a close-up of a wall (50”); 2. Tracking shot in a car, night: prostitutes waiting on the sidewalk— silent until (after about 1’40”) Bach’s music (Cantata BWV 11) (4’23”); 3. Static wide shot: a theatre stage where a play is performed—a version of Ferdinand Bruckner’s three act play Krankheit der Jugend (Sickness of Youth) “condensed” by Straub; 4a. The “bridegroom” leaves the apartment of the “actress” who was in the play, is pursued by an unknown man, escapes from him (5 shots, 1’20”); 4b. Static wide shot: wedding ceremony for the previous couple (2’4 1”); 4c. The couple returns home, finds the “pimp” from the play in their house: the “actress” kills him with the man’s revolver—return of the cantata from the beginning (3 shots, 3’34”).

The connections between the four main blocks are not obvious during a screening. True, the “actress” and the “pimp” are present in the final two, but it is difficult to recognize the former, filmed from a distance in the play. Only 147 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 499. 148 Biette, “Jean-Marie Straub”, p. 9. 149 Straub-Huillet, Writings, pp. 97-98

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

225

the latter is easily recognizable because he carries himself in a characteristic manner—the film plays a lot with the feeling of his weight—and because he is Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Understanding the situation is only possible by reconstructing everything—the theatre troupe is also a site where prostitution is organized, an actress is looking to escape the pimp with whom she works by marrying a young man (an African-American), but the pimp finds them and tries to get rid of the bridegroom by denouncing him to the police (he is likely an immigrant with an irregular situation, as they say): no other solution than to kill him. The only explicit indications are given by the title card and the pimp’s one line outside the play, in the final shot: “You don’t get away from our family that easy [Lilith]. I bring you back to Munich. The police is taking care of your chivalrous friend.” We understand through the title and the tracking shot—though the latter is so drowned in darkness as to be nearly abstract, the women are barely recognizable spectres—that the context is prostitution. But the play deals with this subject and the theme of marriage that prevents one from being reduced to prostitution. We might also need to recognize the “actress” from one block to another, which is not so obvious—if only because her first name changes from Marie (in the play) to Lilith (in the film and real life). Furthermore, we must catch all of the allusions the “pimp” makes. Most surprising is perhaps the fact that the film is actually understandable. We can see the degree to which the transitions and explanations between each block have disappeared, the degree to which it is up to the spectator to reconstruct the “meaning” of the whole. Bridegroom presents a wide array of possible modes of quotation in cinema. The opening credits are superimposed over a part of a wall where students have scratched various inscriptions, which are barely legible on the white background and are further blocked by the names of the participants in the film (also in white letters). Among the words, we can make out these ones that another hand or the same hand has scratched: “stupid / Old Germany / I hate it over here / I hope I can go soon / Patricia / 1.3.68.” Following Straubian habits, the text of Cantata BWV 11 should be understood as creating meaning—a quotation?—inseparable from the images: “You Day, when will you come […] Come, be present.” The play—condensed from Bruckner’s “normal” length play to ten minutes based around moments where doors open and characters meet (condensed so much as to become a quotation?)—is performed in a static shot on a set whose back wall bears a fragment of a mostly hidden text. It is a quotation from Mao, in fact:

226 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Even if the arch-reactionaries of the world— even today, tomorrow, and after tomorrow— still inflexible— but not strong— dog shit

In the play, the character of Freder (Fassbinder) quotes Goethe: “Even in science nothing is known—everything has to be done.” The wedding ceremony naturally consists entirely of quotations from ritual texts, the effect accentuated by the fact that during most of this long shot, the bride and groom repeat, one after the other, line by line, the text dictated to them by the Jesuit—further accentuated by the similarity between this frame and the shot of the theatre, also wide, static, and on a similar diagonal. During the arrival to the house at the end and following the pimp’s murder, the young married couple only speak or express themselves in interposed quotations from poems by John of the Cross, translated word for word into German by Straub. In the shot following the theatrical presentation, the pimp’s above-quoted line and a brief exchange between Lilith and James, the “bridegroom”, are presented as lines “invented” by the characters themselves and not originating in an exterior source. The dialogue is a limiting case, however, both through its brevity and its cliched character: a man leaves his wife’s bedroom, they kiss, she says, “Be careful”, he responds, “Okay baby”—how many films (noirs) could this be quoting? The cutting of the “pursuit” (part 4a) is constantly at the limits of quotation, even if the rhythmic work, specific to Huillet and Straub, can clearly be felt—even in such a rapid montage, the sense of the pauses, contretemps, and tempi that are both very precise and always staggered is striking. The film thus superimposes two kinds of operations. We can understand it as a narrative film: a young actress (in love?) wants to liberate herself from prostitution. But this relationship to the film can only be secondary: it is far too disconnected and lacunary for the story to be followed directly without it first being reconstructed. To access the narrative, we must understand the film through a form of the “ideogrammic method”, juxtaposing scattered elements and producing meaning from them. As in the sestina, where the movement also goes from back to front, and in other films by Huillet and Straub and Pound’s poems, this (strange) operation upsets the temporality of the film’s reception. The illusion of a continuous, homogenous development is broken. The explosion implied by the constellation of quotations that pepper

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

227

the film generates a whole system of interruptions that, generalized, shift the film’s narrative aspect elsewhere. Biette concludes that “interrupting the traditional time of the story, quotation substitutes a specific time and space for it.”150 Only Goethe, the great writer, and Patricia, the girl whose first name only recalls her anonymity and whose sadness is to be only one among many others, are named, on the soundtrack for the former, and on-screen for the latter, as sources of quotations: the names of John of the Cross and Ferdinand Bruckner only appear in the opening credits—the way the names of the authors in A Test of Poetry are only presented at the end of the book; Mao’s is not cited anywhere. But it is diff icult to understand the overall f ilm using the notion of “ideogrammic” construction. Atemporal movement or movement against reconstruction is present, but another organization is superimposed over the very strong formal disjunction between the parts, which is affixed to it rather than cancelling it. In fact, every part consists of a variation on the same theme: liberation, the fugue (not in the musical sense, but in the sense of running away), and the possibility of revolution or escape. The parts have nearly no narrative connection between them (that “Lilith” in the fourth part is the one who plays “Marie” in the second is practically anecdotal), but they obsessively repeat the same story: hating the here and now of a damaged life and fleeing, anywhere out of the world. Like a musical fugue, the film is developed through an exploration of the various manners of deploying a motif, giving it form and harmonies. In a conversation between Rivette, Narboni, and Sylvie Pierre from the time of Bridegroom’s release, Narboni states: The reference to music just made in connection with Bresson may also be applied to all of Straub’s films, which are so rife with preoccupations tending in this direction, so essentially a search for possible homologies. One might cite, more or less at random, the distribution and proportionment of tempi, the alternation of zones of tension and release, of dense nuclei and silent expanses, the complex and variable interplay of autonomy and interdependence among the “cells”, the composition in large blocks or pinpoint elements, the combination of solidly built structures with other “freer” ones, and finally, the application of the principle never belied by Stravinsky, the rejection of expressivity.151 150 Biette, “Jean-Marie Straub”, p. 9. 151 Rivette, Rivette, p. 87.

228 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

He extends his statement with Stockhausen’s letter to Straub about Machorka-Muff and the “composition of the film-time—it is closely related to music”.152 The systematic exploration of quotation in Bridegroom is doubled with a study of variations on rhythmic texture, an idea whose range is given by the simple exposition of the respective duration and number of shots in the different structural “blocks”: a (bright) static shot, 50” / a night tracking shot, 4’23” / an interior static shot, 10’35” / five shots (two static framed by three panning and tracking shots), 1’20” / an interior static shot, 2’41” / three panning shots, 3’34”. This flow establishes a return from ideogrammic perception to the actual viewing duration through the formal emphasis on the “signified” that the “interference” of the quotations recalls and accentuates. We have already seen the degree to which, for Zukofsky, the analogy with music was fertile and foundational from very early in his poetic research. In the contributor biographies for the Objectivist issue of Poetry, he writes about himself: Louis Zukofsky, born in New York, 1904; M.A., Columbia University; teaches English at the University of Wisconsin. His poem ‘A’—in process—includes two themes: I—desire for the poetically perfect finding its direction inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars; and II—approximate attainment of this perfection in the feeling of the contrapuntal design of the figure transferred to poetry; both themes related to the text of Bach’s St Matthew Passion.153

We have also seen the role cinema played for him in the articulation of analogy, allowing him to conserve what new freedoms were allowed by the ideogrammic method, play with montage, and openness—all while bringing the poem’s temporal (rhythmic) materiality to the fore. The two themes through which Zukofsky exposes his project are valid word for word for Huillet and Straub’s film work. In a certain way, the filmmakers must retrace some of the path in reverse so that a more atemporal vertical structure can be established, superimposed on the fundamental stakes involved in the film’s rhythmic movement. “Seen from above”, a work by Bach—the St Matthew Passion, for example—could have a bridge-like structure: the entire work needs to be complete before the structure can be perceived (this should be qualified: one can recognize the 152 Ibid., p. 87. 153 Zukofsky, “Notes”, p. 294.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

229

form before the end). “Seen from within”, it creates a succession of tempi in a system of alternations, creating, as Narboni says, “a very particular type of suspense, without finality, which acts on us as a power to recharge and reactivate, subjecting our attention to a beating, throbbing flow”.154 Rivette adds: “And a purely formal suspense: what is the shot going to be?—and not: what is going to be in the shot?”155 Huillet and Straub’s films mix constructed structures “seen from above” (ideogrammic) and formal, rhythmic research that is supposed to be felt “from within” (related to what Zukofsky called the “fugal principle”, tied to the “cinematic principle”). Moses and Aaron provides an example of these double mechanisms: constructed as two superimposed structures starting in the same place, but going in different directions; in the first act the film emphasizes the condensation of space and the dispositif that is opposed in the second to a deployment privileging a more ample internal movement. Bridegroom accentuates the effect of a succession of blocks that are deeply coherent and separate, even if the return of the same cantata at the end strengthens the formal contrast between the long lateral, nocturnal, urban tracking shot and the brief forward tracking shot in daylight and with trees.

Braiding, Cutting Counterpoint and Seriality: Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach Zukofsky’s “two themes” are of course particularly valid for Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. The film also plays with effects of superimposition. One shot in this film is visually striking for a whole series of reasons: it is the only night shot and it is the only shot using rear-projection—a startlingly unrealistic rear-projection of the top of the front wall of the Leipzig city hall shown from a low angle while “Bach” (Gustav Leonhardt) conducts in the foreground from a slightly high angle, producing a very harsh effect of visual “dissonance”. This shot—absolutely exceptional in their work—is the 57th in a film of 114. It suggests a structure based on symmetry, but one that is only perceptible “seen from above”. In parallel to this, the film is constructed on the alternation of pieces of music played by Bach in a single shot and brief biographical fragments recounted by “Anna Magdalena Bach” (Christiane Lang-Drewanz)—an 154 Rivette, Rivette, p. 88. 155 Ibid., p. 88.

230 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

alternation mimicking that of the St Matthew Passion. There are several kinds of music, each filmed in a different manner depending on whether “Bach” is playing keyboard alone or conducting an orchestra or choir. Within these categories, the framing is repeated like variations on a fundamental model. For example, shots 33, 42, and 60 show “Bach” conducting an ensemble at the tribune of Leipzig’s St Thomas Church: all three are similarly framed on a very marked diagonal from the extreme right of the tribune, Leonhardt on frame right in left profile with a window in the background and the organ covering all of frame left in deep perspective. In the same location, the end of shot 48 and the beginning of shot 89 offer analogous perspectives, but are transformed when the camera tracks forward or backward. Shot 39 also shows “Bach” conducting, but in the tribune of the Paulinerkirche at the University of Leipzig. It too has a pronounced diagonal, but in the other direction (Leonhardt, in right profile, is deep in the frame on the left). The framing is never exactly the same or completely different: the shots present slight variations around a common principle. Likewise, shots showing Leonhardt at the organ are constructed on the same system of diagonals, but at the beginning of shot 48, the musician is on frame right, facing the left; in shot 49 he is seen from a high angle in the background on frame left, facing the right; in shot 69, from a slightly high angle in the background on the right, facing the left, and the camera tracks forward. These are a few examples of a much more complex system since the same shot can combine several returning motifs. The strong formal presence of the off-centred compositions and accentuated diagonals emphasize the shot compositions, and the recurrences become all the more striking—in their similarities and their small differences. A system of visual “rhymes” is thus created, which return and, in the succession of shots, isolate series of blocks, which each have a strong, formal coherence. Through their cinematic function, these “rhymes” always (potentially) have multiple values: several (more or less) salient traits from each block can simultaneously enter different series. The story of Bach’s life not only loses its continuity, it becomes an intertwining where one strand rather than another regularly passes in front—a (contrapuntal?) interlacing of simultaneous or successive formal themes. This method implies both minimalism and its opposite: minimalism in that the filmmakers have constructed their work from a number of fundamental schemas that must be limited for the returns and rhyming effects to be isolated and perceived as such from one to the other; but minimalism hiding a deeply baroque profusion since the variations applied in this regime—as slight as they may initially seem—gain a considerable and obvious importance.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

231

Yet the image of a braid unfortunately masks this quality of the cutting, the constant interruption characteristic of cinematic and poetic forms. The cuts are always sharp, the narrative or thematic transitions absent, and the connections distant; the emphasis on formal attributes emphasizes the effects of the cutting. Every passage from one shot to the next, from one line to the next, from one word to the next in texts or diction becomes problematic, emptied of its evidence, of its casted form. Collision is the law of this world. Movements and Breaks That The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp is both among Huillet and Straub’s most deeply disconnected films and one of their films that most extensively works with the principle of quotation is no accident. The organization of the quotations implies and allows for a high degree of disconnection between the elements, allows the montage—in the sense proposed by Eisenstein and Benjamin, or in what Zukofsky calls the “cinematic principle”—visibly to take precedence over the narration. Interval, gap, interruption, stop, cut, blank, shock: these principles are not equivalent, but represent the dark side of the cinematic machine. They are brought back to the film’s surface and become its matrix. In film, the cut is constantly threatening; time is cut up into successive instants, discovering and revealing its discontinuity. The cut and this threat are at the heart of the conception of the work’s unfolding as well as the movement of history. They play with real cuts and supposed continuities, with the possibility of constructing solid but infinitely tense relationships, simple, simultaneous, or successive juxtapositions. An era is nothing more than a certain shared quality of air that singularities breathe together, united by intervals alone. This “strong juxtaposition” must govern how the work functions, allowing a firm structure to be constructed, as well as immense play between the constituent parts. The link is therefore a link of love as might have been conceived by John of the Cross or Bach, as Zukofsky’s eyes see it in Shakespeare and elsewhere. To believe in this structure and accept the distance of this link, one must forget one’s own name and become lost looking at and in things—as the mystics knew, it is necessary to curse the self to a certain degree. Excessive continuity and breaks target the self. If “the laws of thought are metric”, close perception of this rhythm means abandonment to it. The return to the desert is one way of putting it. The other, inseparably interconnected, is intensely erotic. The dialectical image—a moment defined by instability, a destructive surge and the infinite fragility of disappearance—is for Benjamin

232 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

the “too early/too late” through which the Revolution can penetrate history. This image is an erotic, fulgurous unveiling from end to end. What deeply differentiates Huillet and Straub from filmmakers like Michael Snow is that they do not renounce storytelling and the direct production of meaning, giving a major role to words and, as with the Objectivists, to what is said. If some of Snow’s films are filled with the embryos of fiction—Wavelength, for example—the balance is absolutely unlike in that of the work of the French-German-Italians. We can feel, moreover, both their admiration and some regret in what Straub tells Andi Engel in 1975 after seeing Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen: It has the reality of sound and image—materialist—but it lacks the binding, it lacks the third pole. Of course there is a connection between eye and ear and the brain functions. He appeals to the brain only in this respect and not […] he represses, I believe, everything where a thinking tissue could form, that he represses.156

Like Oppen, Reznikoff, and Zukofsky (at least in part of their work), Huillet and Straub have always considered music to be most important, but that the text should also be meaningful—and most of the poems collected in An “Objectivists” Anthology contain explicit political content. If the films are entirely ruled by formal considerations—structural, plastic, rhythmic, and the partition of continuous blocks and interruptions— these considerations are never alone, but in counterpoint to a measure introduced from outside (cantus firmus): a narrative and/or discursive text whose development is respected. An always unstable balance must be found between movement and stasis, growth and stoppages, history and revolutions. This interaction must never be resolved through deliberation or a “happy medium”, but instead contain the strongest possible tension between the two principles, each working at full capacity.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. and Eisler, Hanns, Composing for the Films. London: Athlone Press, 1994. Albera, François, Sophocle/Hölderlin/Brecht/Straub-Huillet/Zimmermann: Autour d’Antigone—Film, concert, débats. Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 1993. 156 Engel, “Andi Engel talks to Jean-Marie Straub”, p. 16.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

233

Arnim, Bettina von, Werke und Briefe, 3 vols., ed. Walter Schmitz. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986. Aumont, Jacques and Faux, Anne-Marie, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, Der Tod des Empedokles/La Mort d’Empédocles, ed. Jacques Déniel and Dominique Païni. Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. —, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. —, Gesammelte Schriften, 10 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978. —, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. —, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1999. Biette, Jean-Claude, “Jean-Marie Straub: ‘Le Fiancé, la comédienne, et le maquereau’”, Cahiers du cinéma, 212 (May 1969), pp. 9-10. Bitsch, Marcel and Bonfils, Jean, La Fugue. Paris: Combre, 1993. Booth, Marcela, A Catalogue of the Louis Zukofsky Manuscript Collection, Austin, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Tower Bibliographical Series, Number Eleven, 1975. Brecht, Bertolt, “Anweisungen an die Schauspieler”, Werke, vol. 22. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993, pp. 667-668. —, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, ed. Tom Kuh, Steve Giles, and Marc Silberman. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. —, “Das soziologische Raum des bürgerlichen Theaters”, Werke, vol. 21. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993, pp. 557-559. —, Journals: 1934-1955, trans. Hugh Rorrison. New York: Routledge, 1993. —, The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar, trans. Charles Osborne. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Böser, Ursula, The Art of Seeing, the Art of Listening: the Politics of Representation in the Work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004. Cervoni, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub”, Cinéma 75, 203 (November 1975), pp. 45-51. Damerau, Burgard, “Le chemin passait par Hölderlin”, Brecht après la chute, ed. Wolfgang Storch. Paris: L’Arche, 1993. Darras, Jacques “Briggflatts”, Poésie, 7, 4th trimester (1978). Debord, Guy, Panegyric, trans. James Brook and John McHale. New York: Verso, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema II: The Time-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

234 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form and The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967. Engel, Andi, “Andi Engel talks to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is there too”, Enthusiasm, 1 (December 1975), pp. 1-25. Färber, Helmut, Patalas, Enno, Grafe, Frieda und Linder, Herbert, “Gespräch mit Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub”, Filmkritik, 142 (October 1968), pp. 688-694. Franciosi, Robert, “Reading Reznikoff: Zukofsky, Oppen and Niedecker”, The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. R. Blau DuPlessis and P. Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999, pp. 257-274. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Géfin, Laszlo, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Hatlen, Burton, “Opening up the Text: George Oppen’s ‘On Being Numerous’”, Ironwood 26, 13:2 (Fall 1985), pp. 263-295. Jourde, Michel, ‘Menaces pour les yeux et les oreilles des humanistes: Gorgones et Sirènes chez Guillaume Budé’, Par la vue et par l’ouïe: Littérature du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance, ed. Michèle Galley, Michel Jourde. Fontenay aux Roses: ENS Editions, 1999, pp. 173-198. Jousse, Thierry and Vatrican, Vincent, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, Cahiers du cinéma, special issue, 18, “Musique au cinéma” (1995), pp. 46-51. Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Leggott, Michele J., Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Mallarmé, Stéphane, A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, trans. Robert Bononno and Jeff Clark. Seattle: Wave Books, 2015. —, The Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Rosemary Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Mauclair, Camille, A Translation from French into English of Camille Mauclair’s Le Soleil des Morts/Sun of the Dead, trans. Rosemary Yeoland. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015. McAleavy, “The Oppens: Remarks Towards Biography”, Ironwood 26, 13:2 (Fall 1985), pp. 309-318. Oppen, George, “The Mind’s Own Place”, Ironwood 26, 13:2 (Autumn 1985), pp. 132-137. —, New Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 2002.

Cinema, Poe try, History: Immobilizations

235

—, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Pavese, Cesare, Dialogues with Leucò, trans. William Arrowsmith. Boston: Eridanos Press, 1990. Pound, Ezra and Fenollosa, Ernest, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934. —, Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970. —, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1998. —, The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968. Rancière, Jacques, “La Parole sensible”, Cinéma, 5 (Spring 2003), pp. 68-78. Reznikoff, Charles, The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, ed. Seamus Cooney. Boston: Black Sparrow, 2005. Risset, Jacqueline, Dante écrivain ou l’intelletto d’amore. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Rivette, Jacques, Rivette: Texts and Interviews, trans. Tom Milne. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, Film: The Front Line 1983. Denver: Arden Press, 1983. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo D’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri (1100-1200-1300). London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1861. Roth, Wilhelm and Pflaum, Günther, “Gespräch mit Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub”, Filmkritik, 194 (February 1973), pp. 66-78. Roubaud, Jacques, La Fleur inverse: L’Art des troubadours. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2009. —, “La tentative objectiviste”, Revue de Littérature Générale, 96/2, 1996. Shakespeare, William, The Tempest. London: Penguins Books Limited, 1937. Schappes, Morris U., “Correspondence: Objectivists Again”, Poetry, 42, 2 (May 1933), pp. 117-118. Schubert, Franz, The Complete Songs, 3 vols., trans. Richard Wigmore. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Scroggins, Mark, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Seguin, Louis, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet: “Aux distraitement désespérés que nous sommes…”. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2007. Stein, Gertrude, How to Write. New York: Dover Publications, 1975. Straub, Jean-Marie and Huillet, Danièle, Writings, ed. Shally Shafto. New York: Sequence Press, 2016.

236 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Walsh, Martin, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema, ed. Keith M. Griffiths. London: BFI Publishing, 1981. Zukofsky, Louis, “A”. New York: New Directions, 2011. — (ed.), An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology. Le Beaussett, Var, France: To Publishers, 1932. —, Bottom: On Shakespeare. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. —, Complete Short Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. —, “Modern Times”, handwritten manuscript, 15 pages, Harry Ransom Humanties Research Center. —, “Notes”, Poetry, 37:5 (February 1931), pp. 294-295. —, Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

6. Industrial Civilization for the Last Time: Class Relations Abstract This chapter analyses in detail Straub-Huillet’s Kafka adaptation Class Relations, with special attention paid to language and power in the film and the filmmakers’ use of space, as this was their first film from which each scene was filmed from only one camera position. What this choice does to the place of the spectator in relation to the film’s protagonist is related to the poems George Oppen wrote in his Discrete Series, especially in his effacing the role of an “I” narrator. Keywords: Kafka, Straub-Huillet, Oppen, Discrete Series, Class Relations “Above we affirmed that such languages and letters were under the sovereignty of the vulgar of the various peoples, whence both are called vulgar. In virtue of this sovereignty over language and letters, the free peoples must also be masters of their laws, for they impose on the laws the senses in which they constrain the powerful to observe them, even against their will.” ‒ Giambattista Vico, The New Science1

Shot over thirteen weeks from 2 July to 20 September 1983, Class Relations is an important film in Huillet and Straub’s work for several reasons. It is their first film shot entirely in black and white since Bridegroom (excluding En rachâchant (1982), which in a certain sense is a preparatory film) and it marks their return to Germany (Hamburg and Bremen), abandoned since 1968, as well as the German language, abandoned since Moses and Aaron. And starting with this film, Straub invented and applied very systematically the principle of the “strategic point”, which causes a shift in the filmmakers’ thinking about the representation of space—a question Straub insisted upon in interviews and that becomes as discriminating for him as the treatment of language. 1 Vico, The New Science, p. 308.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_ch06

240 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Trials Structure In Class Relations, the idea of a “tribunal” becomes an obsession and, as Narboni describes, the film “establishes a rigorous tribunal staging that makes the articulation, weight, and speed of the legal and procedural words more evident”: [The actors] are called to testify rather than merely be present on-screen and the entire film unfolds like a legal proceeding. Differences between protagonists and sidekicks, main and secondary characters, heroes and extras are erased in favour of a division of the roles between the accused, judge, prosecutor, lawyer, and witness. Although diverse, the locations are composed of many courtrooms where a judicial atmosphere and a heavy climate of suspicion reign.2

In France, Class Relations is also known as Amerika, a title added by the French distributor to evoke Kafka’s novel and the film’s setting. Kafka’s text was the victim of a similar manipulation since the title Amerika was invented after the author’s death by Max Brod mainly for commercial reasons during the book’s first publication in 1927. The only title planned by Kafka, at least the only one mentioned in his journals (31 December 1914) is Der Verschollene or, according to the translators, The Missing Person, The Man Who Disappeared, or even, in the version proposed by Huillet in the French script, The One Who Lost His Rights. Only the first chapter was published during his lifetime, in 1913. He considered the rest of the novel a “complete failure”.3 Huillet and Straub’s original project was simply to make a short film from this part, which became the film’s first reel. As a novel, Der Verschollene is both about an adventure and an erotic and political education, if ever there was a difference between these genres. Karl Rossmann, a young, seventeen-year-old German, goes to the United States of America, not in search of his fortune or the thrill of exploration, but because he has been punished by his family for having (been) seduced (by) their servant. In America, he has a series of catastrophic encounters that take the shape of endless trials. 2 Narboni, “Voyages en litanies”, p. 17, 16. 3 Quoted in Gray, Franz Kafka, p. 68.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

241

Throughout Class Relations, we can count eight in which Karl is involved in one way or another: 1. On the boat with the stoker, the captain, Uncle Jakob, etc.; 2. At his uncle’s with Pollunder (the invitation); 3. In the villa outside New York with Pollunder and Green (Karl asking to leave); 4. In the forest with Delamarche, Robinson, and the servant; 5. At the Hotel Occidental with the manager, the waiter, the cook, etc; 6. Outside Brunelda’s building with Delamarche, the police officer, and Robinson; 8. At the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma with the two Americans, the “leader” and the “other man”.

The issue is always the same: to welcome or reject, retain or fire. This can be done with or without violence. The initial off-screen trial has already declared Karl guilty of a mistake that is difficult to identify, condemning him to exile: the film constantly replays this primitive scene with evolutions and substitutions. During the first trial, Karl finds his uncle, who welcomes him. But the stoker he is allied to is fired. During the second trial, he is invited by Jakob’s friend Pollunder to stay with him, but the uncle, annoyed for unclear reasons by Karl’s acceptance, refuses to see him again. The final two trials however do not result in Karl’s rejection. As with some of the others—the balcony sequence, for example—the qualifier of “trial” and their inclusion in this series may seem debatable. But the balcony sequence is still structured as a trial, if only because it does the exact opposite of the others: while the others involve rejecting or firing Karl, the balcony trial involves keeping him at any price; and if counters, desks, chairs, trees, and paintings separate (and protect) Karl from his judges, everything is now on the same side of the guard rail. The desire to keep Karl with them is as definitive and inevitable as the others to the point of blocking the narrative. The novel can continue as long as the young man is rejected and expelled from a dispositif, excluded from an arrangement. But this is where a lacuna is located in the text; the solution of continuity is created by the impossibility for Kafka to lead his “hero” to the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma—a similar break to the one cutting Moses and Aaron into two incompatible endings—now that he is locked up with this grotesque family, a reduction and regressive caricature of class relations as familial relations, and now that he is resigned to remain with them on the advice of the student-neighbour. It seems clear, therefore,

242 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

that as an overly perfect reversal of the previous trials, this passage has its place on the list. Of course, the dichotomy is not so simple: in effect, the tribunal at the Hotel Occidental is only trying to fire Karl and eject him from the narrative. And yet, even as this occurs, the Head Waiter—one of Karl’s most obstinate persecutors—suddenly tries to stop him from leaving, to retain him, if only for a moment: Karl must be searched. Like Uncle Jakob’s ambiguous reaction to Karl’s departure to Pollunder’s villa, these are contradictions of desire—it is clearly a sexual aggression, the waiter’s hand on Karl’s mouth leaves no room for doubt. Karl must perform the film’s only real act of revolt, a true and difficult act of violence, to escape the situation. Huillet calls it a “gesture he tears from himself […] violence is not easy”—an action accompanied by “But now it is enough”, which Karl says in the film, whereas he only thinks it in the novel. This tendency for the conflicts to be organized as trials touches on two particular points, which contaminate each other: language and space. Language, Law, and Power The judiciary is first and foremost a state of language. Trials use two different regimes of speech: that of the witness and that of the lawyer. The witness is summoned to “tell the truth”. His or her discourse refers to an outside reference point and is based on a moral, even metaphysical, conception of language. There is true speech, describing something real, with its reference in the world—present or past—and false speech, which describes nothing. Like the idol and the image, nothing intrinsically distinguishes them: their difference, which is enormous, is only based on the exterior to which they refer. A lawyer is not summoned by anything. A lawyer’s discourse only needs to be effective. It is based on rhetoric. It does not describe anything, or what it eventually describes has no importance. It must persuade the judge or the jury. It need only be internally coherent. It is the form of language that rules power relations, including class relations. Almost all somewhat important reflections on power have also been reflections on language, from Swift to Joyce and including Orwell’s 1984 and Jarry’s Ubu—which Straub, as if by chance, quotes in his director’s statement (“some—ubu-esque?—class relations”4)—just to stick to fiction. Here, language as a means of domination is a shell carefully emptied of all content—content is always debatable—through the subtle use of paradox 4

Thorel and Archie, Les Films de Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub, p. 3.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

243

and contradictions offered as evidence. Uncle Jakob, for example, is looking to free Karl from the troublesome stoker he is defending: “I understand perfectly your way of acting, but precisely that gives me the right to conduct you hence most quickly.” One can also advantageously use declarations that are so absurd and unjustified that they become irrefutable—like that of the Hotel Manager who wants to confuse Karl, who claims Robinson stopped him: “I don’t even believe the name Robinson; since there has been an Ireland no Irishman has been called that.” How does one respond to that (when the man speaking is your hierarchical superior)? In relation to these oppressive modes of using language, Karl is, moreover, not as innocent as we might believe: while he never manages to escape his net when he is the victim, he does occasionally know how to use this language. This is the case when Green gives him the letter from his uncle, and, wanting to confuse the messenger, he shows himself capable of using flagrant contradictions: “On the envelope it says, ‘To be delivered at midnight.’ […] Doesn’t the inscription say quite distinctly that midnight was to be my last reprieve?” The secret is in the “quite distinctly”. On a tactical level, Karl’s error is to confuse these two regimes of speech. The accusation in the Hotel Occidental, for example—the one that definitively ejects Karl from the system—weighs on the fact that he abandoned his post, a serious mistake even if he asked a colleague to momentarily replace him. During the trial, Karl—warned not to use worn-out excuses—chooses always to tell the truth. But what he does not understand is that the truth is not systematically more valuable. While from a metaphysical perspective it is an infinitely superior form of discourse, for rhetorics it is just like any other excuse, and not very good in this instance. The system needs words that are internally effective: their relation to the objective world plays no role. Language is completely separated from it and that is how it best serves power. Subjective claim against subjective claim, the better one wins. Those who dominate must use language so that the discourse becomes completely subjective and therefore unverifiable: any stated proposition is like a moment of argumentation and that’s all—any relation with a verifiable reality must be carefully avoided. The Head Waiter mutters to the manager: “Every night free of service he runs into the city.” Karl protests: “But, Mr. Head Waiter, every night free of service I am in the dormitory. All the boys can testify to that.” And yet the easily verifiable character of this “truth” has no force here: it is impossible since it implies the Head Waiter has lied or is mixing up people, which his position as headwaiter forbids. His position therefore guarantees his words and no reality in the world could invalidate them.

244 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

The Head Cook is always on Karl’s side. In the trials, she intervenes both as defence attorney and judge, next to and above the manager. Her protests for justice, for generosity even, do not change anything, even if she is in good faith: in the hotel trial, there is never any question of truth or justice, simply a confrontation in which the words “truth” and “justice” are used as ends in battle. The cook even uses Karl’s desire to believe in the superiority of the truth against him, making a stinging demonstration of the fragility of such a position. After Karl makes a final attempt to protest, asking for “an exact inquest”, the cook tells him that will not do: “Things that are just also have a particular look, and your cause, I must admit, does not.” This line is terrible. The cook is giving a lesson that completes and surpasses the manager’s. The latter showed Karl that in the language organizing power relations (of classes) that which is false could be more powerful than the truth. The cook goes further. Karl believes that true statements have their own appearance, value, and force. The cook shows him instead that without too much effort, rhetoric can acquire this “transcendental” appearance, that its metaphysical character renders it unverifiable, making it a very effective tool for power, even more so since everything leads us to believe that at this moment the cook is “sincere”, that she is really trying to help her young protégé, and that she gives up in despair. The proposition about “the appearance of truth” escapes any “test of truth”. The cook’s dialogue mixes two proposals: “Things that are just have a particular look” and “your cause does not.” The first is presented as objective truth, but is absolutely unverifiable—a general, abstract sentence supported by the vagueness of the “particular” look. The second is a purely subjective judgment and as such undebatable—even more so since its foundation does not refer to any demonstrable, concrete reality. This corresponds to the two propositional forms rejected by the Objectivists: abstract generalities and subjective vagueness. The second part of the sentence completes the closure of language on itself, definitively making it subjective and therefore placing its apparently objective “truth” not in its content but on the position of who says it. Language enters a closed circuit, a complete instrument of power. Karl’s error is tactical: from a moral perspective, he is of course right. In fact, his error is precisely to allow his behaviour to be guided by moral principles when morality has no role, when the relations are guided solely by rhetoric, meaning the art of war. This is very much how the problem is posed since the young exile’s mistake involves thinking that the language he employs refers to content outside it—a meaning, a real world. So he has already lost everything by not understanding that in this system the language of the victors does not refer

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

245

to anything: it simply works, traps people in vicious circles, uses mechanisms producing power, and organizes relations. Karl thinks that his error is having forgotten rules stipulating that leaving his post is forbidden, that he forgot the law. But the law already has no contents; it simply functions. What Karl lacks is not knowledge of the law: the law is constantly contradicting itself, that is the source of its particular power; but not having read Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and understood and accepted that there is combat and all means may be good—that his adversary will at least use them all. Karl knows this well, however, just as he knows that the most effective forms of power are not the brutal and explicit ones, but the ones hidden beneath the masks of desire: there is no other way of explaining his distrust during the trial on the boat of the man claiming to be his uncle; distrust continues even after the recognition is definitive. And while he has a defiant attitude towards the Hotel Manager—when he shows him the money he still has in his pocket—he can do nothing against the Head Cook. Reference Against Rhetoric: The Objectivist Position Objectivist poetic research addresses these kinds of reflections on the relation between language and power. The subversive character of language is directly proportional to how strongly it is connected to the concrete world, to “historic and contemporary particulars”. It is defined by the fact that they are verifiable and not abstract generalities. This strength is guaranteed both by sincerity—the poem being open to what is outside it—and by the poem being turned into an object. The things described in the poem gain an incontestable existence through the form’s solidity, which holds everything together. For George Oppen, the Objectivist era was initially characterized by its fierce opposition to rhetoric. This occurred through constantly confronting what exists. In the only essay he published in his lifetime, “The Mind’s Own Place”, he writes: Verse, which had become a rhetoric of exaggeration, of inflation, was to the modernists a skill of accuracy, of precision, a test of truth. […] It is a part of the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth.5

The modernist or Objectivist opposes rhetoric aiming to prove the poet’s authority, his skill at producing ornamentation, with a radical economy—Williams’ review of Discrete Series was called “The New Poetical Economy”. The 5 Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place”, pp. 132-133.

246 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Objectivist’s form not only illustrates the content, it discovers it and tests its truth. The poem as object and the exterior thing as object or as material for the poem test each other through mutual resistance. For Oppen, a poem’s subject can be like thought: it is not abstract because poetry renders it concrete and verifies its validity. After his death, a text entitled “Statement on Poetics” was found among his papers. It continues to focus on these questions: [T]here are things we believe or want to believe or think we believe that will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem […]. And that’s prosody, it is a music but it is a rigorous music—a music that refuses all trumpets, all sweet harmonics, all lusts and emotions that aren’t there, it is a music, quite simply, of image and honest speech—image because image is the moment of conviction. It cannot be altered and it cannot be falsified without one’s knowing it. Prosody is a language, but it is a language that tests itself. Or it tests itself in music—I think one may say that.6

The term “substantiate” engages all of these issues because it means both providing concrete proof and giving something substance—“It is impossible / to separate thought and matter that thinks”,7 reminds Zukofsky. The fundamental idea, the belief if you will (Oppen’s art is an interrogation of the possibility of being simultaneously political and metaphysical) on which all of his poetry is based is, as he wrote June Oppen Degnan in 1959, that “poetry does criticize itself. A false statement makes bad verse.”8 Poetic “music” is therefore no longer ornamentation. It tests the content: the search depends on a state of language that radically destroys any form of rhetoric, only authorizing a strictly “verifiable” regime of speech in a bare relationship with an exterior. The work of objectifying the poem is not decreased: the precise shaping of the poem’s concrete materials must instead (moral obligation) be very rigorous in order for the elimination of what is false to occur naturally. What he calls “actualness” must be achieved, as opposed to “some toughness of ‘realism’, some manly toughness”.9 This precision is one use of language and, inseparably, of perception. The test also bears on the relations between (the poet and) things. A painting is not filmed without its frame; a text is not heard clearly without the accompanying breathing of the person reciting it. Straub affirmed 6 Oppen, Poems pp. 60-61. 7 Zukofsky, “A”, p. 46. 8 Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 21. 9 Oppen, Poems, p. 61.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

247

in 1983: “Simply with the soul, that doesn’t exist.”10 An essence can enter any discourse and accomplish the impossible: bodies are more difficult. The question at the heart of these conceptions is the question in Oppen’s work of a commonplace that poetry could reconstruct and on which a community could be established: “The ‘Marxism’ of Discrete Series is, was felt as, the struggle against the loss of the commonplace.”11 Constantly confronting language with an objective exterior that everyone can verify—“that order that of itself can speak to all men” (Zukofsky)—allows it to be recreated as the site of a possible investigation of the world and at the same time allows it to escape rhetorical games and its use by power. Thus, a being-together can be regained, a community remade on new bases. In “Statement on Poetics”, Oppen glosses one of his poems, “Escape”—“hat-brim fluttering in the wind as she runs / forward and it seemed to me so beautiful so beautiful”:12 Should the word be “seemed”? Or should it be “seems”? Is the past more vivid? Or is the past raised into the present, the past present in the present? It is not a matter of syntax alone: the “s” of “seems” brings the line into the present—it seemed to me that the “d” of “seemed” was needed there, whatever the “story”, the syntax of the story may be, that stop of the “d” must be there—that stop which might be revealment.13

The poem must be a revelation: the stop must be caused in the movement of history (Oppen, quoting Eliot: “‘a man does not write poetry after the age of 29 unless he develops an historical sense’—or, a sense of history.”14). The issue is metaphysical, but also and inseparably political: For Voltaire was wrong you know: anything can be said: there is a great deal too foolish to be sung. Those who merely chatter await an interruption that will save them from themselves.15

From stop to interruption: cut communicative speech and explode chatter that is the rule of the self against the self in order to invent a language through rigorous poetic work where an us can be established through singing. 10 Farocki, “Einfach mit der Seele”, p. 246. 11 Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 254. 12 Oppen, Poems, p. 59. 13 Oppen, Poems, p. 60. 14 Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 232. 15 Oppen, Poems, p. 61.

248 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

In Kafka’s novel and Huillet and Straub’s film, the dominant class is therefore the class that speaks, that has mastered language—language insofar as it helps understand reality (or not). This class decides the fate of truth, declaring it black or white depending on how it feels (the one not preventing the other: the principle of non-contradiction is no longer relevant, the bourgeoisie has abolished it to declare a state of emergency in language). With the masters in control of truth, language, and (possible) contact between language and “reality”, with them being, that is, rhetoric incarnated (capable of passing off the truth for non-truth and vice versa), nothing can resist them. Except Karl, for whom language must speak the truth. This can be broken down as: there is a truth, language can say it, it must be said, and it is the only way for language to escape the bourgeoisie’s uncontrollable rhetoric. The eruption of reality in language cuts directly into rhetoric, blocking it and jamming it like a weapon. Causing the machine to seize up like this is not tolerated, and Karl must be either reduced or expelled. But his attachment to the truth—his innocence, if you will—has one notable consequence: it makes him absolutely irresistible and infinitely desirable. Desire/Power Straub has said that the film “could be called Karl Rossmann or the Misfortunes of Virtue”.16 Virtue is effectively what leads the young man to lose on several occasions—not only because the truth is a poor excuse and virtue makes a mediocre shield in the world as it exists (“Will they not say in such circumstances that, however fair it may be, virtue is the worst option available, when it is too weak to combat vice, and that in a century that is thoroughly corrupt, the safest course is to do as others do.”17)—but also because it is this very virtue that is attractive about him, what attracts these misfortunes to him, in a manner very similar to Marquis de Sade’s Justine. The characters Karl meets always behave immediately and inexplicably kind to him (or mean in some cases, for equally obscure reasons). The Head Cook is a striking example: she interrupts her laughter with a client to glance at him, join him, take his hand, speak with him, give him provisions, and suggest he spend the night at the hotel. “Karl said nothing at all, for he did not know how he had deserved this special treatment.”18 16 Toubiana, Philippon, and Bergala, “Quelque chose qui brûle”, p. 33. 17 Sade, Justine, p. 5. 18 Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared, p. 81.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

249

Likewise, the only motivation there can be for Uncle Jakob’s rejection is a feeling as equally irrational as jealousy. The invariable absence of plausible explanations refers to reasons of another order: initially, the relations are systematically relations of desire. The young man suffers the hazards of his partners’ desires throughout the film. He alternatively attracts and repels them without anything motivating their brutal behavioural changes. These relations appear in the trials. The trial at the Hotel Occidental—where Karl’s final attempt to “insert” himself into the “normal” working world fails—is also where the power relations most explicitly unveil their erotic content. The manager wants to fire Karl. But he is in love with the Head Cook who is protecting Karl. He decides not to do anything that could upset the Head Cook without informing her. She has no formal hierarchical superiority over the manager, but she has a true influence over him. The manager’s keen interest in getting rid of Karl could just as well be explained by jealousy. As for the Head Waiter, his relations with Karl—as shown in the following sequence—and the manager are troubled to say the least, and disturbed by strong narcissistic manoeuvres. The young secretary Therese forms another pole whose erotic aspects are not negligible even in their strangely discrete form—as the previous sequences have shown. A structure is therefore woven, a dual architecture of class and desire relations that confuse each other. The desired dominates the desirer; if the latter wants (desires) to keep the power given to them by their eventual hierarchical superiority, they must get rid of what is bothering them. Huillet and Straub’s mise-en-scène acknowledges the subterranean foundations of Kafka’s discourse on power. While Carole Desbarats notes that the filmmakers have “erased in Class Relations the importance Kafka accords to female sexual violence in The Man Who Disappeared”, Narboni, under the impetus of a remark of Straub’s, insists on the film’s erotic aspect, “a mad machine of seduction and power […] a story of the misadventures of a desirable body (equally calling on caresses, punishment, and blows)”19: In Class Relations, I am sensitive to the contrast between the severe distance most often separating the characters and the force of attraction and destabilization that Karl’s body alone exercises on the places he traverses. Throughout the whole film, he is the one who the others do not cease to try annexing or pushing away, touching, shoving, knocking down, or fighting.20 19 Narboni, “Voyages en litanies”, p. 15. 20 Ibid., p. 16.

250 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Shots constantly include details of an erotic nature. No full nudity, of course, but a multitude of small movements, gestures, skin and tissue games, postures, etc., ultimately suggesting a constant, sensual tension despite being or because they are beneath the surface. At the end of the first trial, Karl kneels down at the stoker’s feet and gently caresses his hand; a few shots later, the uncle reproaches the young man, the hat in his hand placed near his penis. Of the tracking shot of Karl and Jakob at the port, Narboni writes that “No Death in Venice could equal the elegance, mannerism, and ambiguous coquetry of this image.”21 In the villa outside New York, Klara attacks Karl with a sharp bracelet on her wrist. At the hotel, the boy’s first glances at the Head Cook show he is sensually seduced, in a relation confusing the maternal and the erotic. Later in the night, Therese comes to confide in Karl, naked under his sheets. At the end of the sequence, he places his fingertips on the fragment of the girl’s knee that the framing allows to appear at the bottom of the screen. Later, dressed in a bathrobe that is ostensibly open on his hairy chest, Delamarche comes looking for Karl in the street. Brunelda, the opulent singer whose charm Robinson will not stop vaunting, appears stretched out on a sofa in semi-darkness. The Man Who Disappeared can be considered a study of class relations: Huillet and Straub’s film shows that this theme is fundamental and structures the entire work. The circulation or blockage of desire forms an additional layer of organization that completes, extends, and disrupts the first one. From this perspective, erotic relations are presented as power relations. But Kafka adds another level to his construction: power relations are also systematically erotic relations. A radical eroticisation of the exercise of domination occurs here, referring in fact—justifying the Straubian connection—to a Sadian analysis of the mechanisms of capitalism—an analysis Kafka explicitly made himself: The strength which sets itself against fate is in fact a weakness. Surrender and acceptance are much stronger. But the Marquis de Sade does not understand that. […] The Marquis de Sade […] is the real patron of our era. […] The Marquis de Sade can obtain pleasure only through the sufferings of others, just as the luxury of the rich is paid for by the misery of the poor.22

According to Kafka, then, abandoning oneself affirms the greatest strength and this is the only way to liberation. Therein lies the particularity of this 21 Ibid., p. 15. 22 Janouch, Conversations, pp. 75-76.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

251

Kafkaesque version, attempt, or temptation of objectivity. Desire is a force whose power is initially depersonalizing.

On Space While Class Relations marks a turning point in Huillet and Straub’s work, it is also the film where the trial as an idée fixe comes to be explicitly embodied for the first time. This emerges at the same time as a new preoccupation with space and how it is rendered in film. All the same, there had been From the Cloud to the Resistance (1978). The f irst part of the f ilm consists of six of the 27 Dialogues with Leucò (1947) by Cesare Pavese and involves variations around the problem of how to f ilm two people talking. In each case, two characters are arranged in relation to each other in different ways (face to face, side by side, one facing away from the other); each time the shot arrangement adopts different principles. Among other things, the f ilm is a kind of study of a cinematic phenomenon through modif ications of a minimal number of criteria. The two-person sequences in Class Relations recall and develop this groundwork, notably by shifting the question towards the use of space. This can be felt in Karl’s encounter with the stoker on the boat—the positions and postures, as well as the lines of the set, all contribute to a particular understanding of the air around the two new acquaintances. The Trial on the Boat As the film begins, Karl becomes lost while leaving the boat and meets the stoker. One thing leads to the next and the stoker tells his young compatriot how his superior, the Romanian Schubal, had treated him unjustly during the trip (the theme of xenophobia is important in both novel and film). Karl advises the man to complain to the captain. The stoker angrily refuses, then suddenly changes his mind and leads Karl with him to the captain’s office. The film’s first trial begins, establishing the approach to staging that is reused with variations in every other trial scene. The scene has a three-part structure: 1. Class struggle—shots 15 to 25 2. Recognition—shots 26 to 36 3. A strong head—shots 37 to 43

252 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

The sequence begins with a shot of a door, from which comes a knock. Permission to enter is given off-screen: the stoker enters and places himself next to the door on frame right. Karl follows, closes the door behind him, and leans his back against the wall. The stoker can now speak: he asks for an interview with the Head Treasurer. Still off-screen, a voice orders him to leave. With energy from his wall support, Karl forcefully exits frame left towards his adversaries. A servant then enters the frame from the same side, taking Karl’s place. Only then is there a cut, showing Karl in close-up in left profile, further into the room. Several aspects emerge from this passage. First of all, certain gestures that appear exemplary here are repeated with variations throughout the film (leaning, etc.). The principle of substitution is also established, Karl’s place immediately being filled by the servant. The servant has an interesting position: he belongs to the oppressed class, but he acts like a traitor, working for the enemy. The space of the room is hierarchized: the zone near the door is reserved for the oppressed and the other side—first shown in shot 18—for the bosses. This organization is also strategic, and while the servant’s place next to the door seems logical, it is nevertheless an infiltration of the adversarial space by a hired emissary. The fact that the cut only comes after the servant has taken his place means a delay to any cut to Karl’s movement. Consequently, it is impossible to determine how far he moves from the door to his new position, and the set provides no reference point. The dimensions of the location remain very problematic. Elements nevertheless begin to appear that allow the spectator to mentally reconstruct the space. The characters’ sightlines take on a considerable importance. When Karl exits the frame, the stoker follows him with his eyes. Before he begins to speak, both have already observed their opponents and looked at them in succession. At the beginning of shot 16, before speaking, Karl glances insistently towards the lower left side of the frame, then further in front of him, and then slightly to the right. We have not yet seen what is in front of him and will need to wait until shot 18 for confirmation that there are three enemies present. Karl judges who is superior before choosing to whom he should speak: he opts for the one who proves to be the captain. He is not wrong, the real superior is not the one marked as such. Karl cannot know this. He would have to distrust himself. Karl speaks. He does so against the previous order to leave the room— which had only been given by the servant and therefore was of limited value, though only the script clarifies this—and he does so for the stoker as well.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

253

This is an act of revolt and thus courageous, but not stripped of sentimental paternalism and it does not put him at much risk. He launches into a plea about the injustice done to the stoker. He does not introduce himself, but gives his perspective (“I permit myself to say that in my opinion…”). He speaks calmly, although his breathing indicates some nervousness. On the wall behind him, a watercolour depicts a minimal landscape, forming a white rectangle on the wall whose right side is hidden by the young man’s face. Although discreet, the effect is surprising. Film schools would consider this kind of framing a mistake. “Normally”, a line of the set should not be hidden by an object or a person because it causes ambiguities in reading the space, in understanding the size and borders of objects. Besides the effect of a “suture” to the physical world, there are at least two results here: the painting marks a strong (visual) border for Karl that he cannot cross (the space of power is too protected to be easily attacked by a naïve seventeen-year-old) and it is also a very important graphic support for him, without which, in his fragile position, he could probably not stand up. But to return to the set, or what we know about it for the moment: the room in which the action unfolds is covered with relatively dark panelling and is decorated very plainly; the off-screen window light brings the material to life. The backgrounds are striped with parallel vertical lines among which the angles of the architecture become confused. In shot 15, for example, before Karl and the stoker enter, the door is already the site of a strange perception of space: the partition is clearly oriented slightly towards frame left, but a round wall clock is deformed by an elliptical perspective whose orientation seems at odds with the door. For a sharp eye, the reflections from the windows could help. When the stoker enters, he moves a little forward, and then seems to move back to the left of the door. There is in fact a recess, but this remains uncertain at the end of the shot. It is not too difficult to see, but the perceptual ambiguity is doubled by our expectation of the room’s architecture (probable, plausible, realistic): some time is needed for our perception to throw into doubt conclusions drawn through understanding on the order of recognition. After shot 16, the film cuts back to the stoker: Karl continues to speak off-screen, but the sound is the same as in the previous shot. We can feel a strong difference in volume: “I have said only generalities about this matter. He will tell you himself his particular complaints.” To which the stoker can only reply: “All that is word for word correct.” We then move to the other side of the room. Shot 18 shows three men seated at a rectangular table. The first to speak orders the stoker to approach: he is the captain. He is in uniform, deep in the shot, at the end of the table.

254 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

To his right, frame left and more forward, is the person who then speaks, also in uniform. To his left, a man in a suit places his hat at his side. The shot is brighter than the previous ones because long, horizontal windows appear in it. Along with the table, they give the sequence a formal organization where geometry plays an important role: vertical and horizontal lines (the panelling covers the ceiling that we see in this shot), rectangles, this is a location with right angles. The perspective plays with this system, however. This shot also differs from the previous ones because the choice of a short focal length creates a feeling of three-dimensionality—a choice that allows everything to be in sharp focus—accentuated by the set’s strong perspective lines (long table, windows, etc.). Rhythm is created throughout the entire passage and the film through the alternation of “flat” shots (Karl in perfect profile in front of a perfectly flat wall) and “depth” shots. The captain’s order is followed by silence. This corresponds to the time it takes the stoker, off-screen, to approach the masters’ table. If we listen very closely, we can even hear his footsteps. Then, on the left, the Head Treasurer turns his head towards the captain and gives his version of the story, completely different from what we have heard until now (according to him, the stoker is “a notorious quarreller”). Obviously the man saying this can only be considered an impartial source, but this shows that all Karl and the spectator know of the matter is what the stoker himself says. The Head Treasurer suddenly stands up and violently addresses the stoker: “You, listen!” An axial cut shows us the Head Treasurer in close-up: “You / are pushing your insistence / much too far”: these lines are abrupt to say the least and the violence of the tone sounds literally excessive. This exercise in rhetoric is very terrifying and funny to listen to and observe, because not only is the tone of voice extravagantly fierce, the articulation creates an exasperated rhythm on the treasurer’s features that is fascinating in itself. This is all accentuated by pauses in his diction that attack his manner of speaking and force him to rediscover the intensity of his anger in the silences. There is no issue of spatial disjunction between these two shots: it is a forward axial cut and very clear. And yet, for rhythmic and formal reasons, the cut remains very brutal. It is not on the treasurer’s movement as he stands up—which is itself surprising for its suddenness and the resulting composition—but immediately after it. The delay causes a visual shock accentuated by the two violent injunctions (“You, listen! || You (!) / are pushing […]”). There is, moreover, a very important and seemingly paradoxical aspect to the lighting in this shot; we see a portion of the window on frame right while the treasurer is lit from the left (off-screen window), which is

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

255

coherent spatially but graphically contradictory and creates a sense of unease—multiplied by the officer’s terrifyingly grotesque diction. At the end of his speech, the treasurer looks down at the captain and notes that he does not know the young man who has permitted himself to speak, then sits down, disappearing through the bottom of the frame. After so many invectives, it might seem “natural” to cut to a reverse shot of the stoker to see the effect of so much violence on him or on Karl, on whom we would see anger or pity. In the novel, Kafka opts for the second possibility: “Karl restrained himself with great difficulty from jumping forward.”23 In the film, however, the following shot (20) is of the captain—the first slightly high angle shot in the sequence: “Let us listen to the man once. Schubal is getting much too independent for me anyway as time goes on.” This cut underlines that the treasurer’s violence was so spectacular because it was connected to his exasperation, and because he was addressing the captain at least as much as the stoker: he wants to reaffirm in front of his superior the quality of his mastery over his crew. The treasurer literally makes a spectacle of himself. To reuse a term proposed for Moses and Aaron, the découpage here is more analytic than dramatic: it is about demonstrating the mechanisms of power, not involving us in the emotions they produce. The shot of the captain also gives the découpage a structural balance. After three shots of Karl and the stoker, the first two shown together, then each one separately, there come three shots of the officers functioning in the same manner. This kind of equal treatment echoes the closed-off nature of the spaces: even shouted words cannot cross a line of demarcation between the classes through which the two zones are closed to each other and made into blocks. Relations are established—can only be established—from block to block. They are between people on either side of a lacuna. It is decided that the stoker will be heard. The reasons are not, contrary to what Karl desires, so that justice can be served. They are tactical. The captain hopes to be able to use the stoker to belittle Schubal whose rank is higher and who is therefore more dangerous. But what do the motives really matter if things go in the desired direction? Shot 21 returns to the stoker. It looks a lot like the previous shot of him (17): he is standing on frame right while the servant is still near the left of the door watching him. And yet something has changed, as if the form of the space around him has been modified or stretched. In fact, he has moved forward in the room and while his scale in the shot remains more or less the same, the focal length is much shorter and we can see part of the ceiling 23 Kafka, The Man who Disappeared, p. 14.

256 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

and floor. The servant is consequently further away—but his white suit “compensates” for this in a certain way, and by keeping him in focus, the depth of field contradicts the impression of distance. The effect of the change in perspective is stronger since it is difficult to pinpoint it as such. If the two shots—17 and 21—were shown successively or even only one shot apart, it would be noticeable and even striking. But the relative distance in time mutes it while deepening its force, creating a true “unease in space”,24 a noticeable instability in our relationship to depth. This sensation does not result uniquely from the combined change in focal length and the actor’s position, which seem to correct each other. Two other elements of the mise-en-scène contribute to this. The first is the “stroboscopic” or “red light, green light” effect Serge Daney describes, using the children’s game as a model for the mise-en-scène where “visible movement is the mistake and invisible movement is good” and where: [T]he final path travelled can only be reconstituted from frozen moments. […] If we take a f ilm like Class Relations “from the perspective of its content”, we are tempted to reconstitute the path travelled as though we had followed it continuously. But that would be cheating. We would be cheating with the film’s form, a series of moments, of “history at a standstill”, blocks of space-time whose incongruity (leg in the air, fixed gaze, etc.) we are unsure if we should mock or if we should hallucinate the empty zone (what happens “behind our back”, the off-screen space) separating them from each other.25

The connection to the game describes how this sequence works quite well and interests us moreover for its emphasis on stoppage and intervals as secret motors of these films. The rarity of movement in the image not only reinforces their visual impact, but also allows for the strange effects in question here. Another critical element of the mise-en-scène for obtaining this result and that is quite exceptional in Huillet and Straub’s films: the floor is covered—as we glimpse in this shot—by a carpet. This may seem like a minor detail. It is not. This causes all of the characters’ movements to become practically inaudible. We always hear people walking in Huillet and Straub’s films. In the previous sequences in Class Relations as in so many of their films, the filmmakers can wait quite a while before cutting if the characters have just 24 Novarina, Devant la parole, p. 93. 25 “Franz Kafka strauboscopé” in Daney, La Maison cinéma, pp. 244-245.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

257

left frame because we continue to hear their steps. Since this sound forms a block with what precedes it, it is unthinkable to cut into it. This takes place exemplarily and ostensibly in the two shots immediately preceding this sequence: 13 (Karl and the stoker leaving his room and walking down the hallway and stairs off-screen) and 14 (the two on the bridge, climbing the steps off-screen, crossing the frame with a word and gesture for the cook, then entering the hallway where they continue off-screen again). These combined factors are necessary for our almost immediate perception or understanding of the stoker’s movement to be replaced by the impression that the space around him has been deformed. The gap between the two shots is therefore marked and the interval corresponding to the hidden part of the travelled path is emphasized, but not as an indication of the physical distance between the positions. Rather as a formal interval, a difference between two aberrations in the rendering of space. The stoker expresses his complaints. But once again his words are thrown off course and do not reach their target: the following shot is not a reverse shot of one of the officers, but instead shows Karl, still in front of the painting, his chest facing frame left but his face facing right towards where the stoker is standing. In shot 19, the treasurer’s body is also twisted: this is the fate of those in-between—beyond the fact that the treasurer remains in the space established by the initial framing, a space Karl has left for an unknown and unplaceable zone in the room. Karl intervenes because he wants to help the stoker, but his reaction sounds like a reprimand: “You must recount that more clearly. The captain cannot appreciate that as you are recounting it to him. To me you have always depicted it so clearly.” Karl is disappointed; the stoker is not making his best effort. But his reaction mainly seems slightly mistimed: the stoker was not that confused and he has not yet said much. It seems instead that the young idealist finds it somewhat undignified to defend a man whose demands relate to trivial questions like cleaning toilets. Once more, these words do not reach their destination: rather than a cut to the stoker, the next shot is of the man in the suit near the captain. In a short, tight shot (23), he turns his head towards Karl with an intrigued expression and stands up (“What is your name actually?”), immediately exiting frame right. The following shot does not seem to continue the train of thought from the previous one: we do not cut on the man’s movement, but to the door, where someone knocks, like in the first shot in the sequence. In this shot (24), the servant opens the door on the captain’s order and Schubal—looking distrustful and worried—enters to explain himself, placing himself

258 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

exactly where the stoker stood as he entered. His diction is marked by a strong—Romanian?—accent and his pauses are accentuated. When he f inishes, we return to the captain (25), meaning, in effect, the person he has been addressing. But the off icer does not respond to Schubal. Instead he brings the conversation back to what concerned him before the unpleasant interruption: the question the man in the suit had asked Karl. The framing is surprising here: at first, the captain is seated off-centre as he begins his line. Then he stands up, f illing the entire image vertically before continuing his statement. The abruptness of the movement and the balancing of the frame are striking, especially the combined choice of a short focal length and nearly frontal angle in relation to the wall behind him. This type of angle, close to zero, is very rare, and the intensif ication from the very clear use of geometric lines, the off-centre framing of the captain on the left, the low angle, and the short focal length again make our perception of the space very strange—even giving the impression that the camera is slightly canted and the horizon is slanted towards the right (that something is tipping over?)… This practice underlines the simultaneously surprising and violent character of the captain’s intervention—Schubal is ejected from the narration, his complaint rejected. The system seems to go crazy between shots 21 and 25. The previous shots are organized in a simple structure: three on one side, three on the other in a room where the forces present are balanced—two characters in the background, one in the middle (Karl and the treasurer). Now we move constantly from one zone to the next and the zones are enlarged (the stoker moves forward); the découpage does not seem to follow the logic of the discourse; and our perception of space plays tricks on us. For example, when the suited man leaves the frame in shot 23, a strange phenomenon occurs: he was in the back of the room on the captain’s right and exits frame right vaguely in Karl’s direction as his sightline indicates. Up until now we have never seen the region of the room where he will likely stand and nothing tells us anything about it. Moreover, the following shots stubbornly refuse to reveal him and the space around him. When the captain asks him the question in shot 25, he responds off-screen, and instead of cutting to him, we cut to Karl, whose name he asks again, still off-screen. We must wait for shot 27 to see where he is standing. It is as if he has literally disappeared for a few shots. He has fallen into a hole in the space, lost in an interstice, swallowed in the discontinuity. This is truly the effect this practice causes and the sensation is very singular.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

259

Things now become terribly complicated. This may be why the captain asks him again: his interest in the young man’s identity is a fortuitous diversion at a moment when the stoker, now flanked by Schubal, is becoming a bit cumbersome. The man is revealed through a kind of triangulation. He speaks off-screen twice—to the captain in shot 25, then to Karl in shot 26—before finally being shown in shot 27. He appears here in all his glory: in a medium, three-quarter view, he reveals to Karl with obvious satisfaction that he is… his uncle! This shot also shows for the first time the zone of the room where Uncle Jakob is standing, though it remains difficult to place, to grasp in terms of spatial construction. Thanks to the sightlines, there is no doubt about the man’s position regarding Karl: he is facing him. The same wall partition should ‘logically’ be behind both him and his nephew. The lightly marked vertical lines, hard to distinguish from the vertical panels in the dark background, tell us little and the only other indication we have is a horizontal window—undoubtedly the window behind the bench where he was sitting next to the captain—whose orientation contradicts the first conclusion. It appears as if, instead of being located somewhere between the captain and Karl, he is in both spaces at once, simultaneously and contradictorily. The following shot, identical to the previous ones, returns to Karl. The young immigrant’s only reaction is strong distrust. He appears unaffected by the captain’s off-screen announcement that he should be happy, since the man saying he is his uncle is also a senator. He shows no joy and begins to justify why it seems unlikely to him (shots 28 and 30, 29 returning to the captain, who confirms it). If we exclude “explaining” the boy’s coldness by the absence of psychology or as a stylistic choice for rigid actors, we must first seek out another response in the form of surprise: the coincidence revealed here is indeed stunning. Besides, Karl’s attachment to the truth certainly prevents him from looking to “benefit” from a situation that suddenly turns in his favour. But behind all this, something must be hiding. Karl is here to defend the stoker’s cause: what is this new question doing here? Is it not a way to change the subject? Perhaps this is an attempt by the ‘managing class’ to corrupt him: after all, without him, Schubal and the stoker are only rankless men presenting their petty quarrels for the umpteenth time; they are no threat; Karl is what makes them (a little) dangerous. With this skilful manoeuvre, the masters construct (or remind him of) his membership in their class and make him useless to the stoker. The manoeuvre is skilful because it is irrefutable: it is not situated on the terrain of politics or conflicts of interest or class, but instead on affective, familial terrain. Moreover, in

260 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

both novel and film, the victory is systematically given to the powerful in disputes when they understand that the field of conflict must be replaced by the field of emotion, family, or desire—as much as they do not do so, Karl can resist and is tenacious. As soon as the shift occurs, Karl’s efforts are all in vain. The fact that the “uncle’s” intervention is related to tactical considerations seems to be confirmed by his artificiality and lack of believability. What an extraordinary set of circumstances! It is one of the film’s most beautiful theatrical flairs. We return here to the principle of an organization that is deductive, not temporal: it is equally surprising and not very “believable” that Schubal would intervene at this precise moment of greatest “suspense” when the uncle has just stood up to ask Karl off-screen: “What is your name actually?” If he intervenes at this moment, it is for a logical reason: if he is recognized, Karl moves to the side of the powerful and he could help the stoker, putting Schubal in a fragile position. Schubal must therefore prevent the recognition and intervene in the argument. His declaration complete, his defeat is certain because the captain, standing up without a word to him, brings the conversation back to the senator who continues. In shot 30, Karl presents his argument justifying his distrust: his uncle is named Jakob. In the following shot, the uncle looks slightly embarrassed. He takes a breath and after glancing somewhat imploringly at the “proletarians”, turns to two more worthy of hearing him for a grand speech full of explanations that is also one of the most beautiful moments of controlled hamminess in all of Huillet and Straub, after Vinius’ speeches in Othon. “Gentlemen!” he begins, linking his hands behind his back and briefly going over his life in America. The actor is Mario Adorf, one of the few professionals in the film, and he is employed precisely for what he knows how to do: act. Around 50, with a beard and greying hair, Jakob’s lavish suit perfectly denotes his social standing, and his obvious good nature makes him the perfect uncle. Moving on to explain his nephew’s situation and why he is present—which we are also learning—he puts his hands in his vest pockets and continues more emphatically and humorously. He increases his almost childlike expressivity as he speaks, going from mimed anger when he recounts how Karl’s parents threw him out “as one throws a cat out the door when it annoys” to the most delicious false modesty when evoking Karl’s son, “who has received at baptism the name Jakob, doubtless with a thought of my humble person.” The expressive potential of the system of agrammatical caesuras incorporated into the diction becomes very clear here. When he is recounting how his nephew was “seduced by a servant”, Uncle Jakob conserves a theatrical pause that he highlights through conceit full of somewhat smutty, somewhat

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

261

tender insinuations: “Er wurde nämlich von einem Dienstmädchen, Johanna Brummer, einer etwa fünfunddreißigjährigen Person, verführt” (“He was in fact seduced by a servant, Johanna Brummer, a person of about 35 years.”). The isolated “verführt” (“seduced”), emphasized by the caesura, resounds through Adorf’s suave diction with all of its shimmering, voluptuous sonorities. The effect is very successful, and such eloquence reminds us that a politician is speaking. For the final part of his speech on “the signs and miracles still alive in America”, we see Karl again, still in full profile, but now in close-up and, importantly, with his eyes lowered. He only looks up at his uncle at the end when he mentions the letter that arrived. Shot 33 returns to the victorious uncle. The angle is noticeably the same as for the previous shots of him but the focal length is shorter, making more of the ceiling visible as well as two panels behind him and finally clarifying his location in the space. Karl admits that he is indeed his uncle and when he prepares to make another objection, Jakob interrupts him, entering his space to demand a kiss on his hand and kissing the young man’s forehead, forcing him twice to bend his head down. The captain concludes this nice story (shot 35) with excuses about the poor quality of Karl’s trip—a new highly political speech whose caesuras are again calculated and allow us to measure how much the power relations have been inverted by the slight reverence with which the captain mentions the nephew—which the young man accepts, earning him an affectionate pinch on the cheek from his new uncle (shot 36). Everything seems to be turning out for the best in this best of all possible worlds. There remains one point, however, that Karl has not forgotten. The following shot shows the young German asking: “What will happen to the stoker now?” He asks the question calmly and his eyes are glued to his uncle, off-screen frame left. The shot is tight, but an even more remarkable characteristic is that the young man is framed frontally in a three-quarter view. In this sequence, we have only seen him from this angle in the very first shot (15), which was wider and which he left to stand where he has been since, motionless in the centre of the room. Since then, he has only appeared in left profile. This rupture is fundamental and I will return to it. His uncle responds off-screen: “What he deserves.” Karl looks down—“and what the captain deems good”—he looks up firmly at the captain, off-screen slightly to frame right, so calmly and with a neutrality showing so little fear that it soon looks like defiance—“I believe we have had enough and more than enough of the stoker”—he looks down again. He continues looking down as he retorts, in the coldest of tones: “But that isn’t important in a matter of justice.” He says the line without raising his voice, but without

262 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

fragility, a simple affirmation. His humility—performed or not—removes any dimension of provocation, making the line dangerous. In shot 38, which returns to a more typical angle for the uncle, he shows some discouragement, but is soon himself again: it is more about discipline than justice. The uncle refers to the captain’s authority, the only master on board next to God, and turns towards him. But instead of the captain, the cut returns to the stoker—framed identically as shot 21, aside from the appearance of Schubal between the servant and the stoker. He confirms: “It is so” (shot 39). The shot is short, making it even more terrifying—and it is also the last time in the film we see the stoker’s face. Moreover, his line echoes the line in shot 29 when the captain confirms the senator’s name to Karl with the identical words. In this way, captain and stoker, an officer and one without rank, are placed on the same level, both put back in their place by the machine of power mastered by the uncle-senator. The latter continues his speech to his nephew (shot 40), insisting on solidarity with the captain and expressing his disdain for “this futile dispute between two machinists”—the last word pronounced with all the contempt in the world. He ends with a line already noted here, more roundabout than everything: “I understand perfectly your way of acting, but precisely that gives me the right to conduct you hence most quickly,” then he leaves the frame. These should be decisive words. The découpage confirms it by returning to the captain who is going “to have a boat launched”. The shot is from the same angle, but somewhat tighter than the previous ones of the officer: we can now see his eyes. We can thus see his face following something off-screen from the right—where the nephew and uncle were standing—moving towards the left and lowering. The captain looks deeply dismayed, but perhaps that is a projection on the spectator’s part. In any case, this movement is rather strange, all the more so because it is mysterious—the carpet prevents us from hearing the movement. Shot 42 is a reverse shot that explains the officer’s reaction. It is quite surprising. Karl is kneeling at the stoker’s feet—we only see the lower part of the stoker’s body—, his right fist on his thigh. He gently caresses the stoker’s hands with his left hand. He looks at the stoker’s off-screen face, asking him not to defend himself, then lowers his eyes and lets go of his hand: “You must promise me that you will obey me, because I have reason to believe I will no longer myself be able to help you at all.” Karl’s gesture and statement are disarming. Be it pathetic rhetoric or sublime sincerity, their hopeless character makes them touching, even if they are just as politically dubious.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

263

In the following shot, the uncle no longer pretends about his true motivations: “You felt abandoned, there you met the stoker and now you are grateful to him”, he says, his black hat covering his penis like the statue of the man in the pre-credits sequence covers his own. The line echoes the sensuality of Karl’s caressing of the stoker’s hand. Some desires gently come to the surface. Methods The expression “strategic point” is Straub’s and it is contemporary to this film. It means finding for each sequence—each space, each set—the one and only camera position that works, unchanged, for every shot. Only modifications of angle and lens are permitted. Straub: I’ve tried to invent something systematic here, a possible point where the camera can stand the entire time, for the entire sequence. That doesn’t mean it’s screwed down there; the camera position can slightly vary from shot to shot. […] And what I then do is discover a series. […] [A]nd then I need to create variations within the series.26

The series he evokes here is a new form of what has already been mentioned: the camera position does not change and the shots of each character and parts of the set return identically as long as each change in the unfolding of the sequence does not justify a change in the framing. Straub’s declaration therefore brings together several important points for us: the series and strategic point, as well as the system. Being systematic leads to objectivity. This implies constructing a mechanism that, once established, could order all the elements in play without any subjective intervention from the authors. While this method becomes a doctrine for all of Huillet and Straub’s following films, the sequence in the captain’s office is its first major application, measuring and exploring its implications and possibilities regarding the rendering of space. A degree of disjunction results from how the f ilmmakers use it. By forbidding themselves from filming the scene from different angles, they remove any possibility of clearly understanding the distances between characters, their relative positions. Two bodies placed at an angle to the camera greater than what a “decently” wide lens (not distorting the space too much) can cover will never share the same frame. Since Huillet and Straub do nothing excessive in the boat sequence, the different “zones” of the 26 Farocki, “Einfach mit der Seele”, p. 243.

264 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

mise-en-scène—the dominated near the door, the dominators at the table, Karl alone or with his uncle in between—remain completely disconnected, only linked through the cutting and especially through their sightlines. It is only possible to mentally reconstruct the “constellations of people and space”,27 combining the angles of the shots and sightlines. Henceforth—and this is the difficulty and the fun—the sightlines and positions of the bodies and objects cannot be “cheated”, as is usual practice in films, because the space would become incomprehensible. For Huillet and Straub, “cheating” shots is not permissible. First of all, because it is more fun to follow the rules of the game. And then because they refuse to assume that spectators do not see much beyond the star’s eyes. There should be no “minor” zones (peripheral space) in a frame. We find ourselves confronted with the fact that the camera is only a camera obscura, sophisticated but nevertheless hopelessly perspectivist and therefore creating spatial adjustments that could be considered “aberrations”, but which are even more formally noticeable when the peripheral regions of the image are used. It is precisely these anomalies in the rendering of space that Huillet and Straub use and highlight. Just as their love of direct sound pushes them to emphasize rather than hide the unevenness caused by the cutting, their desire to “give themselves the trouble” of “reproducing the reality of a space” is translated into a constant use of the distortions the camera produces. The retreat of the authors also allows the (objective) tool to make full use of its assets, meaning its mistakes. The practice of the “strategic point” has a differential value. By restricting the shots through constraints similar to those of a witness present on the scene—motionless body, observing everything from one perspective—Huillet and Straub highlight the kinds of irreducible differences cinema produces. The advantage of this practice is that the gaps between shots, the disjunctions, are constantly intensified so that nothing ever coheres—space is disarticulated into separate zones, whose anomalous character is highlighted by the gaps. The method is applied rigorously in the boat sequence. The “strategic point” is rather easy to find: the camera remains in the same place, a bit to the right of the treasurer, exactly at Karl’s level in the unfolding hierarchy of the space from left (the dominators) to right (the dominated). Logically, the young man always appears in profile. The camera’s height slightly varies between that of a man sitting and a man standing. Over the 29 shots in the 27 Ibid., p. 243.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

265

sequence, adjustments are rare and minimal except in one single case, for a shot where the rupture is very important. It is in shot 23: the moment when Karl asks what will happen to the stoker. We cut to a head and shoulder shot, almost a close-up, from three-quarter front! We leave the somewhat exterior, witness position (at the edge of the room, against the wall…) to be in the middle of the combat; the time has come to take a side, to show with whom we are in solidarity. Huillet: In Class Relations, it’s not Karl’s gaze, but […] a fraternal gaze. [Question:] You as Karl Rossmann’s brothers? Straub: Let’s say: accomplices. Huillet: Well, not us, but the machine. Straub: Or the spectator.28

There is a hesitancy at the heart of this question. Narboni affirms that “the search for the ‘strategic point’ […] is related more deeply to a desire to subvert the initially all-powerful judicial scene”.29 In fact, the drama of this sequence—and the entire film—is entirely based on relations (struggle or competition) between several possible modes of spatial organization, modes whose stakes are always political. Karl has only one idea in mind when he accompanies the stoker to the captain’s office: that justice be done. He has an idea of justice (Justice) and he has an idea of the truth (Truth): they should trump all else and their invocation alone should dismiss any objections, any lowly considerations of interest. This obsession is carried to the point of naivety and blindness: at the stoker’s feet, he does not hesitate to affirm: “You have been done an injustice as no one else on this ship.” Now, for justice to be rendered a trial is needed and therefore a tribunal and all that that implies: a judge, a defendant, a prosecutor, a lawyer, witnesses. Karl’s task is to produce this tribunal. Obviously, the masters do not reason in the same way and are not interested in the fact that the stoker’s problem is posed in these overly cumbersome terms. Karl’s stubbornness ends up forcing the senator to be explicit: it is not about justice, but discipline. Before, the treasurer had cloaked the search for justice in an unimportant, vain fight used by the captain as a way to control his crew. Faced with these attempts to turn the stakes around, Karl must constantly, obstinately recall that it is not a question of class here, but Truth and Justice. 28 Blank, “Wie will ich lustig lachen”, p. 277. 29 Narboni, “Voyages en litanies”, p. 17.

266 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

In the first part of the sequence, everything seems to go favourably: Karl acts as defence attorney and everyone follows—the treasurer becomes prosecutor, the captain the judge. The servant acts as warden and Schubal acts as witness for the civil party—unless he is the defendant… But this cannot last. Karl is the only one here (with the stoker?) to believe in Truth, Justice, and Law—believing in them as transcendent entities, as they are at the heart of Kafka’s work. To believe in these entities as such transforms the space where they perform—the tribunal—into a ritualized site: there is a place for the accused, for the witness, and for the judge who is only authorized to occupy this seat because he is the judge—at the same time, he can only be judge as long as he occupies this seat or because he occupies it, already a slightly heretical version. The sequence demonstrates that these transcendent notions are in fact only affirmed to structure the space and that if they are abandoned—as Karl’s adversaries force to happen—, if Law and Justice are removed from the trial, it does not become absurd. It simply returns to its primitive mode of organization: class relations. The deeper, older layer finally begins to appear, to become visible. And this primitive space, not yet having reached the ritualized stage of the tribunal, functions according to the only modes it knows: strategy, the art of war. Meaning that the semantic field of combat may be the most exact way to describe the positions of the bodies in the space: frontlines, balance of forces, territorial conquest, counter-attack and retreat, frontal or side attack, etc. It is Karl, then, who is trying to treat the space judicially. In a way, he spends the rest of the film paying for this unfortunate tactic: parodies of judicial spaces are unceasingly built around him, trapping him and mocking his cherished notions, which are instrumentalized, and finally through some terrible irony, used against him. Some obstacles and elements refuse to enter this schema, however. The uncle, first of all—who has no assigned role at the tribunal—, is the one who understands how things work and cancels the competition between judicial space and combat space with the creation of a zone ruled by affect (family, desire) whose absorptive power is strong. It is entirely possible that the camera position, the “strategic point” is the other element whose presence both crystalizes the judicial space and makes it so fragile that it implodes. If we consider that the configuration of space tends to attribute a judicial function to each of the elements in it, then the recourse to the ‘strategic point’ makes us question the role played by the machine. Jury? Clerk? Witness? Judge? But should we say “the machine”,

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

267

“the spectator”, or “us”, with all the ambiguities this pronoun can bring, or something else? Should we consider the machine as only having the function it seems to be given—a bit exterior—or put it back in its place: the absent centre for and around which everything is constructed? The scene looks somewhat like a stabile whose different possible points of balance—stable or unstable—are studied in succession. The camera would be the system’s centre of gravity. Karl’s intervention in shot 23 provokes a brutal change in the organization of the bodies and therefore the leap from one point of equilibrium to a new place closer to the young man. Is the centre of gravity part of the system? It can, in any case, be affected by a mass without having its balance modified. Problematic Distinctions The “strategic point” does not only relate to space: something of the particular situation of Kafka’s narrator is involved in it. Although obscurely, this aspect is also part of Huillet and Straub’s project, as Straub explains: [In a more systematic manner than other films] we always tried to show the other characters from Karl Rossmann’s perspective. That means: for the, let’s say, 36 shots the camera essentially remains in the same position and we see every character from this perspective; and if we see Karl, the perspective remains the same. When we see the other characters before we see Karl, we might believe at first that it is in the first-person. But there is not even a first-person perspective in Kafka […]. This means the perspective is subjective—Karl Rossmann on all the other characters; and yet it is not a subjective perspective since this perspective also shows Karl Rossmann objectively. There is a displacement; I don’t know how to explain it.30

There is therefore a conscious desire to maintain a paradox in the form, to maintain the “tension” opposing subjective and objective, even exasperating it and making this untenable posture the heart of the method. The perspective is valid for everyone in the same way, without distinguishing anyone; it remains impassive and objective. In spite of everything, Karl has a particular position in the most concrete sense: profile. Being filmed in profile, most often left profile, is a characteristic series for Karl (the other characters are never shown this way). This is a consequence of 30 Blank, “Wie will ich lustig lachen”, p. 277.

268 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

this stance: in his trials, the camera is almost always the height of the young man and at his side. To put it differently, if there is a frontline where Karl positions himself, the camera is placed there too. Straub clarified in 1994: In Class Relations, if we filmed Karl Rossmann’s trial in the presence of other people, we needed to know where to put the camera. […] [I]f you choose […] to have a fraternal perspective with him, it is better—even though Karl Rossmann is in the trial as an objective character and the camera does not identify with him or adopt his perspective—it is better to be a bit closer to him.31

Spectators are also in this double position: the absent space keeps them in a specific place. The audience finds itself both within the dispositif, but also a bit outside of it, objective in relation to it. To be both inside—in the heart of the inextricable network of relations, an issue of desires and rejections—and at the same time a bit outside—not understanding everything, not partaking, stating the truth instead of restarting the machine—is also Karl’s position in the novel and within the film’s mise-en-scène. It also means constantly bringing the spectator back to the “pitiless gaze of an invisible witness”,32 which is the nodal point of the film, a witness who listens to all sides with the same attention even if he knows which side he sympathizes with, with whom he is complicit. An entire network of positions is thus created: filmmakers-character(absent person?)-spectator. All witnesses, all actors through the act of observation, all both inside and outside, subjective and objective. The individual as basic unity does not resist the extreme tension on which the narrative mechanisms and mise-en-scène are based. Everything vacillates. The subject can no longer find a comfortable position, trapped in a system with dependencies on all sides. The character himself is not emptied, but neutralized, returned to a type. Oppen’s poems in Discrete Series shed light on a web of similar problems—once again, to a point—at work here: Who comes is occupied Toward the chest (in the crowd moving opposite Grasp of me) 31 Raymond, Rencontres, p. 26. 32 Bazin, What is Cinema?, p. 92.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

269

In firm overalls The middle-aged man sliding Levers in the steam-shovel cab,— Lift (running cable) and swung, back Remotely respond to the gesture before last Of his arms, fingers continually— Turned with the cab. But if I (how goes it?)— The asphalt edge Loose on the plateau, Horse’s classic height cartless See electric flash of streetcar, The fall is falling from electric burst.33

The eruption of the “I”—for the first time in the book—interrupts and breaks the poem. The poem begins on a “who” used as a strangely indefinite pronoun that never finds a specific referent. The first eruption of the “me” fails to cause the poem’s dislocation, just as the “me” itself is caught in the collective of the crowd: the syntax comes undone (“Grasp of me” lacks a verb) and the text is scattered on the page. In the end, the poem manages to stick together thanks to several factors: the “me” appears, but it is still too imprecise to cause an implosion, still too full of being numerous—the title of the poet’s 1968 collection. Perhaps it is not the crowd in motion, moreover, that grasps the it, but the “me” that tries to keep a grasp on itself, to stay together (and “grasp” can also mean “understanding”). What saves the poem or the poet is absorption in an image—infinitely trivial, a moment of industrial civilization, but a support of perception, a site of a possible use of language where the “me” could tolerate accepting to disappear. However, the image ends up breaking apart when the “I” insists: when it reappears, the break is immediate. “How goes it?” is what people say when they have a tune on the tip of their tongue but can’t remember it. So what was the refrain of “I”? How did it work before? The tune is impossible to recover, however, and the “it” returns, isolated on the following line, substituted for the “I”. The poem tells the story of what Lyotard calls disseizure. The image is divided and discovers that it is a series of disjointed fragments. But these bits do not restart in any old way: they are the emergence of history, a moment of confusion between eras, and the perception of things in the world as a historical stratigraphy and geological thickness where traces 33 Oppen, Discrete Series, p. 16.

270 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

of everything that has been are still noticeable—free nature, massacres. Oppen explained the end of his poem in 1968: That’s specifically something I’ve said since, I think, of the vision of the raw land under that asphalt. There’s the asphalt but under it is really what was, or even is, just a prairie, just the raw land. There’s a double consciousness there where you see the road is a road and then begin to see just the raw land.34

The horse is cartless, human “predatory intentions” are removed: virgin nature returns. To see this is neither a hallucination nor a mirage, like the blood in place of the Nile water in Aaron’s vase is not a miracle. Sufficient precision of perception attained, the world appears as it is. An Ending Following many detours and after being rejected many times in unfair trials from every place and group he has been, Karl finally finds a very attractive poster announcing auditions that day for the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. The theatre is paradise—but should we believe this? The text of the poster is impressive, a condensation of rhetorical processes that capitalism has employed to make a fortune through the “language” of publicity, whose terrorizing character—through the immoderate use of repetition and exclamation points—Kafka demonstrates. We find it hard to believe in the Eden it describes when it threatens with an “Accursed be who does not believe us!” Huillet and Straub reinforce its ambivalence by filming the poster on a grey concrete wall where the graffiti “DURSTSTREIK” (“thirst strike”) presides immense and dramatic and which is perfectly reframed for the close-up of the poster so that only the letters “U” and “S” are visible, replaced by the poster’s striking Gothic typeface. The theatre is a utopia, no doubt, but it is also a nightmare: Kafka maintains a double, critical position regarding it—clearly untenable for most commentators who believe they must choose one or the other when one of the fundamental aspects of the Objectivist attitude is to allow the ambivalence to function with all its means in the mind of the reader-spectator. At the end of the sequence in the captain’s office, Uncle Jakob enjoins Karl to “learn to comprehend [his] place”; later, the Hotel Manager declares him “unusable”, while Delamarche tells the police officer he wants out of 34 Dembo, “Oppen on His Poems”, p. 200.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

271

kindness “in spite of all the signs that spoke against it, to still make of him a usable human being.” The poster says, “We are the theater that can use everyone, everyone in this place!” We shift from hierarchies to landscapes, from relations of class to those of geography, a passage that may be utopic because it is still unfinished: it is essential that the promised land never be reached (no risk of that, Kafka tells us: “Moses did not fail to reach Canaan because his life was too short, but because his was a human life.”35). However, something else is at work, something muffled, ambiguous: being usable. The Hotel Manager’s insult is the worst in his mouth; he could certainly not go any lower—and Huillet and Straub emphasize this with wildly violent diction. For us, it is the most beautiful compliment and the most perfect definition of Karl Rossmann. But “brauchen” can also mean “to have need of” and that someone can need themselves, that one can be desired, even and especially as a cog, even and especially as a tool cancelled by its use, even and especially as a slave: a desire that may constitute us. Beyond the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, it may simply be the final sequence on the train that creates this utopic movement, bringing about the end of the film and attaining what physicists call escape velocity, an ending that ends nothing but that creates an opening in the narration to a possible future for Karl, perhaps by his accepting the world at all costs, allowing the world to penetrate him, not passively but as an act of pure, wide, and joyous will. In this sense, the ending could be compared to another famous ending involving a train, that of North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), pretending that the reverse shot of the virgin shores of the Missouri River in Class Relations is at once the opposite of the shot of the train entering the tunnel in the American film and perhaps not so different—just as the ending is ultimately just another version of the ending of “The Judgment”, whose innuendo Kafka himself evoked: “At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge”36—the final leap like Empedocles and the return to the landscape. More eroticism. Furthermore, it makes sense not to forget this is the story of the dissolution of an identity. Karl Rossmann (literally: horse-man), finding his place in this world at the Clayton racetrack (cruel irony); Karl Rossmann, the archetypal Kafka character; Karl Rossmann who can only access this utopic place and movement by agreeing to lose his identity, by abandoning his name, not only for another, but for the worst of others: negro, the name of the lowest men in this early 20th-century America and, moreover, a collective name. 35 Quoted in Bataille, Literature and Evil, p. 152. 36 Kafka, Collected Stories, p. 39.

272 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Because the young man abandons his identity, but goes even further: he abandons any idea of subjectivity, of the self as a separate entity in order to assume the name of the nameless, to be nothing, to disappear (is that not the title of the novel?) into the desert landscape near the Missouri.

Bibliography Bataille, Georges, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton. New York: Marion Boyards, 1985. Bazin, André, What is Cinema?, 2 vols., trans. Hugh Grant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Blank, Manfred, “Wie will ich lustig lachen, wenn alles durcheinandergeht”, Filmkritik, 9-10 (1984), pp. 269-278. Daney, Serge, La Maison cinéma et le monde: Les Années Libé 1981-1985, ed. Patrice Rollet, Jean-Claude Biette and Christophe Manon. Paris: P.O.L., 2002. Dembo, L.S., “Oppen on His Poems: A Discussion”, George Oppen: Man and Poet, ed. Burton Hatlen. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1981, pp. 197-213. Farocki, Harun, “Einfach mit der Seele, das gibt es night”, Filmkritik, 5:317 (1983), pp. 242-247. Gray, Ronald, Franz Kafka. London: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Janouch, Gustav, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees. New York: New Directions, 1971. Kafka, Franz, The Man who Disappeared, trans. Ritchie Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Narboni, Jean, “Voyages en litanies”, Trafic, 31 (Autumn 1999), pp. 14-19. Novarina, Valère, Devant la parole. Paris: P.O.L., 1999. Oppen, George, Discrete Series. Cleveland: Mother/Asphodel Press, 1966. —, Poems of George Oppen (1908-1984), ed. Charles Tomlinson. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cloud, 1990. —, “The Mind’s Own Place”, Ironwood 26, 13:2 (Autumn 1985), pp. 132-137. —, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990. Raymond, Jean-Louis (ed.), Rencontres avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet. Paris: Ensba, 2008. Sade, Marquis de, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Thorel, Christian and Archie, Jean-Paul (ed.), Les Films de Danièle Huillet et JeanMarie Straub: Amerika/Rapports de classes/Klassenverhältnisse. Toulouse: Ombres, 1984.

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CL ASS REL ATIONS

273

Toubiana, Serge, Philippon, Alain, and Bergala, Alain, “Quelque chose qui brûle dans le plan”, Cahiers du cinéma, 364 (October 1984), pp. 32-34. Vico, Giambattista, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948. Zukofsky, Louis, “A”. New York: New Directions, 2011.

7.

On Dissolution Abstract This chapter looks at two of Straub-Hullet’s later f ilms, The Death of Empedocles and Workers, Peasants. Both films deal with the theme of dissolution—of the protagonist in nature or the individual in a community as well as the dissolution of a community itself. Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, a long-form poem that quotes verbatim witness transcripts from American legal trials, is discussed with special attention paid to how the poetic versified the transcripts and put them in relation to one another. The result on the page is a text that looks strikingly similar to the published script of Workers, Peasants, a film based on Elio Vittorini’s novel Women of Messina and that also deals with witness testimony. Keywords: Reznikoff, Straub-Huillet, Objectivists, Empedocles, Workers, Peasants, Vittorini

Speech Without Authority: The Death of Empedocles “One of the greatest powers of cinema is its animism. On-screen, nature is never inanimate.” ‒ Jean Epstein, “The Cinema Seen from Etna”1

Of all Huillet and Straub’s films, Class Relations is undoubtedly the one closest to comedy, even slapstick—the most viciously funny kind. From Today Until Tomorrow might seem like a close competitor for this title, but its sadness quickly invades everything. And yet, strangely, few texts better describe how the Kafka film works than Benjamin’s pages on the Trauerspiel: It is this repetition on which the law of the mourning play is founded. Its events are allegorical schemata, symbolic mirror-images of a different 1

Keller and Paul, Jean Epstein, p. 289.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_ch07

276 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

game. […] The time of the mourning play is not fulfilled, but nevertheless it is finite. It is nonindividual, but without historical universality. […] The nature of repetition in time is such that no unified form can be based on it. [Tragedy is] formally unified. […] The mourning play, on the other hand, is inherently nonunified drama, and the idea of its resolution no longer dwells within the realm of drama itself. […] Perhaps there is a parallel here: just as tragedy marks the transition from historical to dramatic time, the mourning play represents the transition from dramatic time to musical time.2

The filmmakers’ following film, a cinematic staging of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play The Death of Empedocles, is explicitly a Trauerspiel (and like The Man Who Disappeared is unfinished). While Kafka’s novel was not shot where its action takes place—the America where its author never set foot—but in Germany, the poet’s play was performed where its “action” unfolds, under the sun of Sicily. The locations count here, but especially the light. One way of illuminating to its very depths the gulf which separates tragedy from Trauerspiel is to read in the strictest literal sense the excellent comment of the Abbé Bossu, author of a Traité sur la poésie épique, which is quoted by Jean Paul. It says that “no tragedy should be set at night-time”. The midnight hour of the Trauerspiel stands in contrast to the daytime setting required by every tragic action.3

Once again, the night takes over Class Relations in its black and white that does not know day; The Death of Empedocles burns with a hard brilliance. This provokes tensions that perhaps echo those at work deep in the poetry that wants to rediscover Sophocles through the models of its age, Greek clarity through Hesperia. New Break The reasons why The Death of Empedocles is incomplete are inextricably linked to the project’s wild ambition and to a contemporary historical collapse that is also the work’s subject. We have three attempts by Hölderlin under the same title: the first—which Huillet and Straub adapted for this film—is the longest. It includes two of five planned acts, dating from 1798. 2 Benjamin, Selected Writings, I, p. 57. 3 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 135.

On Dissolution

277

Pierre Bertaux recalls how much these years were marked for Hölderlin by hopes of a coming revolution in Swabia, a republic inspired by French movements and based on the models of the democratic heroes from antiquity. The Death of Empedocles can only be understood with this in mind: without a revolution, the play is useless, cannot be performed, is incomprehensible, impossible: “In 1798, the year of the first version of Empedocles, there was no question of performing his ‘republican’ play or even of publishing it in Germany. The princes were too powerful and Hölderlin knew it.”4 The play actually draws from the historical period in which it was born, a period both expected in vain and real. It describes what the poet dreams of for the coming age and states that the poet’s words cannot make it happen—or at least perhaps that these words create the conditions of its own loss. The two acts are both organized around a big trial. In the first, led by the priest Hermocrates and the archon Critias, the citizens of Agrigento banish and curse Empedocles for claiming to be a god. Empedocles leaves the city accompanied by his young friend Pausanias. In the second, the Agrigentans regret what they have done and ask Empedocles not only to return to the city but also to be its king, which the doctor-philosopher refuses. Both trials are absolutely useless: everything has already been decided. Empedocles’ death is not merely the action that must end the play, since the hero is dead from the start. Diogenes Laërtius records several versions of Empedocles’ death: for some, he was lifted into the heavens, called by a loud voice; for others, he threw himself into the crater of Etna, which spat out one of his sandals; for still others, he left for the Peloponnese and was never seen again.5 Hölderlin’s drama and Huillet and Straub’s film bring all of these deaths into play, which share the fact that they are not deaths, but faintings. In the second scene of Act I, Hermocrates and Critias say that a ‘wondrous saying’ is circulating among the people that Empedocles has disappeared. He is of course still living, but he has retired from the society of men, making himself invisible to all, and for a terrible reason: he is dead. Or rather, even worse: the world is dead to him, he is banished from the nature that was so intimately close to him, and from among his companions the gods, and he curses himself for having provoked the loss of this link, for having fallen into death out of pride: O phantom! It is over and you, do not conceal it from yourself! you are 4 Bertaux, Hölderlin, p. 194. 5 See Dumont, Les Écoles présocratiques, pp. 131-132.

278 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

guilty yourself in this, poor Tantalus, you have defiled sanctity, have split the beautiful bond with insolent pride, miserable one! as the geniuses of the world full of love forgot themselves in you, you thought of yourself and supposed, mean fool, the benevolent ones were sold to you, and would serve you, the celestial ones, like stupid vassals!

Empedocles speaks these words while only the lower portion of his body, in a toga, is filmed, with the earth before him where a knife is stuck. The following shot is a close-up of the knife and the doctor continues: Is there nowhere an avenger (his hand grabs the knife from the ground […]) and must I then alone call into my soul the scorn and curse?

Pausanias immediately interrupts his loved one, likely as he is on the verge of using the knife against himself off-screen. The play is full of bad timing. When people come to curse Empedocles, he has already cursed himself. When people come to reconcile with him, he is already reconciled—with nature and the gods in any case. This discrepancy turns the hero’s death into a sacrifice that is not only accepted but also almost desired. The analogy between Empedocles and Jesus becomes obvious: it works less on a symbolic level—the role of the “sacrifice” is not for Assumption or redemption—and more as a structural schema whose clearly legible narrative counterbalances the abstraction at the basis of the movement. The play contains many echoes of Christian events and themes; it is a kind of passion play. Ulrich Gaier enumerates some: Empedocles calls himself a god, which is why the priest (Hermocrates) followed by the worldly powers (Pilate/Critias) accuses him.6 These correspondences work on several levels: in shot 121, after Empedocles refuses the crown and Critias tells him “you are / a great man, betrayed!”, his words echo the words of the centurion at the foot of the cross: “This man was really the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:54; Mark 15:39). Moreover, in the gospels, Christ saves the servant of another centurion like Empedocles heals Critias’ daughter. This is why Critias is a character whose importance Huillet and 6 Gaier, Hölderlin, p. 303.

On Dissolution

279

Straub’s mise-en-scène emphasizes: like both Pilate and the centurions, as well as Peter, or even Judas for his denial, he is the play’s real pivot, charged with its negative pole and at the same time the only one we can feel begins to understand what is really happening (better than Hermocrates, but Pausanias as well), despite or thanks to all of the contradictions in which he is trapped. With its strange mixture of monumentality and delicacy, Huillet and Straub’s direction of the actors enriches his relationship with Empedocles, giving the film the quality of a Langian western: enemies too noble not to respect their rival (Vern Haskell and Frenchy Fairmont in Rancho Notorious or the architect and the Maharaja in the Indian diptych). The between-two-deaths (which is also between two versions of the myth) in which Empedocles finds himself echoes the poet’s position: The poet himself stands between the former—the gods—and the latter—the people. He is the one who has been cast out—out into that between, between gods and men. But first and only in this between is it decided who man is and where his existence is settled.7

The entire play collapses into the interval without filling it, lodging itself in a crack that is also formed by history because the between also echoes the transition characterizing the historical moment, the moment of (desired) revolution, both too early and too late. Bertaux indicates the drama’s key line as “this is the time of kings no more” with which the hero refuses the crown of Agrigento. The entire mise-en-scène confirms this rupture. In the previous shot (119), two Agrigentans—using the substance of the German language as never before, rendering it vigorous through diction—come to ask him to love them and return as king. The shot cuts to a slight low angle of Empedocles with Pausianas a bit behind him on frame left. Empedocles recites the famous line and the three citizens from Agrigento exclaim off-screen and together for the first time, “Who are you, man?” After Pausanias expresses his pride, an Agrigentan, still off-screen, says, “Incomprehensible are the words / that you pronounced, Empedocles.” In the same shot, Empedocles justifies himself: Be ashamed that you still want a king; you are too old; in your fathers’ times it would have been otherwise. 7 Heidegger, Elucidations, p. 64.

280 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Then and only then comes the reverse shot of Critias alone—confirming his structural importance in the drama—asking forgiveness and recognizing Empedocles’ greatness. We then return to Empedocles and only after to the three Agrigentans. There is no reverse shot of the ones seemingly addressed by the refusal when this refusal is spoken because there is nobody to hear Empedocles’ words. His discourse is incomprehensible. For the time being? The theme of speech is central from the first appearance of Empedocles and Pausanias. In shot 36, the philosopher covers his eyes with his hand and shouts, half complaining, half in rage: “Ah! If I could say how it was, to name it.” Empedocles would like to be able to say what he has lost, but what he has lost is already linguistic—and visual (unless it is himself that he can literally no longer see? Or he is hiding behind his hands? Or he is looking for another, “interior” gaze?—in any case, seeing and saying are linked here). Something in his language no longer sticks to things and the gods—or the men listening to him. It seems, moreover, that Empedocles’ “mistake”, what he does not forgive himself for above all, involves having spoken what he was not supposed to: No! I should not speak it, holy Nature! […] I alone was god and proclaimed it in insolent pride. Oh believe me, I would rather not have been born! Pausanias: What? For the sake of one word?

Empedocles speaks the lines from “no” to “pride” in one shot where all that is visible is his lower body, the folds of his light blue toga, the stone bench where he was sitting, and his outstretched forearms and hands. The previous shot shows him seated next to the young man: we cut to him alone just before he stands up. The resulting violence is worthy of the rejection the sage is expressing. One word and the world collapses. This is a kind of miracle. Pausanias already does not understand him in this first scene. Empedocles “make[s] of [his] suffering a riddle”. The disciple repeats his incomprehension at the beginning of Act II: “You but frighten me; / for you are incomprehensible to me”. The philosopher-poet always remains one who says marvellous, incomprehensible words. Pausanias returns to this, as do Hermocrates and Critias: after condemning Empedocles to exile, Critias asks him still

On Dissolution

281

to protect his daughter Panthea—and the archon exclaims with deep melancholy: “Have you yet so many golden words / left over in your misery?” Hermocrates’ curse is also speech, like the “counsel” the citizens ask of Empedocles in the end. The film does not confront people, but words or regimes of speech. For Lacoue-Labarthe, “the failure of Empedocles is the mistake of its theatricality”. The way he expresses this returns precisely to the question of rhetoric. According to him, the poet tried to infuse the play with “theatricality”, meaning intrigue, drama, action, “But nothing works: it remains an exercise in eloquence, almost a static monologue, a kind of politico-metaphysical demonstration […] in the style of the Jacobin or Directoire aesthetic.”8 The renunciation of royalty is also a reversal of eloquence in a drama about speech. Empedocles is a man who uses marvellous but incomprehensible words. His language literally goes unheard. The problem is not so much that this language addresses a people that does not yet exist. Here, Empedocles is speaking a discourse that is precisely addressed to nobody. He is inventing a language without a recipient. That is what is unheard. In his “Remarks on Oedipus”, Hölderlin writes: Other works of art too lack this reliability compared to the Greek works; they have, at least up to now, been judged more according to the impression they make, than according to the lawful calculation and other procedures through which beauty is brought out. Modern poetry especially lacks the schooling and dexterity which would allow it to be calculated and learned, and once learned, allow it to be reliably repeated in its practice.9

This paragraph, which echoes Straub’s own statements that for them, “without moving an inch away from the idea that sensations must never be provoked, sensations must be translated […] in Cézanne’s sense when he says sensations must be materialized”,10 returns to a conception of the work as an object, created using calculable laws, susceptible to being used for teaching or a test (A Test of Poetry), and whose coherence must be measured based on its own autonomous way of working rather than according to its relationship with a reader or spectator. Empedocles is therefore already organizing his words based on principles that do not concern anyone—except himself, the gods, and nature. His 8 “Le Théâtre de Hölderlin” in Lacoue-Labarthe, Métaphrasis, p. 48. 9 Hölderlin, “Remarks on Oedipus”, p. 194. 10 Daney and Narboni, “Entretien”, p. 18.

282 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

speeches always seem to originate far from what provokes them and to use more obscure, rigorous reasoning. Empedocles’ drama performs the birth of poetry in the modern sense, meaning it disengages from rhetoric. This new poetry is no longer defined as one of its branches, but instead exactly as what it has nothing to do with: it is a regime of language placed outside the question of who is addressed and is no longer composed with an effect in mind—conviction, ravishment—but according to objective, repeatable practices flowing from internal laws and balances—a regime responding to Zukofsky’s criteria for objectivation. This is how The Death of Empedocles extends Moses and Aaron: both films tell the story of a revolution that occurs first through the disruption of language. The films also share another trait, which may be a secret attribute of Objectivist artists: faith in the effectiveness of language among and on things, in poetry’s capacity to reveal the world in its opacity. Schoenberg’s opera puts both poles of language—old and new—in two characters who must mutually destroy each other—Aaron destroys Moses at the end of the second act, Moses destroys Aaron at the end of the third. In Hölderlin’s drama, Empedocles alone knows what is at stake. He is quite sensitive to being able to perceive lucidly that his only political task is to organize his own disappearance. Although the play cannot have any “action”, it is not “theatrical”. It is “almost a static monologue” organized into a struggle between regimes of speech. But this is exactly what leaves Huillet and Straub unusually free in establishing their system of cinematic mise-en-scène, making the film one of their most beautiful formal triumphs. Men and two women recite Hölderlin’s text on the edge of or within the woods at the foot of Etna. They wear togas whose folds and movements shape their bodies, changing with the wind and sun. The filmmakers neither oppose nor superimpose any action on the drama’s “stasis”. Instead, they radicalize this dramatic stasis by pushing the actors’ immobility to the limit. Their arms often remain hanging at their sides, giving them a very strange weight and presence. It would be false to claim the people are absolutely motionless: they move when necessary, every time they must perform an action. But between these actions, their bodies are blocked, turned into statues—an effect the togas accentuate—and adopt the mode of being of the trees and stones around them. Rather than being monotonous or minimalistic, this multiplies small surprises and oddities. In the second scene, Hermocrates and Critias are talking together near where Panthea and Delia have just left. Their bodies are both turned towards frame left, where the women were, and sometimes look right, where they believe Empedocles

On Dissolution

283

to be. Their scheming done, they leave frame right. For the second time, the location is empty, the characters who were there (we do not see them enter the frame) walk off, leaving the trace of a kind of impulse to flee, a centrifugal force. But there is something strange about Hermaocrates’ movement, as if his body were bent, falling without falling, sloped, towards frame left—but we only feel its effect now (we no longer see their feet), causing an even more subtle surprise because its origin is hard to see. Huillet and Straub’s work also shows that, contrary to what we might believe, a structure based on the opposition of regimes of speech is in no way abstract. Of all the filmmakers’ work, this film is clearly the one that proposes the largest array of dictions. The secondary characters especially— the three slaves and particularly the three citizens—speak in ways people have never spoken in a film or elsewhere. The second Agrigentan makes powerful, borderline ridiculous lyrical flights; the third, notably in his final tirade (shot 136), has a slowed-down, almost agonizing rhythm, letting his lines and every one of his sounds slowly die away in a prayer whose grief reaches the spectator at the same time as the deep, pure joy procured through the form. The results of using sound in this way are not limited to the sensual proximity that Hölderlin’s language warrants: it contributes not only to the fact that “in The Death of Empedocles, the speakers are hopelessly distracted from their own speech”11 (Louis Seguin), but more largely to the fact that the content of the discourse tends to be drained away and the speeches become pure form, objects with no destination, outside of communication. The third Agrigentan, chanting his request, does not look at Empedocles or anyone else, but loses himself (disappears?), his eyes lowered, in the sound that seems to be guiding him, his body accompanying the rhythmic development with its own curvatures. Once again, everything depends on a conflict of words and their different configurations; it is therefore logical that the staging tends to conform to the tribunal model. As already mentioned, what Huillet and Straub maintain from the play is organized into two overall symmetrical parts, each ending in a big trial. And here they return to and radicalize the principle of the strategic point, extending it to the entire film. In both trials, Empedocles and Pausanias appear on one side facing Hermocrates, Critias, and the three Agrigentans in a line on the other side. Contrary to Class Relations, the radicalization here is in the location of the trial, a “simple” clearing that has no architecture prior to the organization 11 Seguin, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, p. 112.

284 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

the filmmakers create—it is the desert of a western or a Stroheim film. The space is delimited only by the bench and wall behind Empedocles in the first trial and by the trees in both. Beyond this, the arrangement of the characters on the “stage” marked by the vegetation—a stage that is still a proto-architecture, a possible support of a structure—and in relation to each other is only determined by the group of interacting dispositifs. Using the tribunal mode, the mise-en-scène once again adopts the singular practice of the strategic point. The camera is no longer close to either side. It is both within and without, having a concrete place in the location as in no other kind of placement, but maintaining a radical exteriority in relation to what is being performed. The camera never moves, nor do the actors, meaning that the latter are always seen from exactly the same angle. In the second trial, the angle only changes for Critias, further highlighting his importance in the film. Unlike the exception noted in the first trial in Class Relations, it is the actor, not the camera, who moves here: that suffices. Just prior to leaving the location and the film, Critias has a final exchange with Empedocles. In shot 139, alone in a three-quarter view facing frame right, Critias states his renunciation of trying to persuade the philosopher to remain with them. Empedocles asks him in the following shot (140) to come shake his hand, then blesses his former fellow citizens. It is in shot 141 that Critias and the other Agrigentans leave: it shows the archon in a close-up in right profile, almost backlit by the very bright background— there is a gap in the curtain of trees behind him. He is either convinced of Empedocles’ greatness or converted concerning his saintliness. Formally, the shot establishes a very noticeable rupture obtained simply by Critias’ few, sudden steps. This shift reveals the angle from which Huillet and Straub have approached their adaptation. In the play, Pausanias is Empedocles’ disciple. He is the repository for his elder’s ideological heritage: he knows his doctrine, his heart is won, and the Agrigentans should go to him for advice. Critias has not recorded the content of Empedocles’ discourse, but he is more important since he is sensitive to the form of his speech; he senses what is at play in the new regime of language the “traitor” is inventing as well as in the gesture he is making. Empedocles’ speech has no destination: he disengages words from the chore of communication. In 1991-92, Straub declared: “The only thing an artist can still do is make objects, objects, I mean objects that simply do not communicate.”12 There are implications to seeing one’s work as an object. 12 Damerau, “Le chemin passait par Hölderlin”, p. 104.

On Dissolution

285

Of all the characters, Critias alone senses that the thinker-poet’s lines are an attempt to objectify ideas rather than transmit them. The archon is not sure he understands what the man who refuses the crown is saying, but his speech exists for him. If the new regime is some day established, if Empedocles’ testament is some day executed, it will be by him and not Pausanias. After Moses and Aaron, The Death of Empedocles is Huillet and Straub’s new testament. The fact that the references in the first film are Jewish and in the second are Christian only plays a (seemingly) secondary role: the 1987 film extends the reflections expressed in the 1974 film, notably regarding the main theme of the relationship between speech and power, the invention of a language and revolutionary (messianic) fulfilment. Moreover, for both formal and ideological reasons, these two films remain fundamental for them and form a hinge in their trajectory. In both cases, their main interest is in a f inal speech: testamentary speeches made by the prophets and quoted as often as possible by Straub in interviews and introductions to their films. Each time, a few lines: Moses: […] always when you leave the absence of desire of the desert and your gifts have led you to the highest height, always will you be hurled down again from the success of misuse, back into the desert. […] But in the desert you are insuperable and will reach the goal: united with God. Empedocles: […] then reach one another your hands again, give the word and share the goods, o then you dear ones—share deed and glory, like true Dioscuri; let each one be as all,—as upon slender pillars, rest upon righteous ordinances the new life and let the law affirm your bond.

In the meantime, the desert has become a forest and God has become Nature, perhaps because the real eye, body, and mind are not very satisfied by promised delights that are insufficiently concrete. And while with Schoenberg’s opera, Huillet and Straub wanted the two kinds of authoritarian speech to end up mutually destroying each other, in Hölderlin they discovered language as an instrument of domination (rhetoric) that prepares and fulfils its own dissolution in order to find a state of impersonality that is at once utopic (after the revolution) and very old (the tiger’s leap into the past).

286 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

The passage from Moses and Aaron to The Death of Empedocles echoes the evolution in Zukofsky’s work between “A”-8—or more specifically, “‘March Comrades’ (Words from a workers’ chorus, from ‘A’-8)”—and “A”-9—an evolution leading the poet and filmmakers increasingly to replace human history with natural, geological, and botanical history. “March Comrades”—which sounds an explicit call to revolution—dates from a period when its author believed in a certain sense or believed he believed that poetry could still intervene directly in history and work through rhetoric and transformations. But the call is gone from the very revised version of the poem that finally appears as “A”-8, stripped of its most directly rhetorical aspects. “March Comrades” remains an isolated and no doubt hopeless attempt by the poet to escape Objectivist isolation and join the side of those with a camp. Soon, the extreme formal requirements Zukofsky had used in writing “Mantis” went back to being what they always were: the Objectivist solution. In “A”-8 and “A”-9, the political vocabulary is just as explicitly present, but in the latter the poet uses stoppages, interruptions, breaks, dislocation, and love again. The revolution can only occur through a new language—by works made like objects, “according to the lawful calculation and other procedures through which beauty is brought out” rather than “the impression they make”.13 Lacoue-Labarthe reduces the mistakes of Hölderlin’s play to the conclusion that “in his consideration of tragedy, he is not interested in the audience”.14 It is because this is absolutely true that it is absolutely false: by ignoring the audience as radically as possible (and therefore the author as well) something like an exterior—a bit of opacity through which opacity can be grasped without predatory intentions—can penetrate the work and audience at the risk of everything dissolving. The Objectivist task may be to construct a work that blocks history, or better yet time, and transforms its movement into an accumulation of layers whose energy becomes a destructive force. This destruction is dangerous: beyond the work itself, it uses language and the spectator/reader or author, the individual. It questions the modes of our presence in the world—from mechanisms of perception to class relations, as well as how language works and the inextricable interactions of all these phenomena. The ambition is perhaps nothing other than “to yoke oneself to the world of the facts and to keep apace”,15 as Zukofsky writes of Chaplin, if it is not an attempted response to Adorno’s demand 13 Hölderlin, “Remarks on Oedipus”, p. 194. 14 Lacoue-Labarthe, Métaphrasis, pp. 64-65. 15 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 64.

On Dissolution

287

in the final paragraph of Minima Moralia, described as “the simplest of all things” but “utterly impossible”: Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought.16

On Dismantling: Testimony and Workers, Peasants Testimony: Poetry As early as An “Objectivists” Anthology, the group of texts that would become Testimony was always preceded by a foreword: I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases—not a great many as law reports go—and found almost all that follows. I am indebted to the reporters and judges not only for the facts but for phrases and sentences.17

Jacques Roubaud summarizes Reznikoff’s methods as following “two operations”: —The f irst operation is sampling from the documentary mass from which the words are lifted, following strict criteria: precise control. […] —The second operation, without which the f irst would not work, is versification. It becomes verse through cutting; not a story; verse; poems. Then a sequence of poems, a (discontinuous) discrete series, knowingly constructed, that he calls a recitative.18

Everything comes from testimonies and trials, from the words and lives of people whose names disappeared long ago. These words do not originate in a random context, but within a judicial framework. Whether they are the words of a witness, victim, or defendant, Reznikoff does not say. This can sometimes be deduced solely from what a person can confirm having seen. 16 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247. 17 Zukofsky, An “Objectivists” Anthology, p. 92. 18 Roubaud, “La tentative objectiviste”, n.p.

288 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

The words were met with an initial filter, minimal but not negligible: the court reporter’s notation. Reznikoff adds a second filter (“Poetic discourse rewriting legal discourse rewriting witness account rewriting event […]”19). The resulting poems obey a relatively constant model, even if minor variations are noticeable within a framework that is striking for the rigour with which the author sticks to it. One example from the second poem in Testimony: The United States (1901-1910): “The North: II. Children at Work”: He was fourteen or fifteen years old and worked on a machine in the mill. He started to go to the water-closet and had reached the stairs but returned to tell the man in the room whom he was required to notify of his absence. Going back in the darkness between the machines— for the gas had not yet been lit— he slipped on some oil on the floor, threw out his hand, and it was caught and crushed in the gears of a machine.20

Formally, the basic approach seems to be using as much neutrality as possible. While “The English in Virginia”, which is constructed on similar principles, is identifiable by its short lines (making the cutting relatively noticeable and giving the reading a jerky quality), the versification here is minimal and based on a “one-proposition-per-line” rule, the most neutral (objective) mode of division possible. There are of course exceptions: the separation of “of his absence” and the accumulation of the two verbs “caught” and “crushed” in the last line. These exceptions are very notable and are deeply related to the poem’s structure, but they are not ostentatious, no bolts of lightning in a calm or tortured sky. They occur calmly in almost motionless air. They are all the more horrifying for not even having the decency of creating an event. The implacable feeling this form produces is tangible in the poem itself. What to say about what is generated by the accumulation of similar stories over more than 500 pages? Their rhythmic repetition through a structure 19 Lavazzi, “Poetic Discourse”, p. 176. 20 Reznikoff, Testimony, II, p. 130.

On Dissolution

289

establishes both their immediate starting over and their cyclical return. The book is divided into periods (1885-1890, 1891-1900, 1901-1910, 1911-1915) and according to geography (south, north, west) and themes (social life, children, slaves, Indians, domestic difficulties, neighbours, factory and mine work). The stories are sometimes funny, often horrible. They paint an absolutely pitiless picture of an America that is contemporary to Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared and early cinema. The effect of “monotony” present in Kafka is pushed to the limit here, echoing a banality that may be that of evil. Charles Bernstein defines Reznikoff’s work as “literary cubo-serialism”: By “cubo-seriality” I mean to identify the more discrete development that characterizes Reznikoff’s work from that point in 1918 on—the permutation of briefly etched, identifiable details that don’t quite stand on their own and that are separated by a gap, or interval, that requires a full stop. The prefix suggests rhetorically consonant permutations of angles of view on related (or linked) subjects.21

For Bernstein, the use of intervals and stops, the organization of a work through the simple co-presence of its elements or paratext, calls for a comparison with film: Reading Reznikoff formally means attending to the relation of the part to the whole (and the whole to the part) in his work, along lines that also suggest the relation of the shot to the sequence (in film and photography) […]. Reznikoff rejected the “depth” of field simulated by various realist and mimetic self-centring procedures in which each detail is subordinated to an overall image or theme or meaning. By constantly intercutting, or jump cutting, between and among and within material, the poem’s surface of local particularities gains primacy, in contrast to the rhetorical depth of narrative closure that is aimed for in such epic montage formats as The Waste Land and certain of the Cantos (not to mention more conventional poetry). Reznikoff’s network of stoppages is anti-epic.22

The dry formality, the absence of commentary and transitions, and the reiteration this amplifies make the whole hard to bear and give the text’s critical power all the means of the most perfect objectivity. In a group of 21 Bernstein, “Reznikoff‘s Nearness”, p. 216. 22 Ibid., p. 217.

290 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

notes published in 1977 under the title “First, there is the Need”, Reznikoff, trained in law, writes: With respect to the treatment of subject matter in verse and the use of the term “objectivist” and “objectivism,” let me again refer to the rules with respect to testimony in a court of law. Evidence to be admissible in a trial cannot state conclusions of fact: it must state the facts themselves. For example, a witness in an action for negligence cannot say: the man injured was negligent in crossing the street. He must limit himself to a description of how the man crossed: did he stop before crossing? Did he look? Did he listen? The conclusions of fact are for the jury and let us add, in our case, for the reader.23

He then (indirectly) quotes an eleventh-century Chinese poet: “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling […]”24 Testimony is a singular title. It is a study of the language of witnesses or a testimony in its entirety. In order to work, so that something can happen, the poem must be shaped by the very rules to which the blocks of speech it borrows had to conform. The removal of commentary, even of the author’s voice from among the other—mixed or layered—voices, and infinite juxtaposition become conditions through which a new state of speech sees the light of day, a form leading neutrality (minimalism) to excess. Those speaking in the poem have no name—only the protagonists are sometimes named, but we never know who is speaking. Words emerge without a precise origin beyond the rudimentary indications furnished by the titles. The words are issued from an abstract frame maintained by the author: we do not know what the judge says, what the lawyers’ eventual arguments will be, or the verdict. Different versions do not confront one another. Naked facts are exposed. A judgment involving the lives of real people was once passed on these words. The possibility of their position and their effectiveness in this system were a condition of their objectivity—doubly characterized: expression of facts without conclusions and the presupposition of impartiality (sworn truth). The shaping and passage to poetry transform these words into something else—they question the possibility of objectivity by increasing it, and the linguistic or poetic object intensif ies the cause. What is the 23 Reznikoff, “First, there is the Need”, p. 8. 24 Ibid., p. 8

On Dissolution

291

shape of an objective language, what is the objective form of a language? These are a poet’s questions and their implications are metaphysical and political. Utopia and Dismantling: Workers, Peasants In several respects, Workers, Peasants (2001), adapted from chapters 44 to 47 of Elio Vittorini’s novel Women of Messina (1948-1964), takes up where The Death of Empedocles leaves off. Mainly motionless men and women speak a (dense) text deep in an Italian forest and the trial form looms. If it must be said, the people speaking are all, at least for the majority, workers and peasants, men or women—and we realize through contrast how much actors who normally appear in films are socially typed. They are not wearing togas this time, but what appear to be their everyday clothes. They recount an effort whose context is not exactly specified, but which is clearly related to the war and fascism. They recount how they tried to live together, outside the old world, following new rules that were not the project of any prophet but what the circumstances introduced. They recount a difficult winter and a promising spring. But why are they recounting? And to whom? The novelist does not decide (“[T]o refresh their memories or to inform now one and now another, a friend or a new acquaintance who asks about what went on.”25), but for him, the form is that of storytelling and memory, oral transmission, history recounted by those who made or lived it to those who must hear it. The inhabitants of the village are witnesses in the historiographic sense. The first shift Huillet and Straub make involves turning these historical testimonies into judicial testimonies, moments of a trial. The question “to whom?” is therefore posed in a new manner: when a character is speaking, staring at some point off-screen—not necessarily at human height: the point can be situated (much) higher or lower—Huillet and Straub also do not decide, only indicating in the script: “to a judge? An investigator? A spectator? God?”26 The entire judicial dispositif of The Death of Empedocles and so many of their other films is undone, unfolded here. When a trial takes place in the earlier films, we are able at least to determine one or more accusers and one or more defendants—even a judge or a lawyer. In Workers, Peasants, the structure is maintained, but the positions are no longer determinable: 25 Vittorini, Women of Messina, p. 132. 26 Huillet, Straub, and Vittorni, Ouvriers, paysans, p. 17, 21, 25, 31, 33, 35.

292 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

while groups of people are still standing in opposition, they are no longer physically face-to-face. The film has an unusual structure, made up of three movements, seven reels, and 69 shots in three locations—but the movements and locations do not correspond. The whole can be broken down as follows: Introductory shot 1st movement—39 shots (3.5 reels) Location 1 2nd movement—18 shots (1.5 reels) Location 2a—4 shots Location 2b—2 shots Location 3—12 shots rd movement—10 shots (1.5 reels) 3 Location 1—4 shots Location 3—1 shot Location 2—4 shots Location 1—1 shot Concluding shot

Location 1 is a clearing in a ravine with a small stream running beside it that is audible beneath the dialogue during most of the film. Its sound disappears little by little because as the shoot and the summer progressed, the stream dried up. Six characters appear here, split into two groups of three: workers on the right, peasants on the left. One of the latter, Widow Bilioti, is seated on the ruins of a washhouse. All face the same direction and the camera, in between, faces them—therefore when they look straight ahead, they are not observing each other, but the workers are nevertheless looking frame left and the peasants frame right. Location 2 is first shown as two distinct sites: Spine alone on one side in a small clearing, Fischio and Giralda Adorno on the other, seated on the side of a path. It is only in shot 64 (third movement) that we understand these two sites are contiguous, that Spine and Fischio, between whom the film’s most violent conflict occurs, in fact share the same location. We understand moreover that—a notable exception in the film’s organization—the three characters are facing each other. Location 3 brings together three more characters: Toma, Siracusa, and Ventura (also called Faccia Cattiva, or Ugly Mug, by his companions). Again, all are facing the same direction and the camera faces them. Siracusa stands between the two men, because she is between them dramatically: jealousy

On Dissolution

293

is at the basis of the situation. But Siracusa loves Ventura, so Toma is a little further away. He is the only one wearing a suit and tie; he is a doctor. A small sunny wall and the grass covering it are visible behind them. In the novel, the text of these four chapters is formally distinguished from the rest: it does not appear in classic narrative form, but in an almost theatrical manner, like a series of monologues introduced solely by the speaker’s name. No indication is given as to how the characters are organized in groups or locations. Everything just described is solely attributable to Huillet and Straub and modifies deeply how the text works. The simple presentation above shows how much the film is based on an acceleration principle. The dispositif of the first movement is maintained so long that on an initial viewing we may think it will make up the entire film. The first change of location is a true surprise. They then follow one another at a more emphatic rhythm (undoubtedly an excessive term). This evolution—very noticeable for a spectator—is multiplied by others. For example, the sites become more and more open, from the initial pan within the ravine (no visible sky) to the final pan discovering a break on the horizon where the sea appears. Splitting the locations creates strange effects. In shot 46, for example, Spine explains how Ventura changed more than anyone. In the following shot, Ventura—who we see for the first time and only gradually realize who he is—adds: “Changed?” Given the lack of resemblance between the locations, everything suggests that the two friends are far apart and that Ventura could not actually have heard what Spine is saying. The effect is very important: instead of a simple exchange of thoughts, the film shows the circulation of collective speech and that links exist in this community that are not magic, but that predate what we know—that this community already has a history. Other structures are then added to this complex set of locations and groups. Workers, Peasants proves to be an endpoint in Huillet and Straub’s work of a long-term tendency to construct their films by drawing from a limited pool of gestures, postures, and other cinematic elements. This permits formal solidification—an important objectivation—while transforming the film into a “discrete series”: everything in the composition of a shot might return at other moments, organized differently, with or without variations. With some exceptions—there are always exceptions—the people are motionless; they may be standing or sitting, have their arms hanging at their sides, their hands crossed in front of them or behind their backs if they are standing, or on their thighs or at their sides if they are sitting; they may be framed alone or with this or that person and in this or that way (close-ups of the widow often have a lot of “air” above her head); their gaze may be locked on the ground or on a point at some specific, fixed height. They may read or recite their text.

294 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Because the other big novelty in Workers, Peasants involves the actors having their text with them, reading it sometimes, while at other moments they look up and speak, reciting, this creates a very strong effect that is both structural—what is read and what is spoken—and formal: when someone is reading a text, we do not see their eyes. Eyes lowered until they cannot be seen suddenly give a face an opacity, an inexpressivity that totally changes the spectator’s relation to the person and the shot. Their face remains visible, viewable, especially when the shot is static and long, but any access to pseudo-intimacy with the character, the illusion of an acquaintanceship, is refused in favour of maintaining raw alterity. A face is what escapes. And we grab hold of what remains visible: quivering. All of these structures continue to be superimposed, completing or troubling each other in a series of layers whose models we have already dealt with. The part of the second movement that takes place in the third location, for example, forms the entirety of the fifth reel. It is broken into twelve shots. By only choosing some of the above-mentioned criteria, we can already outline its basic structure, complicated by the other aspects: Shot 47: Toma, Siracusa, and Ventura; Ventura speaks (short shot) Shot 48: Ventura alone; he speaks (long shot) Shot 49: Siracusa and Ventura; she speaks (short shot) Shot 50: Siracusa alone; she speaks (long shot) Shot 51: Toma alone; he reads, then speaks (long shot) Shot 52: Siracusa alone; she reads (long shot) Shot 53: Toma, Siracusa, and Ventura; Toma speaks (short shot) Shot 54: Toma alone; he reads (long shot) Shot 55: Siracusa and Ventura; she speaks (short shot) Shot 56: Siracusa alone; she speaks (very long shot) Shot 57: Siracusa and Ventura; Ventura reads (very long shot) Shot 58: Ventura alone; he reads (long shot)

It is notable that only one person speaks in each shot. From this principle, the sequence, filmed entirely from one perspective, adopts a bridge-like structure: it is framed by two blocks of two shots with Ventura speaking, then two blocks of two shots with Siracusa speaking. In the central block, Toma reads and speaks first in a single shot, then in two distinct shots, creating a slight asymmetry. In the centre of the sequence is located the only shot where Siracusa reads her text instead of expressing herself directly (52). Rhythmically, the two-shot blocks respect the same kind of construction: wide and short, presenting at least two characters, then long and close

On Dissolution

295

for a single character. To this is added the effect of a repeated movement over the two blocks: shots 55 and 57 have the same framing; in 56 Siracusa speaks and in 57 it is Ventura’s turn. Ventura only expresses himself at the beginning and end of the sequence, first to speak, then to read. We thus f ind in Workers, Peasants the principle already described regarding Moses and Aaron (and “A”-9): superimposed layers presented as independent and in which the work creates interferences. Presenting the analysis in this way, however, may lead one to think that the choice of reading or reciting Vittorini’s text looking up or down is based on criteria of cinematic cadence. While these are involved, it is the regimes of speech that are decisive. Changing from a novelistic context where a story is being told to a trial-based cinematic structure clarif ies the discourse. The heterogeneity of the language of the stories appears. There is that which partakes in the trial and describes the facts as they happened. There are also the feelings of the characters involved, their motivations and motives, and their questions. Part of the discourse is based on what Reznikoff would consider objective language. The rest echoes the speaker’s subjectivity. The characters want to understand what happened in their village as objectively as possible. Whether they need to defend themselves in a trial against accusers from outside or oppose each other in front of judges (spectators? God?), they must be careful not to forget or distort anything. But objective speech—also objectified through having been written, transcribed on paper—sometimes causes reactions for those speaking it or those listening to it, a need to comment, specify, and explain. When Ventura recounts why he is no longer “Faccia Cattiva” or when Siracusa tries to explain what about this man touched her, they follow their own train of thought and their statements would not be admissible in any court or by any historian: they do not read, they speak. And yet, when the same Ventura says of the people in the village: One needs to think how we had come together. That reunion of people could become a good thing or also the worst thing. Each of them was someone who could, in combination with the others, make it become good or make it become bad. Each was ready for both combinations. I was instead as though I was ready for only one combination alone.

296 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

—“subjective” or “objective”, his statements are indispensable to understanding the (objective) situation: they are read. To a large extent, Workers, Peasants is therefore a study of the possibility, limits, and modalities of an objective language whose paradigm, as in Reznikoff, is legal testimony. Moreover, the typographic arrangement adopted above echoes the Straubian practice in using literary material: Vittorini’s text is a prose novel. The film’s published script presents the text in verse form, representing the filmmakers’ work of objectifying the diction that they first perform alone and then in collaboration with each actor. In a certain way, the filmmakers do not know how to have people recite text as prose: they must first study its movements and rhythm, its structure and how it works. It must then be cut up into shots and verses. Several levels of caesuras are introduced into the flow of the text so that the work of formal solidification can occur. This crystallization is established through a repeated back and forth between seeing and hearing: by considering the text to be for the mouth and ears, the line breaks appear necessary for the rhythm, thinking, and breathing of the person reciting it. The versification is thus tested and then refined through a striking annotation system. For Huillet and Straub—especially in their later works—the work on the sound of the text cannot be considered separate from a visual support, giving it a tangible materiality (allowing it to be objectified in every sense) and, in return, according to a strict equivalency, a (visual) practice of formatting a text must correspond to something in the domain of sound. Herein resides their doctrine of verse, their own or that of others; and it is this framework that they further reduce, disseminating counted caesuras (one, two, three… marks on the page for a pause that the actor counts mentally), stresses, liaisons, and the pronunciation or elision of syllables. Thus, every word in Workers, Peasants was written by Vittorini and, with the exception of the small introductory paragraphs in each chapter, the complete text of the four chapters from Women of Messina is presented as it was written. But prior to being heard by the spectator—or read as the book-object that is the published script—the material undergoes so many levels of reformatting that the form’s relation to the content is completely destroyed. As a work about objective language, the film also creates an objectivation of language that superimposes a very different form of perception on the question of testimony—which remains of crucial concern, as in Reznikoff—deeply modifying the problem of judgment. The film engages spectators in a singular manner by presenting a number of extremely complex disagreements. The first movement relates the conflict that caused the group of workers and the group of peasants to

On Dissolution

297

be in opposition during the particular circumstances of a very difficult winter. The second and third movements report the differences between Spine and Fischio, on the one hand, and Ventura and Toma, separated by Siracusa, on the other. These are all delicate matters, all the more so as the density of the original text is strongly accentuated: readers of the novel know the characters, readers of the script can immediately identify who is speaking—their names precede their lines. In the film, it takes a while before we know who is who—in fact, many names and connections remain mysterious—and Vittorini’s taste for lists, digressions, and interruptions does not help. Furthermore, the stories we hear are obviously all problematic: everyone justifies him or herself and gives their version of the facts—a version presented as objective (condition of its receivability), but contradicting their neighbour’s version. In fact, the versions are rarely contradictory: they are instead the same thing presented in different lights. Spine’s “case” is unique in this regard. This time, his and Fischio’s version of his departure from and return to the village and about the money he planned to keep for himself or give to the others are incompatible. Should we decide what is true? Are we in the position of needing to do so? Spine defends himself from his old friend’s accusations: is he lying? Should we be suspicious of him even when there is insufficient proof? The sequencing of his discourse seems to put us in this position, but the film reverses it. Spine makes the only gesture in the film. The other characters may turn, lower, or raise their heads, pick up or drop their notebook, even exit frame. In shot 45, he takes his hands out of his pockets, throws them in the air and stamps his feet, then brings his hands down in front of him, all while reciting: “And I who had believed / in the story of the Prodigal Son!”—after which we cut to a close-up of the strange speaker. This extraordinary gesture, occurring an hour into the film, is amazingly powerful. Can the man who would make this gesture lie? And he is not speaking to anyone—which shot 64 contradicts—, he is looking down or staring at a high point in a location that does not seem to be connected to any of the others: does one lie when speaking to no one? Spine’s body is very tense, he finds his breath deep within himself, and the forest air and two trees come to his support—one where he places his left hand, one pushing on his right shoulder: can a body like this lie? Maybe. He is confusing and his reasons are not very plausible, but that does not seem to change anything. Our relation to him might be like Karl’s to the stoker—principled and unjustified sympathy, blind, perhaps naïve faith. But after his speech, Spine is also heard by Ventura. Spine is the one who understands that Ventura, clearly mixed with the fascists prior to these events (hence his nickname), has truly changed, that what the others

298 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

doubt is possible. In the story, Ventura intervenes to help Spine—Ventura has also not asked who is telling the truth, he has not judged. Huillet and Straub’s mise-en-scène therefore makes the question of judgment central, while keeping it open and unresolved. The objectivation of the text itself introduces the shift both through the work on the sound of the material and through the disconnection in the dialogue caused by splitting it into multiple locations, the cutting, etc. The entire form of Workers, Peasants is characterized by a principle of openness. First, in terms of narrative, the film has no beginning and no end and seems confined to taking up and then dropping problems that occurred before and will perhaps only be resolved after the action being recounted—this is of course related to taking an extract from a novel that had already begun and continues. The film’s only dramaturgy is the changing of the seasons. With the exception of the second location, the adversaries do not face each other, resulting in the space feeling strangely unfolded, intensifying the effect found in Moses and Aaron. Instead of crossing, their gazes are parallel. The filmic space makes them meet in infinity, including infinity as a pole of attraction, the opening itself. The single camera position also restricts the angle of visible space to a minimum, leaving the rest to the void. The camera is the summit of a sharp angle with an absent exterior. It is exactly the break (hinge) on which the space—organized by the sightlines—is unfolded and the limit beyond which a black hole forms. But the gazes sometimes dive into this vast hole, producing a tension towards it that nothing can satisfy. A large hole is thus maintained within the film and gives it its force. Corresponding to this noticeable breach in the film’s space is the serial structure that is also ruled by openness. This construction is emphasized by the interventions of the worker Carmela Graziadei, who spends more than five long shots with her eyes focused on her notebook obstinately counting and enumerating everyone who left the village during the difficult winter, one by one, then counting and enumerating the ones among them who returned, one by one. She is the one who brings the first movement to a close, but her task only comes to an end at the end of the story. Zukofsky chose two extracts from Reznikoff’s Testimony, then titled “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, for An “Objectivists” Anthology. At that time, the poem already involved endless lists, inventories of names of slaves from the south, names of boats and boat captains, cargo inventories, descriptions of diurnal and nocturnal marine meteorology, etc., six vertiginous pages cataloguing romance adventures or demonstrating the dizziness of addressing the diversity of reality.

On Dissolution

299

Openness and interminability are characteristics of a series. Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach suggests serial organization as a practice for intensifying the film’s contrapuntal aspect—as a way to produce a form by placing a “cinematic principle” in parallel to a “fugal principle”, as Zukofsky expresses it. Too Early / Too Late is also based on endless enumeration, repetition as the secret behind the (false) movement of history. The obsessive inventorying of the destitute in France in 1788 becomes the only way to make the immensity of the misfortune understood and overwhelming. An infinite list is also a way to establish the problem of naming, to conjure up the anxiety for naming which is also absolute confidence (faith) in the name—as Zukofsky writes in “An Objective”, specifically about Reznikoff: The economy of presentation in writing is a reassertion of faith that the combined letters—the words—are absolute symbols for objects, states, acts, interrelations, thoughts about them. If not, why use words—new or old?27

The systems of series or discrete series—framing, gestures, recurring words (and again, “recurrence” is a fundamental word in Zukofsky’s poetics)—are a means of structuring without closing, using a model not so far from the musical fugue. Since this is a film, this unfastening cannot concern space or narrative and découpage structures without also effecting time itself. A particular and noticeable dispositif assures the organization of the first movement. After the introductory pan, a series of static shots first shows the three peasants together, then each one in isolation as they speak. A group shot is followed by close-ups from the same camera position, with very composed framing within what is delimited by the first shot: impossible to imagine a more Straubian dispositif. But when Pompeo Manera stops talking, something strange happens: suddenly the frame zooms out until, thanks to a slight pan to the right, the peasants are shown together again, then a leftward pan shows the three other villagers, the workers, next to this group. Cataldo Chiesa then states, “That’s the point”, and a forward axial cut allows him to explain himself. This form of transition, systematically repeated throughout the first movement, has an obvious logic: Cataldo is not responding to Pompeo person to person; Cataldo is responding for the workers to Pompeo who was speaking in the name of the peasants. The passage must therefore 27 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 14.

300 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

work from group to group. The continuity of the zoom-out relates to the solidarity created by and around speech. The cut on his response translates the severity of the debate—particularly as a zoom-in would clearly have been less elegant and the symmetry excessive. Nevertheless, this practice has implications. In the first place, unlike a simple, straightforward cut, it has duration, more or less long but not negligible. Suspense is created; a caesura between the moment Pompeo stops talking and Cataldo reacts. The interval created by the method has no “verisimilitude”: a pure excess of time, it establishes a momentary pause and creates a stumbling block in the unfolding of the “action”. Just as the horizontal pan in Moses and Aaron changes status because it is too horizontal, this mode of transition also gains a singular character because its technique is visible exactly for what it is. The shot never tries to make the moments I have been describing—1) static shot, 2) zoom-out and rightward pan, 3) brief pause, 4) leftward pan, 5) stop—disappear in a smooth flow: instead, the steps are neatly separated and the roughness of each one gives the whole a jolting quality whose value is both in its rhythm, as well as in the shift it implies. The obviousness of the movement at this moment reveals it is purely a matter of articulation: it clearly appears as a substitute for a cut. And the contrast is obvious: whereas a classic cut would create an ellipsis, removing duration—even if it is only the camera turning off and on—this transition instead adds duration, producing a surplus of time. This is even more striking within the image because of the absolute immobility the actors maintain during the entire miraculous interval (bearers of the miracle)—immobility that they maintain in positions whose unnaturalness is extremely emphasized: Elvira, for example, is standing next to Cataldo, her open notebook against her chest, her eyes staring at an improbably high, mysterious point. It feels like a fairy tale, a feeling of true enchantment. All of these people and this world are under a spell; time is stretched out; dizzying holes have been dug into it. These combined elements undoubtedly make these shots the most literal figurations of stoppage. If interruptions of this kind are possible, then isn’t everything else? “Everything else” covers the utopia described in this film—a literal utopia—a geographic non-location lost in a ravine with no signs specifying it as such—a legal non-location allowing nothing to conclude. The interruption is the emergence of the possible, cutting the form into a carefully made opening impossible to suture. Interval, stoppage, cut, and series join forces to attack. What remains is there and holds together: voices, faces, light, earth, hands, textures, various shadows depending on the time, the

On Dissolution

301

thickness of fabrics, the weight of bodies, the green of leaves and moss, rustling, gazes and tree trunks, curving shoulders, skirts and stones, hair and headscarves, an unending series of disagreements, and a recipe for ricotta cheese said straight in the eye. But this utopia may look funny, constantly jostled and threatened by all kinds of differences, bickering, betrayals, failures, abandonments, departures, and returns that are ultimately catastrophic or nearly so: in any case, nothing of the pacified world the word “utopia” would seem to promise. And yet, Machiavelli points out in his Discourses on Livy that peace and freedom can after all be two unreconcilable goods, writing about the Roman Republic: “I say that to me it appears that those who damn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs blame those things that were the first cause of keeping Rome free, and that they consider the noises and the cries that would arise in such tumults more than the good effects that they engendered.”28 For conflicts to end, there must be a victor and a loser, a dominator and a dominated, but then there is no more freedom. At the limit, being free is only possible in a state of permanent civil war. In Workers, Peasants, there are neither nobles nor bourgeois nor therefore plebs. For this to continue, the rule must be openness. Nothing must be decided, nothing finished. Everything must become constituted as a potentially infinite, interminable series. Maintaining this openness, with its stoppages and intervals, produces a tension whose difficulty and violence must not be underestimated. All of the work of the Objectivists involves using emphasized and exasperated tension as its foundation and stakes, the secret of its formal constructions.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978. Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1999. —, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Bernstein, Charles, “Reznikoff’s Nearness”, The Objectivst Nexus, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloose: University of Alabama Press, 1999, pp. 210-239 28 Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, p. 16.

302 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

Bertaux, Pierre, Hölderlin ou le temps d’un poète. Paris; Gallimard, 1983. Damerau, Burghard, “Le chemin passait par Hölderlin”, Brecht après la chute, ed. Wolfgang Storch. Paris: L’Arche, 1993. Daney, Serge and Narboni, Jean, “Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet”, Cahiers du cinéma, 305 (November 1979), pp. 14-19. Dumont, Jean-Paul (ed.), Les Écoles présocratiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Gaier, Ulrich, Hölderlin: Eine Einführung. Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 1993. Heidegger, Martin, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. Hölderlin, Friedrich, “Remarks on Oedipus”, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J.M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 194-201. Keller, Sarah and Paul, Jason N. (ed.), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, Métaphrasis. Paris; PUF, 1998. Lavazzi, Tom, “Poetic Discourse v Legal Discourse: The Case of Charles Reznikoff”, Sagegetrieb, 13:1-2 (Spring-Fall 1994), pp. 169-213. Machiavelli, Niccolò, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Reznikoff, Charles, “First, there is the Need”, Sparrow, 52. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977. —, Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative, 2 vols. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979. Roubaud, Jacques, “La tentative objectiviste”, Revue de Littérature Générale, 96/2, 1996. Seguin, Louis, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. “Aux distraitement désespérés que nous sommes…”. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2007. Straub, Jean-Marie and Huillet, Danièle, Ouvriers, paysans. Toulouse: Ombres, 2001. Vittorini, Elio, Women of Messina, trans. Frances Frenaye and Frances Keene. New York: New Directions, 1973. Zukofsky, Louis (ed.), An “Objectivists” Anthology. Le Beaussett, Var, France: To Publishers, 1932. —, Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

Conclusion “[…] a wrong—an injustice—done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice—never—where it does not exist—but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to “temper” in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to Wrong:—this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of Right—of justice—of proportion—in a word, of καλός.” ‒ Edgar Allan Poe, Fifty Suggestions, XXII, quoted by Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare1 KARL: I understand nothing of politics. STUDENT: That is a fault. But aside from that you have eyes and ears. ‒ Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared, quoted by Huillet and Straub, Class Relations

Hölderlin, Flaubert, Cézanne, Mallarmé, Kafka, Schoenberg, and Brecht, as well as Benjamin and Adorno, Fritz Lang according to Rivette, or Chaplin according to Zukofsky: the artists encountered here in connection with Huillet and Straub’s work all share a very deep link to the (strange) question of objectivity, even if this is inflected in many different ways. They all expressed and translated in their respective works these kinds of preoccupations through the forms they invented and themes they developed. Similar underground forces are at work from Hölderlin’s “sacred sobriety” to Benjamin’s “expressionless”, including the “limitless objectivity” Rilke saw in Cézanne and Mallarmé’s “impersonality”. Huillet and Straub find their place in this obscurely coherent tradition—a place they constructed by radicalizing their filmmaking and moving even closer to the asymptote of which their predecessors dreamed. And since 1 Zukofsky, Bottom, p. 242.

Turquety, Benoît, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463722209_concl

304 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

their goal was an objectivity that can be qualified as radical, they needed to discover methods that would bring them as close as possible to this unattainable place. They were Objectivists. The Objectivist position remains highly original in its manner of keeping together the terms of what many consider a dilemma, not wanting to choose between options others perceive as irreconcilable. While others were summoned to choose between political engagement and advanced artistic research, between social realism and elitist formalism, between Lenin and Pound, the Objectivists decided that not only were they compatible, but that only the strictest formal requirements could create a true political presence for an artistic work. The notions and techniques that developed from this position are marked even in their organization by a tension always threatening to lead to implosion or failure. The basic expression of this position remains the one proposed by Zukofsky in his essays of 1931-32. The Objectivists—including Huillet and Straub—base their practice on two pillars: sincerity and objectivation. The first is an open breach in the work to the things of the world: “the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody”.2 It is a break kept open to avoid falling into “personal vagueness” and other “abstract generalities”. These words describe Huillet and Straub’s project exactly: rejecting the mirage, attaching themselves to details as they are seen, thinking with things as they exist, and giving everything a movement that is related to music. But for a breach to be valuable as such, it must be a lacuna in something that forms a block: it must shed light on a solid element. Objectivation is the indispensable second moment involved in shaping the work as rigorously as possible. For the Objectivists, the shapeless is morally intolerable. They all use the analogy of the manufactured object: the structure must be perfect, the construction rock solid, and the execution irreproachable. It is the originality of the Objectivists to wager on the complementarity instead of the incompatibility between sincerity and objectivation. The two notions play with other fundamental dualities in these artists’ discipline. Objectivation aims at solidity, sincerity is full of holes; the work is a block, but the more it is a block, the more it needs lacunae (without which it cannot function), and the more it produces them. The Objectivist poets therefore exasperate the principle behind poetry: the constant play with phrases and caesuras, with verses and lines, with characters and blank spaces; and the filmmakers adhere to exceeding the tension between shots as blocks and 2 Zukofsky, Prepositions+, p. 12.

Conclusion

305

cuts as breaks, composing monolithic shots of an unheard of compactness and cutting into them with intervals that are impossible to fill. The hinge becomes a fundamental notion that must be considered a break rather than a connection—hinge and rupture. With this in mind, the self can only “interpose itself” as Cézanne says in Huillet and Straub’s film, it can only generate aberrations and meanderings, nothing concrete, nothing testable—nothing to confront or make the world confront. Letting things be as they are outside of us implies not applying pre-conceived ideologies to them, as well as abstaining from intervening in the work (what Zukofsky calls singularities: manufactured objects and historical events, as well as, for the poet, words), from any form of intention because an intention is ultimately just a predatory manifestation. Likewise, the immense demand for rigour in the development of a poem prevents room from being made for the self-complacency demanded by the ego. The Straubian obsession with not leaving traces, not cutting any tree branch on a shooting location, and not causing any damage is a visible part of the absolute refusal of a predatory relation to things. But like the Objectivist poets, the entire writing of their films is completely thought out so that no such relation is ever established. What Zukofsky helps us to understand is how precautions taken vis-à-vis exterior objects can only have real value if they are also taken against the elements of the work itself in their relation to the whole and by also directing their organization (syntax, arrangement). The editing must not exhibit any predatory intentions towards any of the shots; nor the shots towards the gestures of the actors or the movements of the light; the structure towards its parts; the film towards the adapted work. The Objectivists developed several strategies to reach this ambitious result. One of the first is used exemplarily by Zukofsky in “A”-9 and Huillet and Straub in Moses and Aaron: construction through the superimposition of partially independent structures. In this manner, it is possible to build a work based on a foundational text and produce specific meanings without modifying it, generating it in the interferences between structures. This approach opposes the relation between secondary work and primary work as traditionally thought of with the term interpretation: it is not a matter of presenting a personal gloss of the original text, but presenting the text as neutrally as possible, while including it in a series of structural layers that, without touching it, simultaneously analyse it and even critique it. Neutrality is only accomplished through a constant return to the surface of the text, to its materiality. No depth is assumed: the work takes place on the surface, on the concrete elements of the work to be (re)-objectified.

306 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

In their systematic return to materiality, we can recognize the basis of the analytic posture at the heart of their project: Huillet and Straub’s films appear as both a mise-en-scène—in the most common sense—of the stories they adapt and as an analysis of how these stories work. The analytic approach does not focus on the characters’ inner psychological conflicts and instead emphasizes relations—of class, power, and desire. The narration unfolds like the exposition of a mathematical demonstration, and the cuts take the form of logical operations instead of temporal conjunctions. This is permitted by and in return permits strong stylization that emphasizes form with the intention of shifting towards “objective” perception, but also for aesthetic pleasure. Non-predatory relations also generate a differential principle of action: since the processes are employed without intentions (personal or predatory) and through simple deductive logic based on the fundamental principle of objectivation, many of their effects appear through differences. This is an art that does not desire originality, but perfection. Only in the intervals and gaps, in the deep rupture with what exists does its deep unity produce meaning and beauty. Through the simultaneity Zukofsky found an example of in cinema and which he made a goal of poetry, this work in the vertical dimension generates a strong density of events. The density that for these artists is the foundation of the moment when the material can finally shift into something other than communication, is also speed, because contrary to the clichés about their work, Huillet and Straub’s films have always been very fast. Excessively fast, in fact. But this excess is what allows the work to escape from the subject. Returning to materiality and formal density creates the impression of terrible speed and draws the reader/spectator into perceiving the work as pure rhythm. The use of caesuras, lacunae, etc. is part of this, but caesuras act here more specifically as interruptions, as beats or syncopations. The hole-solid dialectic is reflected and completed in the play between motion and immobility, rapidity and stoppage, without any transition from slowing down to acceleration (in general, Objectivism does not know transitions). An interruption is both the site of a break and the moment of a stop. Developing a work with this principle means elaborating a strange mode of organization whose rule must prevent the predator from emerging. Zukofsky finds this embodied in an idea that may be contradictory and that he owes to cinema, where he believed it was possible: that of a composition whose elements are in “free relation” to each other. What makes cinema admirable for the poet may be that it is not a language: in any case, that it is not ordered in a hierarchy through syntax, but simply arranged through juxtaposition,

Conclusion

307

co-presence, and the play of intervals. The Objectivist poets all express this idea in their own way. For Oppen, the “discrete series”; for Reznikoff, the “recitative”; for Zukofsky, the fugue. Despite incontestable divergences, their desire is always for an absolutely rigorous form that is at once free, open, and potentially endless, assembling its units in firm structures while radically respecting their singularity and incommensurability. This arrangement assumes development through repetition with variations of one or more main subjects, an organization into series, a musical management of recurrences, and a consummated art of gaps. All of these formal principles have a common concern: escape the subject, empty the work of subjectivity, deliver it to objectivity as radically as possible. Sincerity and objectivation imply the work’s objective “testability”: it must be able to stand as an object among the objects of the world. A concern for referentiality can be found at the heart of the project: it presupposes that the formal work must make the work a test of truth, as Oppen put it. The objectivation of language in poetry or through diction in Huillet and Straub’s films and the objectivation of space through mise-en-scène must prove what is said or done, but also oppose these solid things to common vagueness in order to prove how much their inanity makes them suspect to being used by base rhetoric for games of power. It is an Objectivist task to make oneself useless for the masters. Reznikoff’s reflections on objectivity become coherent in relation to his reflections on legal language, the language of the witness or one who must limit oneself to reporting objective facts. This connection between objectivity in language and the judiciary can help in understanding the obsession with testimony in Huillet and Straub’s films, in both its legal and historical dimensions as well as the increasingly present dimension of the trial form. This unites the questioning of language and its effectiveness, problems of truth and power (rhetoric), and the organization of space and politics, all while rigorously remaining on the side of the objective. Escaping the subject is also perceived as a threat for the subject. It ends in the ambition of producing works that are objects, meaning works addressing no one, works that, no longer having an author, cannot admit any reader. Like no one else, the Objectivists took the opening lines of Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” seriously: “In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. […] No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience.”3 Conceiving a work of art as an object and calculating 3 Benjamin, Selected Writings, I, p. 253.

308 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

it based on internal laws rather than in view of its effects on the recipient is considered an act of violence: pushing away the recipient or, worse still, making the recipient disappear. But these works do not think about the recipient and they do so in a space that sees itself as artisanal—a space and time, one before the division of labour, one in which one took the time needed to execute a masterpiece, one in which one weaved while distractedly listening to a storyteller. This is an art that dreams of being the incarnation and continuing possibility of non-alienated labour. Its form wants to be political, to be organized through the systematic refusal of predatory manifestations. But it also wants to result from a form of labour whose traces have been maintained and that it proposes as an example to the rest of the social body. Zukofsky expressed this utopia as it must ultimately be expressed: labour dreamed of as a form of love. Writing must therefore invent and adopt an amorous syntax. Love itself is a relation with the pure singularity of the loved one, a link that is the absence of a link, a pure interval, a relation placing the self outside of exchange and communication and yet, or therefore, infinitely strong. Amorous writing is therefore infinite tension and absolute openness, block and lacuna, movement and stillness, generalized coherence and disjunction, de-hierarchization, and pure rhythm. This is precisely how the utopia at the basis of Huillet and Straub’s film work is articulated. The project of accessing radical objectivity is in effect literally utopic. From the start, it was obviously unattainable: an absolutely objective artwork is impossible, unthinkable. Whatever the size of their means, the virtuosity and rigour of Objectivist artists are condemned to failure. Perhaps this has always been the case. Perhaps, as Adorno affirms, the great (objective) work is more fundamentally inaccessible today in current historical conditions given the state of the subject and the world than at any other time. Perhaps Dante, for example, represents a possible example of achieved objectivity (of genius), or Bach. These days, in any case, the Objectivists—poets or filmmakers (or…)—must renounce even before beginning. In this sense, they are in the position of Benjamin’s translator: his task is probably not exactly unrealizable, but no one can realize it. This is also how Zukofsky renews the classical correlation between love and poetic writing, writing as a labour of love and poetic labour as a form of love. The main idea of Bottom is that Shakespeare’s work continually expresses and realizes a definition of love: [T]hat the learning of the later (specifically English) Renaissance had forgotten: the definition of love as the tragic hero. He is Amor, identified

Conclusion

309

with the passion of the lover falling short of perfection—discernment, fitness, proportion—at those times when his imagination insufficient to itself is an aberration of the eyes; but when reason and love are an identity of sight its clear and distinct knowledge can approach the suff icient realizations of the intellect. 4

An Objectivist melancholy is the counterpoint to a fundamental political pessimism. The artist is “the tragic hero” who, as long as he exists as a subject, is destined to fall “short of perfection”. The systematic and unrestrained use of quotation and the need to always begin with pre-existing works joins a determined constructivism at the heart of this posture. These are ways to refuse personal authority and to always transfer the burden of authority to others. These methods go hand in hand both with a very deep sense of history and of singularities existing as thick accumulations that have a presence and with a quality of seeing that perceives things as resulting from a minimal and immense geological movement. But Zukofsky points towards a way out: “reason and love are an identity of sight”, and if the solution cannot be attained, it can at least be “approach[ed]”. If the artist manages to reconcile love and reason in an identity, then the artist’s sight can be relieved of individual strabismus and generate clear, distinct knowledge—terms linked to vision. Intellectual elaboration can then remain love and thus reach a sufficient proximity to perfection. It is therefore desire in its full depersonalizing power that can lead to perfect objectivity. Objectivism’s utopic aspect shifts from the expression of a political ideal to the question of the possibility of an ideal way of working that directly engages and is incarnated in the artist’s actual methods. Like negative theology, Objectivist art can be considered as pointing towards an unattainable horizon, always outside, a pure utopia (its mystical dimension); or for the methods that it concretely allows to be produced in order to make fertile the contradictions that are obstructions everywhere else (negative theology as a philosophy of language). It can be seen as referring to a future, a time after the revolution, or as using the tensions inherent to the state of what exists, undoubtedly to intensify them rather than to resolve them. Like all forms of art, no doubt, Objectivism is based on a theory of love embodied by a practice and a politics. It is also realized in a fundamental conception and practice of sight. Watching becomes a labour of love, seeing the possibility offered by the desiring dissolution of the self in the objects of 4 Zukofsky, Bottom, p. 15.

310 

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Str aub

the world. It is first necessary to accept getting lost in the tiny and infinite variations that make up existence, losing oneself in the tiniest and most banal details, from the articles “the” and “a” to the infinite variety of shadows on a mossy tree trunk over the course of a day in an Italian forest. Only by losing and renouncing protection of oneself can the delicacy required for the absence of predatory manifestations be achieved—this absence must be the only moral. A theory of love and an artistic method, Objectivism is also a doctrine of attention.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Zukofsky, Louis, Bottom: On Shakespeare. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. —, Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.



About the Author

Benoît Turquety is a professor in the film department at the University of Lausanne and director of the SNF research project on Bolex and amateur cinema, and of the EPIMETE/digital media epistemology research axis. Educated as a f ilm technician at the Louis-Lumière National Cinema Engineering School, he received a Ph.D. from University Paris 8 in 2005. He is a founding member of the Material Archival Studies Network, and part of the Dispositives research group, of the Network for Experimental Media Archaeology, and the Technology and the Humanities project. He is preparing a book on the technology and geography of past and contemporary media circulations.

Index Adorno, Theodor W. 12, 38, 72, 93, 108, 109, 120, 163, 286, 287, 303, 308 Bach, Johann Sebastian 9, 59, 62-64, 133, 137, 147, 169, 174, 190, 224, 228-231, 308 Baudelaire, Charles 11, 182 Bazin, André 9, 22, 34, 36, 268 Benjamin, Walter 12, 22, 23, 39, 65, 84, 99, 120, 122, 123, 129, 137, 138, 145, 155, 157, 165, 182, 190, 191, 193, 197, 201, 204, 210, 215, 218, 221, 223, 231, 275, 276, 303, 307, 308 Biette, Jean-Claude 34, 74, 224, 227 Brakhage, Stan 37 Brecht, Bertolt 135, 151-156, 160, 163, 165, 181, 184, 196, 211, 216, 221, 222, 303 The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar 152, 211, 216 Bresson, Robert 110, 227 Bunting, Basil 12, 43, 48, 49, 53, 58, 59, 170, 190 Cavalcanti, Guido 129, 131-136, 141, 142, 144, 220 “Donna mi priegha” 129, 131, 133 Chaplin, Charles 24, 166 The Gold Rush 168 Clair, René 167, 168, 170 Corman, Cid 56 Corneille, Pierre 18-20, 22, 23, 25, 26 cummings, e.e. 43, 49 Daney, Serge 72, 100, 101, 104, 110, 113, 143, 256, 281 Daniel, Arnaut 28, 128 Dante Alighieri 28, 29, 56, 133, 166, 202, 308 Darras, Jacques 51, 58, 59, 190 Dreyer, Carl 38 Dujardin, Édouard 36 Eisenschitz, Bernard 20, 35, 36 Eisenstein, Sergei 38, 46, 159, 160, 176, 221, 231 Eliot, T.S. 46, 47, 49, 56, 130, 170, 247 Fenollosa, Ernst 157, 158, 160 Flaubert, Gustave 12, 36, 40, 222, 303 Ford, John 25, 32, 195 Fortini, Franco 120, 215 Franju, Georges 26 Géfin, Laszlo 159, 161 Genet, Jean 75, 107, 210 Gielen, Michael 73, 74, 90 Godard, Jean-Luc 34, 41, 106, 216 Montparnasse-Levallois (1965) 34 Griffith, D.W. 31, 32, 38, 173

Hatlen, Burton 181, 187 Hölderlin, Friedrich 23, 120, 123, 145, 152, 153, 174, 210, 221, 222, 276-278, 281-286, 303 Huillet, Danièle. See Straub-Huillet Ideogram, ideogrammic method 157-163, 165, 224, 226-229 Imagism 42, 51, 157 Kafka, Franz 240, 241, 248-250, 255, 256, 266, 267, 270, 271, 275, 276, 289, 303 Kramer, Robert 35, 36 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 108, 109, 120, 123, 281, 286 Lang, Fritz 9-11, 26, 29, 32, 38, 89, 90, 303 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 9, 10 Maimonides, Moses 95, 96 Mallarmé, Stéphane 12, 50, 56, 57, 129, 157, 177-181, 220, 303 Marx, Karl 47, 130, 135-137, 139, 143, 144, 223 Capital 39, 130, 136, 139 Meins, Holger 75, 76 Mizoguchi, Kenji 32 Monroe, Harriet 42-44 Moore, Marianne 49, 219 Musil, Robert 38 Narboni, Jean 32-35, 40, 62, 227, 229, 240, 249, 250, 265, 281 Niedecker, Lorine 12, 41, 48, 49, 130 Noguez, Dominique 36, 37 Novarina, Valère 53, 256 Objectivism 13, 41, 44, 46, 49, 51, 56, 58, 59, 135, 165-167, 171, 175, 210, 228, 245, 270, 282, 286, 304, 305, 307-309 Corpus 48 history of 42-48 Judaism 48, 130, 142, 188, 215 leftist politics 46, 64, 130, 147, 151 Objectivists 12, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 60, 62, 129, 155, 167, 175, 190, 197, 210, 212, 215, 219, 221, 232, 244, 287, 298, 301, 304, 305, 307, 308 perfect rest 54 predatory intent 20, 54, 56-58, 60, 61, 65, 78, 83, 105, 106, 135, 137, 138, 140, 146, 166, 204, 206, 218, 270, 286, 305 The Objectivist Press 45, 46, 49 theory of 50-65 To, Publishers 45 Williams’ definition 49

314 Index Oppen, George 12, 41, 43, 45-49, 52, 65, 118, 175, 180-183, 187-189, 205, 206, 213-215, 219, 232, 245-247, 268-270, 307 Discrete Series 46, 65, 187, 245, 247, 268 Of Being Numerous 206, 269 Primitive 180 “The Mind’s Own Place” 175, 245 “Statement on Poetics” 246, 247 Oppen, Mary 45, 47 Pavese, Cesare 207, 251 Dialogues with Leucò 207, 251 Poe, Edgar Allan 11, 303 Poetry (Journal) 42 “Objectivists” 1931 42, 43, 49, 52, 53 Pound, Ezra 42, 43, 45-49, 53, 58, 60, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 141, 157-161, 167, 217-219, 222, 226, 304 ABC of Reading 53, 158, 159 Guide to Kulchur 158 The Cantos 49, 130, 158, 217-219, 223 The Exile (Journal) 42, 43, 49 Proust, Marcel 26, 47 Rakosi, Carl 12, 41, 43, 46-49 Ray, Nicholas 26, 27, 29 55 Days at Peking (1963) 27 Johnny Guitar (1954) 26 Party Girl (1958) 26 Rebel Without a Cause (1955) 26 Red Army Faction. See Meins, Holger Renoir, Jean 28, 32, 38, 222 Revault d’Allonnes, Olivier 114 Reznikoff, Charles 12, 41, 43, 45-49, 52, 130, 188, 214, 215, 219-221, 232, 287-290, 295, 296, 298, 299, 307 Jerusalem the Golden (1934) 45, 46 Separate Way (1936) 46, 47 Testimony (1934-1978) 41, 46, 47, 287-291, 298 The Manner “Music” (novel) 47 Rilke, Rainer Maria 61, 303 Rivette, Jacques 9, 10, 28, 35, 62, 162, 195, 227-229, 303 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 137, 138 Roubaud, Jacques 41, 42, 50, 51, 128, 129, 133, 137, 155, 202, 287 La Fleur inverse 128, 129 “La tentative objectiviste” (essay) 41, 42, 287 Roud, Richard 46, 47 Schoenberg, Arnold 38, 63, 64, 72, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 112-114, 117, 120, 121, 152, 153, 155-157, 162-165, 190, 220, 221, 282, 285, 303 Scroggins, Mark 47, 62, 130, 132, 213 Shakespeare, William 9, 138, 209, 210, 231, 303, 308

Sitney, P. Adams 84, 85 Snow, Michael 37, 85, 173, 232 La Région centrale (1971) 37 Spinoza, Benedict 130, 131, 135, 137, 141, 142 Ethics 127, 130, 141 Stein, Gertrude 51, 151 Stevenson, Robert Louis 17 Prince Otto, A Romance 17 Stevens, Wallace 42, 45, 49 Straub-Huillet Antigone (1991) 109, 152, 172, 221 A Visit to the Louvre (2003) 208, 216 Cézanne (1989) 61, 190, 200, 207, 208, 210, 221, 222, 303, 305 Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967) 19, 35, 37, 63, 169, 172, 174, 195, 224, 229, 299 Class Relations (1983) 195, 239-241, 249, 251, 256, 265, 268, 271, 275, 276, 283, 284, 303 En rachâchant (1982)  239 Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice (1977) 177, 181, 215 Fortini/Cani (1976) 213 From the Cloud to the Resistance (1978) 131, 164, 251 From Today Until Tomorrow (1996) 215, 275 History Lessons (1972) 131, 135, 152, 155, 169, 181, 184, 185, 187, 190, 191, 193, 196, 208, 216, 217 History Lessons; Driving Shots 182 Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” (1972) 155, 159, 161, 163, 181, 186, 215 Lothringen! (1994) 78, 213 Machorka-Muff (1962) 76, 228 Moses and Aaron (1974) 33, 71-123, 138, 147, 152, 153, 162, 164, 172, 194, 198, 205, 215, 229, 239, 241, 255, 282, 285, 286, 295, 298, 300, 305 Not Reconciled (1964) 32, 34, 76, 152, 159, 169, 176, 190, 217 Othon (1969) 17-29, 71, 72, 75, 76, 89, 163, 169, 181, 182, 195, 216, 260, Sicilia! (1998) 25 The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp (1968) 19, 131, 224, 225, 227-229, 231, 239 The Death of Empedocles (1986) 121, 152, 174, 190, 195, 207, 210, 222, 271, 275-277, 282, 283, 285, 286, 291 Too Early/Too Late (1981-82) 78, 131, 173, 196-199, 213 Workers, Peasants (2000) 10, 172, 185, 287, 291, 293-296, 298, 301 Straub, Jean-Marie. See Straub-Huillet Stroheim, Erich von 38, 284

Index

Subjectivism 36, 37 Subjectivity 11, 40, 72, 88, 121, 144, 145, 158, 159, 206, 209, 272, 295, 307 Tesson, Charles 25 Troubadours 28, 128, 129 trobar leu 128, 152, 155 Vertov, Dziga 38, 160 Vittorini, Elio 10, 291, 296 Vorticism 42, 157 Walsh, Martin 77, 88, 92, 135, 184, 186, 211 Williams, William Carlos 43-45, 48-51, 54-56, 59, 61, 65, 130, 212, 219, 245 Autobiography (1951) 51 Spring and All (1923) 49, 50 The Wedge (1944) 55 Zukofsky, Celia 130, 134 Zukofsky, Louis 9, 12, 18, 24, 29, 41-65, 78, 83, 105, 129-139, 141, 143, 145, 146, 154, 158, 159, 161, 165-176, 180, 189, 190, 195, 197-199, 201-204, 206, 208-210, 212, 213, 217-220, 224, 228, 229, 231, 232, 246, 247, 282, 286, 287, 298, 299, 303-309

315 80 Flowers (1978) 41, 60, 189, 208, 213 “A” (1927-1978) 59-64, 129-143, 146, 166, 195, 212, 213, 223, 224, 228, 246, 305 An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932) 44, 167 A Test of Poetry (1948) 46, 53, 55, 56, 64, 213, 216, 227, 281 Bottom (1963) 9, 138, 142, 166, 209, 210, 303, 308, 309 Prepositions (1968) 24, 52-62, 65, 78, 83, 105, 154, 165-171, 173, 176, 199, 209, 218, 219, 286, 299, 304 “A”-8 189, 286 “A”-9 127-147, 175, 206, 286, 295 “A”-21 136 “An Objective” (essay) 52, 299 “A Statement for Poetry” (essay) 58 “Bottom, a weaver” 209 “Mantis” (poem) 29, 129, 134, 171, 201-206, 286 “Modern Times” (essay, 1936) 24, 165-167, 176 “Poem beginning ‘The’” (1927) 42, 43 “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931” 43, 49, 52 “Sincerity and Objectification” (essay) 43, 53