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The Sound of German: Straub-Huillet’s The Death of Empedocles
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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123 The Sound of German Straub-Huillet’s The Death of Empedocles Three pretentious but relevant quotes: ‘‘Aesthetics are the ethics of the future’’ (Lenin). ‘‘To make a revolution also means to put back into place things that are very ancient but forgotten’’ (Charles Péguy). ‘‘When the Green of the Earth Will Shine Freshly for You’’ (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s subtitle for The Death of Empedocles). For spectators who don’t know what to do with their films, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet offer a rigorous program that’s all work and no play—a grueling process of wrestling with intractable texts, often in languages that one doesn’t understand, without the interest provided by easy-to-read characters or compelling plots. But in fact every one of Straub-Huillet’s fifteen films to date (ten features and five shorts) offers an arena of play as well as work, and opportunities for sensual enjoyment as well as analytical reflection. To find this arena of play and pleasure, one has to go beyond what we usually associate with the enjoyment of culture—beyond parameters that are usually limited by mutually exclusive notions of ‘‘art,’’ ‘‘entertainment,’’ ‘‘education,’’ and ‘‘scholarship,’’ notions that generally make us smile or groan in advance, regardless of what is placed in front of us. Among the intellectuals in Europe who make marginal films (as opposed to the more widely circulated ‘‘art films’’ of Godard, Ruiz, Kluge et al.), Straub and Huillet are in many ways the most respected, but their works are seldom dealt with in this country. Utopian Marxists with a taste and passion for nature, antiquity , direct sound, and obscure, mainly neglected texts, they remain materialist thorns in the sides of those critics and programmers who believe that films are meant to be consumed rather than grappled with. It’s taken two years for The Death of Empedocles, the couple’s latest feature, to cross the Atlantic, and, apart from a single screening in Berkeley six weeks ago, its appearance here at Facets Multimedia represents its U.S. premiere. (That Facets is running it for a whole week also makes this the first ‘‘commercial’’ run StraubHuillet have had in the U.S. since Moses and Aaron opened in New York in 1975.) The handful of American colleagues I know who have seen Empedocles, in Berlin or Paris in 1986, have dismissed it as Straub-Huillet’s least rewarding and/ or most ‘‘punishing’’ feature. I think they’re dead wrong about this, but I have to 124 ESSENTIAL CINEMA admit that the film is likely to be unrewarding or worse if approached with the wrong frame of mind or set of expectations. The conflicts, textures, pleasures, and meanings of all Straub-Huillet films are created in the encounter of one or more preexisting texts (verbal or musical) with concrete places/settings or landscapes. In each film the complex balance of the encounter is distinctly different. The texts have ranged from fiction (by Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Böll, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, and Cesare Pavese) to poetry (by Saint John of the Cross and Stéphane Mallarmé); from plays (by Ferdinand Bruckner and Pierre Corneille) to letters (by Friedrich Engels and Arnold Schoenberg); and from political statements (by Franco Fortini and Mahmoud Hussein) to musical pieces (by Bach and Schoenberg). The locations have included urban and rural landscapes in Egypt, France, Germany, and Italy, as well as shots in New York and Saint Louis to supplement the mainly German footage of Amerika / Class Relations, their 1984 Kafka adaptation. Some Straub-Huillet films use musical texts (notably their 1967 Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach), and some use both musical and verbal texts (their 1972 Introduction to Arnold Schönberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, and their 1975 film of Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aaron). The Death of Empedocles might be described as their first fully musical film with only a verbal text. The highly metrical blank verse of Friedrich Hölderlin (the first of three versions of an unfinished verse tragedy, written in 1798) becomes in effect the libretto for an opera or oratorio that uses the chance contributions of the wind, insects, birds, plants, clouds, and sun as orchestral accompaniment. (There’s also the barking of an offscreen dog and, behind the opening and closing credits, bursts of actual music as well as thunder.) The pleasure to be found in the sound of Hölderlin text...