In 1997 filmmaker Robert Bramkamp made an interview with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, shot on 16mm, regarding their film "Von Heute auf Morgen". Where the image is black as the material was short, new voices will re-enact in 2009, during "of a people who are missing" and translate from german to english. A conversation between a 16mm past and a digital presence. Realized by and with students from HFBK Hamburg: Alex Hatschl, Arne Körner, Astrid Friedl, Joachim Glaser, Katja Briesemeister, Klaas Dierks, Norman Richter, Paul Thalacker, Tim Liebe, Ulrike Paul - and Prof. Bramkamp.  » read more

Peter Friedl is an artist who lives and works in situ. His artistic practice highlights political awareness, permanent displacement, narratology, and the reinvention of genres left over from the history of modernism. He has participated in documenta X (1997) and documenta 12 (2007). Solo exhibitions include the retrospective survey “Work 1964–2006,” Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Miami Art Central, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille (2006–07), and “Working,” Kunsthalle Basel (200. Since the 1980s he has published numerous essays and book projects such as Four or Five Roses (2004) and Working at Copan (2007).  » read more

Pietro Bianchi reflects on the Straubian method and pedagogy starting from his impressions of the film "J'ecoute" by Giulio Bursi. The films by the Straubs are materialist cinema par excellance and in all the later films that were made in Buti, the wood plays a very important role.  » read more

The lecture will focus on the last works by Straub-Huillet in cinema and theatre based on Vittorini and Pavese texts, confronting different materials about the actors and découpages preparation for the movies and exploring the relationships with other traditional forms of representation as such as the "maggio" and, going inside the medium, confronting the last developments in instruments for the moving image productions.  » read more

An analysis of Straub/Huillet’s "Sicilia!" in order to address questions of voice and translation according to a materialist practice informed by Walter Benjamin and a contemporary reading of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation principle in theatre performance.

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Barton Byg is a long-time collaborator of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, author of "Landscapes of Resistance", and founding director of the DEFA film library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The "impossibility of translation" has produced an apparently opposite realization that the translation of a text actually reveals an alienation from its own language that was already there. The gap between what words say and what they mean, between signifier and signified, may be invisible in one's own language, but the inevitable failure of translation brings it to the fore. Straub/Huillet's methods of distancing texts from their performance in film has a similar effect. Particularly in regard to German literary works, the films reveal that these works are not necessarily at home with conventional German diction, nor do they necessarily belong to Germany at all. As Louis Seguin put it, "the film is the exodus of the text."

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How could "Death of Empedokles", a film from 1986 based on the drama by German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, be envisioned in the year 2009? Filmmaker Robert Bramkamp will talk about formats and will question forms of mediation and a possible rediscovery of the unique quality which is present in the "kinematographic material". The digital presence of a new copy made from the first reel of the Hamburger version is a starting point but will not only lead to questions of distribution but also black holes. Black holes from two interviews, Robert Bramkamp made with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in 1986 and 1997 and filmed on 16mm. Where the image is black as the material was short, new voices will re-enact and speak now, 2009, when nobody could imagine to complain about the lack of material. A conversation between a 16mm past and a digital presence.  » read more

"Une Visite au Louvre" (2004) is a companion film to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Cézanne (1989). The opening title of the later work indicates that it was inspired by Dominique Païni, then film programmer at the Louvre, in 1990. Like the earlier film, "Une Visite au Louvre" is also based on Joachim Gasquet’s book, Cézanne, specifically on the chapter entitled “Le Louvre,” which recounts Cézanne’s visit to the Louvre, accompanied by the young Gasquet.  » read more

“Artistic Encounters: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, and Cézanne” is an investigation into Cézanne (1989), the filmmakers’ first filmic encounter with the painter. In the history of modern painting, Cézanne’s legacy is greater than any other artist. Straub-Huillet are best well-known for their transpositions of famous literary and musical texts—what was their interest in Cézanne? And how would they approach him? Sally Shafto is an independent film scholar. Her work is often interdisciplinary in nature and explores film in relation to the other visual arts. She is the author of The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 (Paris Expérimental, 2007) and is a regular contributor to the online film journal Senses of Cinema.  » read more

Too Early/Too Late shows certain aspects of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s work at their most radical. But what does the film show precisely? What exactly do we see, when watching those “panoramas” of the French and Egyptian cities and countryside around 1980? What we hear may give us clues: something about history is at stake here. So the question could be: when we are looking at a landscape, what do we see of its history?

Other artists have worked on this matter. Some of them have also shared with the Straubs other problems and principles: the “Objectivist” poets, a group formed in the USA around 1930, featuring Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams. They wanted a highly innovative poetry that could also be politically radical, a poetry that would engage at the same time vision (they were influenced by Ezra Pound’s Imagism), and history. They proposed solutions that have to do with the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, and with us.

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