jacques rancière & philippe lafosse - politics and aesthetics in the straubs’ films

8/10/2019 Jacques Rancire & Philippe Lafosse - Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs Films

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Jacques Rancire, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation

about Straub-Huillet after a screening ofFrom the Clouds to the

Resistanceand Workers, Peasants

Monday, February 16, 2004, Jean Vigo Cinema, Nice, France

PHILIPPE LAFOSSE: It seemed interesting to us, after having seen twelve films

by Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet and talked about them together, to ask

another viewer, a philosopher and cinephile, to talk to us about these filmmakers.

Jacques Rancire is with us this evening to tackle a subject that weve entitled

Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs Films, knowing that we could then look into

other points.

JACQUES RANCIRE: First, a word apropos the and of Politics and

Aesthetics: this doesnt mean that theres art on the one hand and politics on the

other, or that there would be a formal procedure on the one hand and political

messages on the other. I will define these terms first. Politics is certainly ideas

about the way to organize a community, but its also a real community, a certain

distribution of spaces, bodies, words, capacities... As for aesthetics, it isnt form. I

would say that, there too, it is a visible distribution of time, spaces, bodies, voices...

A film by the Straubs is always a way of placing bodies that recite texts in a space;

bodies, texts and spaces being almost inseparable. A film by the Straubs is always

characters who recite texts: none of them speak in a traditional mannerin order to

express feelings, for exampleor in a reaction to fictional situations. They recite

texts and sometimes in the most radical of ways, like in Workers, Peasants, with a

notebook in front of them. These texts are strong, literary texts, thus never

sketches, never scripts. The people always recite texts that talk about community,

power, people, property, classes, the shared world, and communism. Also, what I,

the spectator, see in a film by the Straubs is a mise en scnethat is always a mise en

communof bodies and texts, texts that concern these bodies themselves. The

Straubs reject everything in the order of mediation, what happens through story,

characters... Traditionally, a political film is a film where you are lead to make

political judgments through stories, situations, characters reactions to events. Now,

there is never anything like that in their films. For them, everything must be

present in the relationship of bodies to these texts that talk about ordinary things.

They also exclude all forms of representation, representation in the sense of a

relationship between something that is there, present, and another thing that is

elsewhere, absent, represented by what is there. That does not mean that theres no

absence, even if it seems to me that there is less and less in their films. When there

is absence, it can be said to be inscribed in the shot itself, in the film itself, and that

it is never situated in a supposed inside-outside relationship: inOthon, to only

take one example, the absence of the citizenry is in the film itself. After all, there is

always a privileging of the direct, the present, which is marked in the treatment of


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time and space, in the treatment of the texts: space and time are always real spaces

and times. To put it differently, they are never presented as fictional constructions

and the characters say their texts over the noises of cars, insects, or variations in the

light, of the air with time... Workers, Peasantsis, from this point of view,

exemplary of their methods: they remove blocks from a text that are theatricalblocks, blocks of dialogue. In this instance, these blocks are lifted from a book by

Elio Vittorini, Women of Messina: these are four chapters of an eighty chapter

novel, a novel made of assemblages and using different types of narration. In the

book, these four blocks are stories that the people tell to someone who was absent

from the community during winter. The entire context disappears in the film so

that only the stories remain. In general, the modifications that the Straubs bring to

the texts are very limited, but we can say that they consist of two kinds. Firstly, and

this is also exemplary in Workers, Peasants, one goes from prose to a type of

versification: with the actors, they transform Vittorinis prose, which is written incontinuity, into verses. Secondly, they always go from an indirect style to a direct

style: for them, there must never be quoted words, they suppress everything that is

in the third person, quoted voices or narratives, they dont tolerate such things.

There are never stories, but only dialogues, meaning uniquely words that are words

performed and always kept in the first person. From which maybe sometimes come

certain problems... like inFrom the Clouds to the Resistance, adapted from Cesare

Pavese. While the first part, consisting of dialogues taken in blocks, is perfectly

satisfying, to my eyes the second part is less so: in only wanting to keep what can be

put in the direct style, they eliminate a whole part of the novel, which is essentiallya flashback. And, in this case, eliminating what cant be treated in a direct style is to

my eyes regrettable because this has the consequence of narrowing the novel and

concentrating on the explicitly political issues, such as the priests speech or the

statements of the reactionaries at the bar, which ends up losing something from

Pavese. But lets say that its their point of view: they dont like narratives,

everything must be direct. With the notable exception, its true, ofNot

Reconciled and Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

LAFOSSE: That is the aesthetic position that, for you, proves a political position

true...RANCIRE: One could say that in general their dispositifcontains a bit of open-

air theater, with characters that may be in togas or in ancient garb in an open space.

And this basically reflects a certain type of political utopia: one might think of the

public festivals of the French Revolution or the Greek theater as it was dreamed of

during the German Romantic period. Its the idea of a peoples theater. The people

are both in the audience and on stage. There is a similarity between theater and

democratic assembly. At the same time, there is this culture-nature relationship,

this myth of the Greek theater as the city-state in the middle of nature, nature being

both its location and its foundation. For the Straubs, there is always thisrelationship reflected between three things: bodies, texts, and what the texts talk


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about. And the texts themselves, what do they talk about? They talk about people,

about nature, and the relationship of one to the other. There again, its particularly

striking in Workers, Peasantswhere, precisely, the community is not in the past:

these are stories and yet one could say that everything is in the present, one could

say that the community remains in the present in the text that talks about it. I thinkthey made this film in opposition to another film with a similar subject: Jean-Louis

ComollisLa Cecilia, a film from 1976 on a utopian community of Italians in Brazil

who dissolve a bit like the community in Vittorinis book dissolves. There are

outside events, new things, the newly founded Republic, and the community falls

apart. Comolli tells the story, we see people leave, we witness their misfortunes,

their contradictions, and we see, finally, how this crumbles. And that is what the

Straubs absolutely refuse. In their films, the community may be done with, but it is

always there and it will always be there. Its like kinds of visible blocks of intensity

that are always present and always in the present. Thats the overall dispositifof thepolitical aesthetic in the Straubs films.

LAFOSSE: We were able to see the films they directed in the 1960s and 1970s as

well as the recent films. Do you consider this dispositifto be found in all of their

films, fromMachorka-Muffto Workers, Peasants?

RANCIRE: There is most certainly an important evolution over time. I would say

that, if an open-air theater is involved, we nevertheless pass from a one kind of

theater to another: lets say from Brecht to Hlderlin or, if you prefer, from a

dialectic dispositifto a lyrical dispositif. This is a change of the dispositifsmeaning

that, I believe, is also a change of Marxism and of Communism between the films ofthe 1960s and their latest films. In the first configuration, what Im calling the

dialectic configuration, at the center there is a relationship of tension and

opposition between words, what the words mean, and those who say them. Im

thinking in particular of OthonandHistory Lessons, films from 1969 and

1972.History Lessonsis based on Brechts textThe Business Affairs of Julius

Cesar, a book that also presents itself in the form of interlocked narratives:

supposedly living a bit after Cesar, the narrator goes to interview a witness, a

witness who is getting rid of a manuscript of the freed slave who took care of Cesars

accounts. Already at that time, and a bit like in Workers, Peasants, the Straubsmade a selection: they take the dialogues, the characters discussion about Cesars

career, etc., so that the film is a straightforward political lesson. Finally, these

distinguished people, seated in a garden, make us understand that the logic of

profit, the permanence of economic interests and class struggle underlies wars,

revolutions, changes of leadership or forms of government. It is a straightforward

lesson given across a series of processes of disassociation, gaps between bodies,

texts and space. These dialogues borrowed from Brecht are recited by figures in

Roman togas, who talk of Julius Cesars business affairs the way we talk about those

of Jean-Marie Messier, except that they are in the garden of a villa in the present,arrived at by car. Moreover, their conversations are cut up by long sequences where


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people drive in the packed streets of Rome. A question: what relationship is there

between traffic jams, the world, car horns, noise and the rest, between this

contemporary urban city and the conversations in togas? It seems to me that there

is an almost automatic distancing effect here. A game of current events is set up, a

distance is created. Its always the same and, at the same time, precisely, thedistance is marked, the strangeness of this business is marked. After all, these car

rides that have a pointless feeling are a way of miming the dialectic exercise. Its a

way of telling us to pay attention to the text, to those who recite it, and that it is

necessary to learn to read reality on the model of the attention that one brings to

the hazards of driving. Its a bit of the same thing in Othon, Corneilles tragedy

recited in its entirety and recited on Mount Palatine, in the ruins of ancient Rome

that overshadow modern Rome. Its based here again on a system of gaps in the

topography and gaps in the diction of the text. At the topographic level, first... This

tragedy about clashes for power after Neros fall, this text, in sum, about Romesdestiny is filmed on Mount Palatine between two Romes that are both absent: one

is only ruins and the other is below. In most of the film, we hear, sometimes we

discover, far below, modern Rome, with its cars and aggressive noise.

LAFOSSE: A modern Rome that has nothing to do with all these stories...

RANCIRE: Also, you could say that the text is situated in a space presented twice

as inadequate. If we consider the diction of the text now... We notice that it is said

by mostly Italian actors and in a monotonous and accelerated manner, as if the

overall meaning was more important than the exactness of the text. Its very

different than what we saw this evening. In Othon, the talk is fast, a part of the textis chewed up, and we understand well that it is a supplementary demonstration that

all these beautiful words are after all great intrigues between them, distanced from

the people, and behind their backs. In these films from the 1970s, the dispositifthat

Im calling dialectic makes it so that the texts are directed by their differencesthe

collision of words and things, the collision of the past and present... the collision of

the working class and the nobility. And this collision is supposed to have a

revelatory function; it is supposed to show the contradictions inherent to social

reality. We therefore have a theater for a spectator Brecht dreamed of: the actor in

social conflict is supplied the means to read reality, given the knowledge of what thewords mean and so on. It is political cinema that operates the basis of

demystification, of unmasking... of disrespect, and that allows a certain state of the

world to be understood, meaning the state of the class struggle. The second

dispositif, that we find later, for example in Workers, Peasants, is in my opinion

completely different, even if there are still rather immobile bodies in a large, natural

space. In Othon, Corneilles text was sort of made into prose. Now, what is striking

in Workers, Peasantsis that there is, instead, a sort of versification of Vittorinis

text, like a desire to magnify each word, almost every syllable, and this is notably

thanks to a kind of over-articulation. I would also say that their recent filmssubstitute the dialectical dispositifof the past, made of disagreements and


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disassociation, with a lyrical dispositifof agreement between text, body, and place.

In regards to the story, for example, it is now no longer about revealing the more or

less seedy reality of the business affairs of the elite, but it is now about

demonstrating in a directly visible manner the way in which people deal with their

own business affairs. At its core, it is about directly demonstrating the power of acommunism that is not a goal to obtain by arming oneself for a future battle, which

is also not a past, nostalgic episode, but that is already and still here, and that, in a

sense, is here forever. Therefore, there is a dispositifof agreement between what is

said and the words that express it: we are no longer in the dissociation between

words and the visible but rather in the relationship between equality itself in the

visiblethat is there, this stays, this continuesand speech, both dramatic and

lyric. By dramatic speech, I mean words exchanged by characters in conversation.

The construction of Workers, Peasantsis remarkable from this point of view.

Groups oppose one another: workers and peasants, leaders and masses, men andwomen... Each speaks in turn, lays out his or her problem. Each is in his own shot

it is very rare in the Straubs films that partners in an exchange are in the same

shot; when they are, its generally from behind. Each one reads his text or looks at it

or looks in front of him in an undetermined direction. None of the characters look

at those that they are talking to. Its like a kind of absolutizing of words, its as if

everything was in the words. And these discussions between workers and peasants,

between leaders and masses, between men and women, between the faithful and

deserters, etc. are not heartrending dramas like in Comolli, for whom these

conflicts are dissociated elements; in the Straubs films, these are, to the contrary,elements of consistency. This communist people exists. It exists in its own division

and, at its core, by its capacity to affirm the division.

LAFOSSE: Ah, dialectics

RANCIRE: Yes, we find there their dialectical side. For there to be a community,

it must be divided. One exists by two. And it is dramatic speech that speaks of this

division, but not in the style of a story because they dont recount: they declare.

Thus to declare is the occasion to demonstrate capacity for communism, to begin by

an ability to speak. And, on this subject, what is remarkable is that the working

class characters are played by non-professional actors who do not speak a workingclass language: they speak a kind of poetic language, its practically Virgil. In such a

way that there is something like a game, something like a jumbling of hierarchies.

The more humble the characters are, the more grandiose their language and tone.

Think of the widow Biliotti, a country character played by Angela Nugara, who

plays the mother inSicilia!: she incarnates the nobility of the poor, a nobility of

speech, an ability to elevate herself and to speak by bringing the greatest attention

to language itself. There is nothing of a working class language; it consists, on the

contrary, of a magnification. We can think of Carmela too, the one who does the

accounts in Workers, Peasantsand who says who leaves, who returns: everything isperformed in her mouth; we constantly see her try to be at the height of the


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situation by her speech. We have before us the affirmation of a capacity for elevated

language. And, as this speech is deployed, I would say that we pass from the

dramatic contentin the sense of the exchange of arguments and disputesto a

common lyric power of words that affirm the community as it is. This culminates in

the Ricotta episode and the episode of the departure to go looking for laurel, whichare such great utopias staged through speech. Lets take the Ricottaepisode... She

tells how it is made, how they come together around her, how it is shared, and we

see that all the power of the community is put in three things: first, the savoir-faire,

in the sense that, for the Straubs, there is a peasant savoir-fairethat is opposed to a

vision of socialist engineers or technicians; secondly, the grandness of the ceremony

of sharing to which this savoir-faireleads; thirdly, language itself. This is

interesting because an elevated culturewhich is the culture of speech or based on

speechis often opposed to a working class culturewhich is based on gesture and

artisanal, manual savoir-faire. Now, here, this opposition is refuted absolutely: thesame power is in the Ricotta and in the speech that talks about this Ricotta. There

are no working class arts and, opposite them, bourgeois arts or arts cultivated by

speech, but a shared intensity to words and what words says. At this moment,

communism becomes an intensity, a degree of intensity of perceptible experiences.

There is equivalency between Ricotta, sharing, and eloquent speech. Its almost the

same thing inSicilia!, when the mother evokes the past. She is seen preparing her

small dinner, there are long shots of the fish cooking, then she gets up and starts to

talk of the lovers she has had, evokes the grandfather who was socialist but who

nonetheless led the St. Josephs Day parade, and all of this is like a kind of workingclass grandeur that is found at all levels: in savoir-faire, in language, in storytelling,

in tradition. But lets go back toWorkers, Peasants: there, Ricotta is like a

communist Eucharist... like a consecration of the community. And I believe that

that is an illustration of the reversal of the Straubs initialdispositif: the dialectical

theater of the past becomes the theater where the dialectic is judged for its

pretension to judge. Lets look atUmiliati, which is in a way the sequel to Workers,

Peasants, and lets examine itsdispositif. These are also short extracts from the end

of Vittorinis bookif it is only from thereits the end of the community, the

moment when it explodes, through contact with the outside. A more or lessenigmatic character who serves as prosecutor explains to the people that the world

is a world of properties and that, consequently, they do not have the right to settle

like this on a small bit of earth in order to make a community. There are also three

characters, who are hunters in Vittorinis book and partisans in the Straubs film.

And the prosecutor and the partisans explain to the others that they are rather

backward: together, they form the tribunal of history. The partisans are comfortably

set up in the shade, in the ravine, while the members of the community are up high,

under the sun, filmed like prisoners about to be executed. They teach them the

lesson, they explain to them the laws of the economy like Brecht explained themin The Business Affairs of Julius Cesar. Except here the mise en scneitself refutes


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these economic laws. Visually, for example, it is apparent that this discourse and

these lessons bore the peasants, the worker peasants of this commune. You can see

how much the mise en scnerefutes them, in the smallest gestures, such as that of

the old peasant who lends a hand when another is speaking in order to finish off by

simply saying, Here, its another affair. What other affair? We dont really know,but a distance and a refutation are created, a refutation of the triumphant discourse

of the laws of history and progress. Likewise, when the one who Im calling the

prosecutor explains these rules to them, it is a speech worse than a legal speech,

and he delivers it with a wild look and a ventriloquist's manner of talking, which

makes what should be a brief statement become a funeral dirge, so that the

dialectician clearly refutes himself. And then theres obviously the last shot:

Siracusa, the leaders companion, is prostrated on the doorstep of the house, her

head in her hands, its over but, when the camera lowers, her hand becomes a tight

fist. That is a final gesture, a final image that comes to refute the tribunal of history.LAFOSSE: Space plays a very important role in the system the Straubs set up...

RANCIRE: We can talk a bit about that if you want. What is striking in Workers,

Peasants, as in their latest films, is that the place of the characters is more and

more nature itself. First, nature is the subject of the discussionhence the

argument in Workers, Peasants: on one side, there are workers and what one could

call the soviet ideology that wants to put nature to use, to make roads, to transform

it and so on, and to order total mobilization, and, on the other side, one finds

peasants, those who agree on the time of germination, of waiting, of the harvest, of

rest, of respect for the earth. That is the first aspect. Next, there is nature, which isbefore speech, and which eventually gives up its place and its power to speech. Its

what is there, what is always there without reason, before all reason, and what does

not stop acting, reproducing itself and altering itself at the same time. From which

comes the importance of the continual agitation while the men and women are

talking: nature doesnt stop moving. These are insect noises, bird songs, the effects

of light on the plants, the trees, on the moss-covered rocks and the dead leaves...

The activity of this undomesticated nature is constant. Youll note that were talking

about a peasant community but that at no time do we see it in the shot, for

example: this is clearly voluntary. The partner is the wild nature, the ravine,undomesticated nature; and, after all, communism, for the Straubs, in this last part

of their work, must necessarily be linked to a nature without rhyme or reason.

There is also a dispositif that pronounces a rupture with the idea of nature that

accompanied Marxism for a long time: nature as transformable material that man

must model in his image and the idea of history as the humanization of nature. One

could say that, now, the Straubs politics and mise en scnestands up for a certain

inhumanity of nature. Nature is like a continual power and rumble that limits

humans.

LAFOSSE: In your opinion, this change, this reversal can be situated at a precisepoint in their work?


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RANCIRE: I would say that the film that is the turning point isFrom the Clouds

to the Resistance, a film from 1978 adapted from Pavese, that Ive already talked

about and that has two parts: first, six of theDialogues with Leuc, then very

selective extracts from The Moon and the Bonfires. I believe that this meeting of the

Straubs with theseDialoguesis very important. Pavese wroteDialogues withLeucearly in the post-war period, at the time when he rejoined the Communist

Party and when he was writing a novel to announce this conversation, The

Comrade. But, while rejoining the Communist Party, Pavese took a considerable

theoretical distance not only vis-a-viscontemporary political and social events, but

also from the technical tradition of Marxism. Thus, what he wanted to do

withDialogues with Leucwas to root what had been fascism, war, resistance, and

communism in a much older drama of the relationship between culture and nature.

This is why he went and looked at ancient mythology and, basically, what he

recreated is a drama about the origins of tragedy: we can think of the originalproceedings of Greek tragedy with the quarrel between the old and new gods, the

establishment of justice, the passage from a maternal timeof the time of mother

earth, the titans, the monstersto the order of the Olympian gods. In 1978, the

Straubs directed these sixDialogues with Leucon the theme of the creation of a

universe of justice and, consequently, on the time of the differentiation of gods and

men, on the end of the religion of the earth. But, while they directed these

dialogues, I believe that they placed themselves in a drama that marks their

political aesthetic more and more. At this moment, the relationship of bodies to

space becomes more and more this relationship to an inhuman nature, an inhumannature that is the basis of another idea of culture. We move to a peasant or

ecological communism, opposed to the communism of Soviet engineers. After all,

this nature has no pastoral qualities. It is an ancient nature: a play of forces, a play

of conflicting elements. One thus finds in their work what one could call an ancient

philosophy of the elements of naturewater, earth, fire, airand their conflict. To

put it differently, with this film in 1978, there is a division between the heavy

elementswater, earth, elements of heaviness, duration, secretiveness, waiting

and the light, volatile elementsbrightness, light, elevation, air and fire. In a

sense, Workers, Peasantsis a discussion between men of fire and men of the earth,and everything plays on this war that also takes places in this setting. All the

elements intervene all the time. You can think of the roles that water and air,

insects, and wind play, the role that fire (meaning the sun) plays. The film is a war

of elements that arrives at a reconciliation: the story of the Ricotta, the story of the

fire, how to make the fire... The reconciliation of the elements is conceived as an

apotheosis of the community, knowing that, at the same time, nature is also what is

there before all arguments, as what is nameless. Thats why I say that for me, at a

point, there is in their films a reversal of the dispositifbetween two communisms

and two mise en scnes. In the first period, what was important in their work wasthe power of words over imagesthink ofMoses and Aron, with Moses as the man


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of words and Aron the man of images, and the Straubs who, in this conflict, are on

Moses sideand, this period is followed by a lyrical model where the power of what

precedes words affirms itself over words, when something unnameable appears

that gives words their meaning, all while imposing on them a form of respect. I have

voluntarily opposed these two models in a rather blunt manner here, but I thinkthat this opposition exists.

LAFOSSE: What youre saying, and what youve shown with these examples is that

at a certain moment, there is an ideological reversal for the Straubs: they move

from a workers communism to a peasants communism, they move away from a

Marxist dialect la Brecht, to get closer to a defense of the earth communism.

RANCIRE: Thats the general context, but when I say that there is a dialectical

model and a lyrical model, or a model of dissociation versus a model of agreement...

at the same time, of course, the mise en scneonly exists in so far as it works these

two logics. And, there again, one could say that films like Workers,Peasantsand Umiliatiare a way of putting these two logics in the same space. In

both, there is this play between a dramatic, dialectical dispositifof exchanges and a

lyrical dispositifof affirmations...

LAFOSSE: And of movements of nature, as if everything was also in agreement:

the respiration of the men, the vegetation and things.

AUDIENCE: Youve talked about singing, but never of operatic singing, while

sometimes there are poses that could make you think that the Straubs think of

themselves like that. Is the presence of singing a new element in the Straubs films

or has it always been there?RANCIRE: If we talk about the direction of the music, in the literal sense of the

word, it is certain that music has always been present in the Straubs film. Proof of

this is that the first film of theirs that was seeneven if it isnt the first that they

madewas Chronicle of Anne Magdalena Bach, in 1967. Then, in 1974, there

wasMoses and Aronand, in 1996,From Today to Tomorrow. Thus, there is a very

strong relationship with music. But, to respond to your question, we also note a

stronger and stronger relationship to a form of total spectacle. I talked in regards to

them about the Greek tragedy as it was thought about during the Romantic era, and

we know that at first, opera wanted to be a recreation of Greek tragedy. This idea ofa total spectacle is there, a complete spectacle that is a hymn. In regards to their

films, you could therefore talk about operatic qualities. To this is added a

displacement of the status of speech itself, an obvious displacement when you

see Othonwith its delivery and way of talking that make it so the close

relationship between language and speaker does not exist at alland Workers,

Peasantswhere Vittorinis sentences are treated like tragic verse, indeed as an

operatic element. In this sense, there has also been an evolution and you could say a

new element.

AUDIENCE: In Workers, Peasantsor films like that, the actors sing the text...


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RANCIRE: I wouldnt say that they sing the text. They dont sing it literally, but

lets say that they utter it in the fashion of poetry which implies the idea of singing:

in the vein of lyrical poetry. The reference to a language that would not separate

prosaic speech from song is very present. In that film, one finds the utopia of the

Romantic period when speech and song formed a primary entity.LAFOSSE: Over the course of these days weve thought about the coexistence in

the Straubs films of materialism and spirituality. Could we address this question?

RANCIRE: Its a bit complicated and rather dangerous. Basically, in their work

there is a kind of radical materialism in the mise en scnethat wants to eliminate

every representational element and that wants everything to be shown, direct,

present. And there is equally an idea of communism as an entirely material matter:

in the place of relationships of production and productive forces, there is the

Ricotta, snow, ice, stars... So there is this aspect that can be qualified as

materialistic. But, at the same time, this materialism recalls the dream of theRomantic era (and thats due to their proximity with Hlderlin and German

Romanticism), meaning to the idea of a world where there would no longer be on

one side the intelligible world, thought, and law and, on the other, the visible world,

but a world where a common law would be incorporated in the visible world itself

and where there would no longer be any opposition. This is what gives the Ricotta a

Eucharistic quality, a desire to transform everythinggesture, human speechinto

a sacrament. In a way it means uprooting sacraments to the heaven in order to now

consecrate human bread and blood in place of the bread and blood transformed by

the son of God. It is in this way that a materialism that is not against idealism,against spiritualism, is found in the Straubs films. There is also asecond aspect

that responds to this question but that, for me, is less interesting. Its an aspect

thats a bit provocative and fashionable: you constantly are meeting people who

explain that Marxism is religion, that Brecht was Catholic and Claudel a

materialist... For me its a game, a rather simple reversal and, if it occurs to the

Straubs to sometimes concede this, it remains secondary. What is essential in my

eyes is really the refutation of the opposition itself that we talked about, its the fact

that the spiritual is found entirely in the gestures, in the consecration of gestures.

Its the fact that thought is entirely found in the materiality, not in the Soviet vein oftransforming of the world by thought, but by a realization of thought as in accord

with the rhythm of nature.

AUDIENCE: Aside from the question of the opposition between materiality and

spirituality, what I found interesting in their work is that there is maybe a mystical

approach which leads them to do radical things, including in the vein of

representation and form.

RANCIRE: There are different ways to overcome an opposition. One can

overcome it by the classical model of thought that realizes, that transforms the

world in its image, or by an inverse model of thinking that puts itself in agreementwith nature. I dont know if you can call that mystical. What is certain is that it is a


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matter of going back to a religion of the earth that existed under diverse forms

during the Romantic era. The Straubs Marxism has more and more of a tendency

to move towards Heidegger and to distance itself from the Brechtianism of thirty or

forty years ago.

AUDIENCE: I remember in a film a scene of a supposed fusion of the hero withnature, with the stars. But the way in which the Straubs talk about the stars has

nothing to do with the way in which Goethe, Novalis or Hlderlin do. For Goethe,

Novalis, and Hlderlin it is always upward, while there, to the contrary, its

downward: the hero sees the stars almost below, its absolutely amazing...and there

is nothing inseparable about it. The relationship with nature is not inseparable at

all. Also, I agree with you when youre talking about another relationship to

naturefire, not electricity, but not when you talk about fusion with nature. Its

also for this that the relationship with German Romanticism, it seems to me, needs

to be used with a bit of precaution.RANCIRE: It isnt me whos making this relationship, its them. Its maybe not

your Hlderlin, but its theirs. As for the fusion, I would say that it is without a

doubt more at the level of the relationship between nature and culture than at the

level of an inseparable relationship of men with nature. The fusion with the stars is

one thing. But what is at the heart of German Romanticism is the idea of a visible

world that would no longer be opposed to an intelligible world. And it is this idea

that the Straubs take up, the reference to Hlderlin being massive.

AUDIENCE: But Hlderlin isnt a Romantic!

RANCIRE: You can say of anyone that he isnt a Romantic.LAFOSSE: A question of fusion, and even if HlderlinsEmpedoclesis unfinished,

his goal is nonetheless to melt himself in the volcano, and totally. At its heart, it is

also a question of that kind of fusion.

RANCIRE: Yes, of course.

AUDIENCE: Dont you think that the connection youre making between the

Straubs and Heidegger distances them from any idea of progress?

RANCIRE: From progress surely, but they are deliberately anti-progressive!

They want to be in this anti-progressive revolutionary tradition, in the way

Benjamin criticized progress. They are developing an idea of progress completely atodds with an idea that would inscribe it in the continuity of the development of the

sciences and social relationships. There is a back to the earth quality, in their

work. This is seen in the layout itself, in the distribution of characters between high

and low, between light, brightness, and appearance, and withdrawal, the earth...

And this is a dramaturgy very close to Heidegger, a dramaturgy that corresponds to

a certain form of contemporary thought that draws from Hlderlin a model of

revolution and communism separate from progress. You may find this paradoxical

but they take up this paradox with the same willfulness that Benjamin had in

breaking the course of history and advocating a return to the past. Like Pavesegoing back to myths to re-interrogate and question the relationship between nature


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and culture in order to re-situate and re-think communism, the Straubs are

radically isolated from the tradition that links communism to Enlightenment

thought, progress, and scientific development. They demand it.

AUDIENCE: When one talks about progress or development, it is important to

know what one puts into those words. What is progress and development in theWestern world? Today, these are things that are questioned, outside of all dogma,

and including by those who want to be considered progressives. It seems important

to me to add nuance to it and say that the notions of progress and development do

not come down to certain harmful models that wanted to be imposed as universal

standards. The progress of knowledge is not necessarily the progress of techniques,

the ravaging of the quantitative and the increasing of production!

RANCIRE: In the strongest sense, progress is the idea that all developments

work in unison. If we leave behind the rather ordinary usage of the term

progressive, meaning someone who is rather to the left, on the side of the peopleand for justice, if we try to give a more precise meaning to the word, progress

means an idea of history as going straight forward and with all developments

contributing to one effect. It is this type of progress that is at the center of Marxism.

AUDIENCE: Maybe, but that doesnt sum up progress, progress doesnt reduce to

that!

RANCIRE: No, but it is always necessary at a given moment to make summaries.

One makes choices and, when one makes choices, one makes summaries. Its what

the Straubs do in this case.

LAFOSSE: Youve talked about story, about narrative. You say that plot neverreally interests the Straubs. On the choices precisely, there is something striking in

their work: the position of the bodies in relationship to the narrative. The narrative

advances through the bodies but at the same time there is a force that could be

qualified as a refusal. In their films, dont the bodies also go against the narrative?

RANCIRE: Bodies put everything that is narrative in the present. Said

differently, they appropriate the text. In Vittorini for example, there are people

who, in contrasting manners, tell what happened to them over a period of six

months. But in Workers, Peasants, thats not what it is: there are groups who

confront their past and this past is absolutely present. So, basically, the bodies arethere, upright with their text, with the reasoning of their arguments, and, as they

speak, everything that was narrative, becomes direct speech, dialogue, affirmation.

This doesnt mean that they make the past into ablank slate, but the film is always

in the present tense. Also, bodies take possession of the text, putting it entirely in

the present tense. If we dont forget that, fundamentally, narrative doesnt interest

them, that they dont want that, and that, everywhere that it is, they eliminate itas

inFrom the Clouds to the Resistancewith the examples of the flashbacks that I was

talking about, a flashback necessarily being narrative, well, you realize that

speech has to unceasingly re-conquer its power over everything that puts it in thepast tense, that makes it not current, outside of reality. Of the narrative. And, as you


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said, bodies that take possession of the text through speech are therefore also going

against the narrative.

AUDIENCE: Can one not think that everything must be in a film and that a film

doesnt have to need ulterior explanations?

RANCIRE: Its a choice. What is a film? A filmis something that one sees likethis, that one sees once and, often, its over for a long time. A film is an extremely

volatile object that does not necessarily need to constantly be explained or

commented on, but extended. In any case, films continue to live within us, even

without commentary: we make our own commentaries on them. In eight or ten

days, this film that you have seen this evening will become another thing. Shots,

words will leave; a new film will be constructed. You cant ignore this extension.

Memories of films are not uniquely memories of what has been before our eyes at a

given moment. Memories of films are memories of everything that, afterward, gets

buried. The cinema is made of this sedimentation. Also, if I dont think that filmshave to be explained, I believe that one can try to extend them outside of all

commentary, interpretive aims. Cinema needs to have created for it a space for

speech that is a space of sedimentation: thats the role of talking about films.

Personally, when I see a film, I want to read the things behind it. Not to explain it to

myself, but so that it resonates differently, so that other connections are created, so

that the film is made to live in a larger space.

LAFOSSE: This extension through words is something very present in the

cinephilic tradition starting at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

If we look into everything that made up the New Wave, we see that for thosefilmmakers it was indispensable that there was, after the film, an extension via

words that could be even more important than the film. It was the period of film

clubs, of repeated viewings of films. To associate vision with talking is something

that is linked to cinephilia, which was part of the resistance, a counter-cultural

network, and a parallel society, places where one thinks and debates as well. And

that was a discourse that was not really on the level of explanation but in the order

of exchange and of another life for the film. Films dont die after the words The

End,for them, at least, Im sure of it. Outside of their body, they can still unfold.

AUDIENCE: I think that this is part of this genre of films. The Straubs films aremade to be thought about and to incite people to think. You think and afterwards

you talk, it cant stop there. Its made for thinking.

LAFOSSE: To think, to feel... The fullness of the idea in the colors: its what

Cezanne says of Vronse.

AUDIENCE: Im discovering the Straubs here. And Ive asked myself about the

place of children in these films because the only one that I saw was this evening

inFrom the Clouds to the Resistanceand I have the impression that they were

embarrassed to film him, a bit like Godard. Could you talk to us about their

experience with children? Are there many of them in their films?


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RANCIRE: There arent a lot, and it seems to me that there is no problematic of

childhood. There are two children inFrom the Clouds to the Resistancebecause

they are in Paveses book and his novel is also a story of transition, transmission

and passage from an old order to a new order. In The Moon and the Bonfires, there

is the story of the deformed boy, and that of the father and son, where arelationship between an old world and a new world is expressed, and where the

child brings a negative judgment on humanity, and inEn rachchant, a film from

1982, a child resists his teacher... Does this mean that there is a child figure in the

Straubs films, indeed a figure of resistance? Never forget that they work from texts

that are addressed to an adult community to ask it where it is with itself, with its

past, with its future and, if there arent children in these texts, there arent any in

the films. It happens that the child serves certain questions but it is rare that he is

really put in the foreground and treated as a character. For the Straubs, the child is

not the future of the world.LAFOSSE: Would you say that this cinema treats a sort of lost innocence?

RANCIRE: Can one speak of innocence? Maybe. There again, from the turning

point that isFrom the Clouds to the Resistance, we notice a nostalgia for a certain

innocence, not in the sense of lost purity but of a world before good and evil. It is

present in Pavese and even Hlderlin: there is a confrontation with a world in

which the gods no longer exist; there is a relationship between man and nature

before the division of good and evil. This could be called innocence in the sense that

Nietzsche talks of the innocence of becoming, of a world that is beyond good and

evil. However, Ill say it again: the Straubs nature is absolutely nota pastoralnature, it is savage, worrisome, cruel and inhuman. It is not idyllic.

LAFOSSE: Weve sometimes asked here how weve come to the Straubs films...

Can you, Jacques Rancire, tell us how you came to their films?

RANCIRE: A bit in a zigzag. I first saw Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bachwhen

I was young. I was happy to see it but I cant say that it marked something specific

in my life. After thatit was the period of an extreme left, the people at Cahiers

du cinmarecommended I go seeHistory Lessons. Ive always had a bit of an

imposed relationship with the Straubs: go see it and come talk to us about the

Straubs, theyd say to me. So I sawHistory Lessonsfor the Cahiersand Iremember that it rather depressed me. Its true that next I immediately loved the

magnificent way that they treatedDialogues with LeucinFrom the Clouds to the

Resistance: its fabulous. Even if I continue to hold it against them for, inThe Moon

and the Bonfires, completely avoiding the three girls who are the body of Paveses

novel and having instead made a sort of easy bit of anti-clericalism by giving a

spectacular visualization of a priests speech that is only mentioned in the book. At

other times, I saw a film that I liked, then films that I didnt like at first but that I

liked afterwards. Lets say that I saw in a rather chaotic manner certain films at very

different moments, without at all feeling myself to be an aficionado of the Straubs.And then, two or three years ago, some young, fanatical Straubians told me they


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wanted to unite their two passions by hearing me talk about the Straubs. To do this,

they sent me to see Workers, Peasantsso that I would talk about it at a philosophy

convention in Nantes. I went to see it, saying to myself that it wouldnt necessarily

be very amusing, but I was seized by its lyrical power. I talked about it, this pleased

the Straubs. And there you have it. Afterwards, I was asked to writeabout Umiliatiand Pedro CostasWhere Lies Your Hidden Smile?. So you could say

that I found myself as an accidentally inundated specialist of the Straubs. There are

things that I love tremendously in their work, there are other things that I like less,

and, finally, there are films that I dont like at all. In any case, I didnt have an

epiphany with their films, I had a relationship spread out over time with

considerable variations in approach and feeling.And Im trying to talk about all

this.

AUDIENCE: Did you have an epiphany with Jean-Luc Godard?

RANCIRE: Thats entirely different. Straub doesnt belong to the New Wave.AUDIENCE: They claim they do! They confirm that they belong to the New Wave,

through certain links, like those with Godard.

RANCIRE: Jean-Marie Straub can say that he belongs to the New Wave, but he

doesnt belong to it since he did not belong to this historic configuration, eventually

based on a misunderstanding. The New Wave was a generational movement, a

movement of young people, a societal phenomena and a school, a cinematographic

movement, and a kind of singular conjunction, a coincidence between a moment of

change in society and a young cinema. Godards films from the 1960s were seen by

people who were 20 or 30 as the films of their time, witnessing changes of theirtime. For the Straubs films, its completely different. If they feel a relationship to

the New Wave, it cant be with that New Wave. There has always been an untimely

side to their approach, while at a certain time, before there was a rift, Godard was in

step with his time. Truffaut stayed on track. What I want to say is that I didnt have

any revelation with Godard because there was, throughout the 1960s, this

relationship of assimilation and identification that didnt need a revelation. In a

certain way, one set out to admire Godard the filmmaker once one was liberated

from the nebula of the New Wave, which was a mixture of similar things. Even if

Straub belonged to this generation, even if he had links with it, he has always been abit to the side, he has always been the dodger, the dissident, eternally exiled and

eternally out-of-step. Godard became so, but he was not always like that.

LAFOSSE: You have to remember that the New Wave as it is usually meant

without neglecting the angry young people of the British Free Cinema here, the

Cinema Novo over there, or a John Cassavetes elsewhereis above all a French

movementJean-Marie Straub was exiled in Germany, that lasted only a few

years: in 1963, it can be considered over. Afterwards, each one did something else:

Truffaut and Godard, but also Chabrol, Rohmer... In the middle of the 1960s, there

was no more movement. If we consider that the New Wave as a real and relativelycoherent movement begins in 1958-1959, it lasted five or six years, with, it is true,


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numerous and very different filmmakers: in December 1962, an issue of Cahiers du

cinmapolled 160 directors officially recognized as part of the New Wave and, in

the photo taken in May 1959 at the La Napoule Colloquium, one finds Franois

Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rozier, Claude Chabrol as well as Robert

Hossein and Edouard Molinaro. It didnt last more than four or five years.As earlyas December 1960, Franois Truffaut had a falling out with Roger Vadim whose

non-fraternal attitude he denounced and, in 1962, Godard wrote to Truffaut that its

terrible because he and Chabrol, who he went to see on set, have nothing to say to

each other anymore. From that time onward, each of them dug their own hole, as

Jean Douchet wrote. He considersParis vu par..., a film released in 1965, to be the

last testament of the New Wave. You might say that it is a launching pad for some

of them. Afterwards, there are those who soared, those who collapsed or fell

immediately, those who went to the right, to the left, and those who did loop-the-

loops... Jean Douchet takes up a comparison that Franois Truffaut took from aRoberto Rossellini film: monks in a circle spinning around until, dizzy, they fall to

the ground, then they pull themselves up, and each one leaves in the direction that

his fall pointed him.

AUDIENCE: In regards to discussions about films, and therefore about the

Straubs films, we recently came to realize that the interpretations held in the West

about Ozus films were wrong: here, we talked about, for example, emptiness,

whereas there is no emptiness. Isnt it the same for the Straubs? Havent they

suffered discussions about political films long enough? Isnt it now necessary for a

change in appreciation for their films?RANCIRE: Theyve always wanted to be political, that isnt a label that comes

from elsewhere. In a certain way, the Straubs have always made political cinema,

but its true that at one time you were able to read it according to a Brechtian

interpretation: it appeared like a way to schematize certain social relationships.

And then, at a certain point, it veers completely, it changes radically to an

anthropological interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture. These

are things that sometimes take time to notice. For a long time, people continue to

be interpreted based on what they were ten, fifteen or twenty years beforehand, and

then it changes. Its like the evolution of interpretations of Godard. In the 1980sand 1990s, American literature regarded him as the champion of post-modernism.

So that while watchingHistoire(s) du cinma, Americans didnt understand what

he was doing: whats this imaginary museum of Malrauxs? Hes not a

postmodernist? In fact, a complete displacement of the Godard problematic has

taken place for a long time, but it didnt appear because he had been set off as a

maker of pop cinema. All of the sudden its understood that he isnt that at all. With

the Straubs, its similar. Its rather recently that it was noticed that it was no longer

the kind of political cinema that theyd been assigned to and that, in particular, the

image of austerity that theyre glued to is inadequate, their cinema being one of themost sensual, the most sensiblethere is always something moving onscreen. It


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really is necessary to not trust categorizations and reading models. Certain people

will say, for example, that their films are abstract, others that they are concrete.

And to this is added the fact that there are considerable changes that, sometimes,

only appear over time. Also, I dont know if they have really suffered from the

interpretations of their work: they have definitely suffered from the fact that theirfilms arent seen very much.

AUDIENCE: Yes, but if people werent coming, I think that its also linked to that,

that its also because of the theoretical discourse and the critics attitude, all these

things resound and lead the public to have a rejectionist attitude.

RANCIRE: If you want, but you have to realize that at one time the Straubs were

part of a revolutionary Marxist culture that had a rather large base: even if they

were boring, people went to see their films, they thought that it was an obligation.

And then that ended, there was no longer a need to go see them. Once again, there

is always a time when filmmakers are more or less in sync with something, anexpectation, with a certain configuration of society, of the public. And then there

are other times when they are out of sync and to the side. Thats what makes their

problematic today, defense of the earth, which nevertheless has echoes in society,

not enough to draw in their audience as was the case twenty or thirty years ago

when they were talking about class struggles.

LAFOSSE: The cinema is also about economics. And, for the public to go see a film

or not, it still needs to have the possibility of choosing, which is almost no longer

the case today except if you live in certain neighborhoods in Paris, and even still.

The Straubs belong to the group of filmmakers whose films have enormousdifficulties finding distribution. While certain films come out in France with 800 or

1,000 prints, theirs have two or three... What youve been able to see these last few

days is exceptional. Its the counterexample of what happens in normal film

distribution. Ill point out that in France the number of screens is of the order of

5,300in 2003, there were exactly 5,289and to release 1,000 prints of a film

means taking over a proportion of screens that exclude other filmsat best, if one

can say so, this limits but often this prevents the release of other films. Some weeks

it happens that three films occupy 60% of screens. And I say occupy the way one

occupies a territory because the same imperialist will is involved. Theaters arebombarded with prints the way countries are bombarded. Two things can be added

to this. The first is the number of films (insofar as this invasion also happens by the

plethora of films, uninteresting most of the time) that are releasedabout 15 per

week, products that are only there to occupy the territory. The second is that

small films that manage nevertheless to be seen collide with distribution problems

and projection conditions where anything is possible, including in art houses:

formats that arent respected, mistreated prints...A Visit to the Louvre consists of

two about equal, apparently identical parts. I wont be surprised if, sometime soon,

someone tells me that one of the cinema owners who shows the film, and who is aprogrammer and owner of an art house, performs an act of treachery by deciding to


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only project the first or the second part, irrespective of the original intent of the

authors and the spirit of the film. Irrespective of what the film is.

AUDIENCE: In regards to the places where films can be seen, what do you think

of the fact that they are shown in other places than movie theaters, in art galleries

for example?RANCIRE: Films are meant to be projected on a screen. Now, quite a few are

seen in museums because they dont fit in the cinemas economic circuits. This

being the case, these films demand that one sits in front of them in the dark, which

contradicts the logic of these distribution sites. I think that youll see more and

more films with commercial problems in museums, but in conditions that are not

necessarily good to see them. Thats the problem. These films leave the channels of

cinema to enter the nebulous of heterogeneous things called contemporary art. But

Im not sure that the Straubs would be happy to showtheir films in an exhibition of

contemporary art, I dont believe they think of themselves as artists makingcontemporary art in the meaning that term is given.

LAFOSSE: Its necessary to be careful that museums arent a ghetto and dont

mean the definitive abandonment of the place of Cinema. Quite a few people would

like certain films to clear out of the theaters and leave the field open to distribution

as they envision it: dominant, exclusive and profitable in the short term. Its clear

what has happened since the appearance of small digital cameras: because this

technique makes it so that one can shoot at a smaller cost, most somewhat

ambitious projects conceived originally for the cinema are now refused financing by

the authorities and commissions. The result: cinema, or what they still call that,becomes standardized and levels out, while what is carried by an idea and emotions

of another scale is relegated to an economy of resourcefulness, not to say of misery,

and is very often invisible... On the other hand, museums can allow other things

than projection in a theater, other links. It can highlight an aspect of the work or

propose correspondences with other artists, such correspondences can suggest,

unveil or reveal. But showing films in a museum is not what is at stake. Its very

much something else, maybe on the order of the enlarged space that Jacques

Rancire was talking about in regards to interpretations.

AUDIENCE: Several years ago, the fact of working with non-actors was talkedabout a lot, like the Dardenne brothers did forRosettaor Bruno Dumont for The

Life of Jesus. What do you think about that?

RANCIRE: The Straubs seem to think that nothing or almost nothing can be

done with actors. Above all because they advocate a certain kind of relationship to

the text and actors are not necessarily trained to say or to read texts. Actors are

trained to interpret characters, which the Straubs dont want. They want people

who speak and read texts. This means that they are looking for a very material

relationship with the text itself. What interests them is to work with actors who not

only are not professionals but who are also outside the world of the university andculture. In sum, what interests them is the autodidactic side and the appropriation


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of the text, of literature by people who werent destined to it. That is something vital

for them, which means a considerable amount of work because obviously it doesnt

involve going towards improvisation but instead towards discipline. Also, its

different from the working methods of the Dardenne brothers and Bruno Dumont:

despite everything, I have the impression that they call on outsiders who want tobecome actors. Its the same thing when talking about non-professionals. If you

take Robert Bresson, who only worked with non-professionals, youll notice that

some of them wanted to become actors and that few succeeded while for some

others it was a tragedy... Its true that a professional actor has his tics, his habits, his

tricks, and his power, but at the same time the term non-professional includes lots

of different things. When the Straubs turn to non-professionals, theyre thinking of

a form of popular culture, while for other people it is to work with people who obey

them entirely. Bresson wanted a completely malleable material. Thats not the case

for the Straubs for whom the goal is not to play the body like an instrument but totry to create a new relationship between ordinary beings and texts.

AUDIENCE: It seems rather logical to me that they dont appeal to non-

professionals, in so far as they want to remove all psychology.

RANCIRE: Yes. But dont forget that what is central and essential for them is the

relationship to language.

LAFOSSE: The Straubs said it again yesterday and the day before yesterday with

the image of the clearing. For them, professional actors close the multiple exits of a

clearing in order to only propose one a priori, to only step into a single one. In their

eyes, professional actors take the easy way out in not wanting to make the effort tofind, around a table, different ways to serve a text. This being so, non-professionals

carry around just as often quite a few preconceived ideas and naturalist psychology,

they arent virgins or impermeable to laziness. But I believe that what also interests

them with non-professionals is the solidarity that is born from all this, from their

way of working. Solidarity and engagement. It isnt an accident if, inWorkers,

Peasants, for example, the people continued to practice their normal employment

during the day and accepted to come work with the Straubs in the evening. These

arent insignificant acts. They create something with commitment and solidarity,

which is generallybut not alwaysabsent when working with professional actors.AUDIENCE: Can a link be made with the films of the Medvedkine group in this

manner of working with non-professionals?

LAFOSSE: The Medvedkine group, or groups actually, stems from another idea. It

started in 1967, it lasted until 1974; France was restricted, the France of de Gaulle

and Pompidou, in which the workers at Peugeot decided to use cinema to

understand their life, their working conditions, because they didnt see themselves

in the media. Except at the time there were no video cameras like today and images

couldnt be made without a minimum of technical knowledge. So they asked

filmmakers and technicians close to them in terms of social activism to introducethem, help them, and, concretely, give them lessons. That lasted several months,


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then, from there, for seven years they made films in which their struggles, their

married lives, strikes and doubts appeared. They appropriated their image little by

little. Its a cinema of intervention, reaction and action based on urgency. These

werent professional actors because these were workers and they remained workers.

So, if a relationship between them and the Straubs needs to be found, it is maybe inthe desire, in the will to go against and affirm. As for the work on the text, the

Medvedkine films dont have much to do with those of the Straubs.Letter to My

Friend Pol Cbeis a poetic film that joins poetry and politics but it takes an entirely

different route than that of the Straubs.

AUDIENCE: What do the Straubs think of the audience? Its clear that they dont

think of it as most filmmakers do but there is an audience all the same, as we see

here, where the theater was often full. Would you say they have a high opinion of

the audience, of viewers?

RANCIRE: Its a real problem because they have a way of saying Our cinema isfor everyone, which, at the same time, evades the question. Lets say they go off of

the democratic principle that great art is for everyone and bad art is what is not for

everyone. That said, at the same time, we see that the choices they make pose

questions. Earlier, I alluded to Othonabout which they said, at the time, that they

had made for the workers at Renault. So people said, The Straubs let the workers

see Othon. Very well! But the fact remains that their formal choiceslike that of

people with Italian accents talking fastobey a political logic that was addressing

an audience with a Brechtian training and not only a wide audience. I believe that

they always have this double relationship. They say that they make historical epicsor westerns and they play with the distance between what a real epic is and their

idea of an epic. Once again, it was a period when the audience accepted this because

it was politically and socially formed. Now thats no longer the case. Also, the

Straubs place themselves, I believe, in the utopia that they make of true working-

class theater. Basically they make real working-class theater in the sense that they

bring back a form of working-class culture, oral culture. But that, when you think of

todays plays and audiences, is actually a relatively mind-blowing position. There is

clearly a gap, a gap that participates in an approach that I approve of... Personally, I

think that its never necessary to think of the audience and that it is alwaysnecessary to depart from the fact that what you consider good, you consider good

for all audiences. Put differently, there isnt a film or a position that is good for one

audience and not for another. But, once thats said, isnt it necessary to attempt a

more refined reflection on the kind of viewers in the current conjecture? I think one

cant avoid this reflection in simply responding that one makes working-class

culture from ancient culture. Because, then, one is addressing a mythic people.

AUDIENCE: Maybe,but weve come to understand here, where most of the

audience discovered these films, that the first attitude to have in front of them was

simply to watch and listen. And, doing this, we learned to watch.


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RANCIRE: Yes, of course, you only have to watch... Only if you normally dont

really watch a film. So its not as clear and easy as that. You can say that it is

necessary to learn to watch these films and that they teach us to watch, as you say,

and I agree withyou. But you cant say that its as simple as that. Because watching

is learned and it takes time. To watch a film is something that comes after a periodof time, there isnt any visible or sensible evidence there. The normal viewing of a

film channels 80% of the elementsthe story, the meaning, everything is so

mediated that you dont need to watch everythingwhereas the Straubs films

assume that you must practically integrate all the elements of each shot. In a way,

this cinema can be qualified as exemplary because everything in it is visible but this

is precisely what is puzzling.

AUDIENCE: I think that in their films the Straubs dont give the solution. They

make people look without giving a solution.

RANCIRE: They dont give the solution, they dontimpose one, but they have, allthe same, very precise ideas. You cant say that they only show. They construct: they

construct a very specific space with a precise relationship of voices and bodies. They

create a very particular visible universe that assumes an education because it

demands attention to the slightest articulation, for example. In Where Lies Your

Hidden Smile?, we see a long sequence where the Straubs question the way of

pronouncing a letter and the position of the eyes that has to correspond to it. There

is such a minutia in the constitution of a space in their work that it is rare for there

to be viewers who immediately get it. On the other hand, people can feel the overall

effect, feel that something is happening and afterward, work on what happened.Thats why the experience has to be extended.

jacques rancière & philippe lafosse - politics and aesthetics in the straubs’ films

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