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 film because it's the most barbaric and it speaks my native language.” This film 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.

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” (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.