2 - Objectivity and Objectivities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
Summary
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 VerlaineHuillet 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, 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”.
Why not take this affirmation seriously, wager that their films can be seen with the same criteria, analysed with the same methods as the above-mentioned 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.
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- Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub'Objectivists' in Cinema, pp. 31 - 68Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020