Straub/Huillet and Political Modernism

The relative marginality of Straub/Huillet in treatments of the New German Cinema, with its narrative, "art cinema" label, is based on the supposed "antinarrative" quality of their work as well as their outsider status. This judgment can be traced to the Anglo-American reception of their work since the 1970s, which relied mainly on the critical and theoretical interest in "political modernism." David Bordwell, for example, distinguishes between the narrative ambiguity of the art film and the "pedagogical" montage of what he calls the "interrogative strain in the historical-materialist mode of narration."^[69] Elsaesser, too, relegates Straub/Huillet from the main investigation of New German Cinema to an "alternative approach" that connects it to the avant-garde, modernism, and a "postnarrative, 'deconstructive' cinema."^[70] But Elsaesser sees the primary project of New German Cinema as a blend of art film, social cinema, and Hollywood variations that, even when transgressive, remains more conventionally committed to narrative than the alternative paradigms of Godard or Straub/Huillet.^[71]

This identification of Straub/Huillet and Godard as "Brechtian" filmmakers is certainly important, but it has led to narrowing of the interpretive framework applied to their work.^[72] Much recent theoretical writing has shown the virtues and limitations of the explosions of film theory in the 1970s of which the most intense treatment of Straub/Huillet was a part. D. N. Rodowick provides one history of the phenomenon in his book, The Crisis of Political Modernism . Rodowick traces the relevance in film theory of the "triangulation of Marxism, semiology, and psychoanalysis" and the theories of Louis Althusser and Lacan, especially as mediated in the journals Tel Quel and Screen .^[73] Rodowick's description of a crisis implies that this theoretical approach in film culture eventually reached an impasse. And Colin MacCabe writes, "It was true that the independent sector had grown, it was true that many of the films made in the later seventies had been influenced by Screen , but it was also true that much of that influence had been catastrophic, linking a banal formalism to political didacticism in a formula which had nothing to recommend it—except to initiates."^[74]

This pessimistic view, written at the beginning of the Reagan era, has a degree of merit, since what had been a vibrant and critical impulse in independent filmmaking had become elitist, self-absorbed, and overly concerned

with formal questions. This situation may be mirrored by the academicization of film studies and film theory that also occurred in that period. These developments may not prove that the "Brechtian project" was a dead end, however, as much as they reflect a defensive and frustrated reaction to the failure (or defeat) of the cultural impulses of the 1960s. Therefore, getting beyond this impasse has been a major project of film theory since the 1980s, especially in feminist inquiries into the audience's pleasurable relations to the cinema.

Rodowick cites Peter Wollen's description of how feminist theory's application of both psychoanalysis and materialism can deal with this dilemma: "Wollen asserts that the lesson learned by Godard and Straub is that for Brecht there is neither a question of abandoning the realm of social reference outside of the play (or film) nor of equating antiillusionism with the suppression of any signified. . . . Wollen claims that Brecht's materialism reconciles antiillusionism and referentiality in his theory of distantiation (the Verfremdungs-Effekt ) as an activity that encourages a fundamental dissymmetry in the film/viewer relation—the opening of a 'gap in space' between referent, representation, and spectator."^[75] Although Straub/Huillet also do not believe in the existence of "film language," the process by which the elements are combined to make up their films indeed suggests parallels with analyses of literature and linguistics. In the final chapters, for instance, we will see connections between the "primitive" forms of Straub/Huillet films and the motion from temporal to spatial relations in Hölderlin's poetry. In the later films of Straub/Huillet, we see more and more the articulation of the elements Elsaesser's book has theorized in the context of early cinema, seeing "the generation of meaning in the film-text itself as a continuous process: one located in the tension between presentation and narration, rather than of formal patterning or a fixed semiotic system."^[76]

By looking at the multiplicity of contexts in which Straub/Huillet films function, we shall see that they are not totally to be defined within the impasse reached by political modernism in Rodowick's critique. This impasse was based on a conviction that "theoretical practice" in the form of radical cinema could achieve some sort of political "break," couched in the context of binary oppositions such as "realism and modernism, modernism and semiology, ideological and theoretical practice."^[77] Rodowick goes on to propose a way out of this impasse with terms that recall very much what Straub/Huillet's works most strongly encourage: "a practice of reading and . . . an intervention in the institutional formations of knowledge."^[78] To the danger that such "reading formations" might return to the assumption of a unified subject, Rodowick contrasts the multiple subject positions posited in Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge , which again are strongly suggestive of the decentering of space and narrative unity in Straub/Huillet films.

Instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifest his [sic ] dispersion. To the various

statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he [sic ] can occupy or be given when making a discourse. To the discontinuity of the planes from which he [sic ] speaks. And if these planes are linked by a system of relations, this system is not established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself . . . but by the specificity of a discursive practice. . . . Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking [reading] subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed.^[79]

This definition of the subject is appropriate to the explosion of the unity of the "author" in Straub/Huillet films, beginning with Chronicle , but especially clear in the Schoenberg short and Fortini/Cani .^[80] The dispersed subject also corresponds to the "invisible audience" constantly suggested by Straub/Huillet films—a postulated subjectivity that necessarily is "exterior" to the text but is also its utopian future audience. At the conclusion of Crisis of Political Modernism , Rodowick turns to a "previously unrecognized and untheorized utopian dimension in the discourse of political modernism," the feminist aspect that a number of critics have explored. Rodowick cites Gertrud Koch in this regard.

The aesthetically most advanced films resist any facile reading, not only because they operate with complex aesthetic codes but also because they anticipate an expanded and radicalized notion of subjectivity. What is achieved in a number of these films is a type of subjectivity that transcends any abstract subject-object dichotomy; what is at stake is no longer the redemption of woman as subject over against the male conception of woman as object. What is at stake is less—and at the same time more—than the most general sense of the concept of subject: in the sense that Marx could speak of the working class as the subject of the revolution, in the sense that the women's movement could be the subject of the transformation of sexual politics. The most advanced aesthetic products represent a utopian anticipation of a yet to be fulfilled program of emancipated subjectivity: neither of a class nor of a movement or a collective, but as individuals, as concrete subjects [as] they attempt to insist on their authentic experience.^[81]

Rodowick is bothered by the proposition that this "subjectivity" is to be found in the work of art and insists on critical and theoretical practice as its agent as well. The utopian aspect of it, however, as "yet to be achieved" must necessarily remain outside both art and theory, in the sum of the uses to which they are put: authentic experience. In the analysis of the individual films to follow, I explore the powerful aesthetic effects Straub/Huillet produce by attempting to reconcile the opposites in these debates, calling attention to the artificial devices by which film constructs meaning while at the same time invoking its immediate relations to the reality of the world. And beyond all this, they assert the connection between formal innovation and political practice in

a historical context. In regard to the theoretical debates of the 1970s, this necessity has been observed by both Sylvia Harvey^[82] and Colin MacCabe, who writes, "It cannot . . . be stressed too often that theory only and ever makes sense in relation to practice. The practices to which literary theory must always address itself are those that regulate our relation to a literary tradition which is both inheritance and oppression."^[83] Straub/Huillet's sustained engagement with the traditions of music, theater, cinema, and literature seek a mediation between inheritance and oppression in the German context.