Straub/Huillet and the New Left
That the debates in film theory since the 1960s continue those among German leftist exiles in the 1930s only adds richness to the relevance of Straub/Huillet's work to the historical and contemporary context of German culture. The contemporary stakes are remarkably similar: the apparent separation of artists and intellectuals from the wishes of "the masses," the "failure of the student left to formulate a progressive aesthetics that had popular support,"[1] and the threatening rise of Fascist movements to fill the gap.
The decline in attention to Straub/Huillet films since the early 1980s, I argue, has to do with many factors unrelated to the films themselves, which have ventured into exciting uncharted film territory in this very period. Backlash against the 1960s and the cultural climate of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl brought a chill to leftist counterculture that has yet to subside in the aftermath of the cold war. Political and economic factors have made it more difficult to view any foreign films in the United States since the early 1980s, and the distribution of Straub/Huillet films has suffered from this. Finally, the resistance of German critics to the German films Straub/Huillet have made since 1984 has no doubt spilled over into other countries. The most positive reception—even to films as German as the Hölderlin works—has been in France.
Straub/Huillet refuse to accept limitations placed on the cinema by these conditions. Through the separation of the elements of its makeup, they reveal traces of layers of history going back to the beginnings of cinema and the beginning of the modern era; they place alongside each other gestures of
political concreteness and utopian otherness; they point to the past with the future in mind. The profound optimism and militancy of even such a nihilistic film as Antigone , especially its continuity with their other work, places Straub/Huillet as a counterweight to the melancholy and immobility reached by both film theory and leftist politics since the 1980s.[2]
In film theory, we have seen that they have avoided the impasse of political modernism by not subscribing to the Althusserian conflation of theory and praxis but instead increasing the separation between aesthetic representations and political action. Despite what many have seen as a deconstruction of codes of film communication, they have also not moved in the direction of postmodernism's play of "infinite reversibility." By looking at their work as part of a larger formal and cultural/political continuity, one can perhaps step away from a melancholy theoretical impasse of postmodernism as well, of which Jean Narboni has observed, "Everything is leveled out in a sort of desperation that is a little melancholy. Obviously, the Straubs are everything but postmodern. In their work are themes, contents to which they hold hard as iron—political, cosmic, mystical contents."[3]
We have seen the affirmative function of melancholy in the context of postwar German history and the New German Cinema, and I argue that this melancholy has led to a certain complicity with anti-sixties backlash on the Left as well. Thus both Straub/Huillet and Godard are attacked for stubbornly refusing to adapt to the needs of the popular marketplace. This, rather than any specific discussion of their films, has been the main objection to Straub/Huillet's post-seventies work from both Wim Wenders and Alexander Kluge, for instance.[4]
The vehement rejection of Straub/Huillet films on the part of leftist or former leftist critics seems to be part of the phenomenon of wallowing in failure as a cultural unifier. The utopian gesture of connecting Hölderlin's Empedocles, for instance, with the "fête permanente" of the 1960s is felt to be unseemly by former student radicals, who, as Jürgen Habermas observed, have accommodated themselves with the "end of utopias" in the 1970s.[5] This revolt against utopia, which feeds an already pervasive animosity toward the sixties, has thwarted the former receptivity to aesthetic wishes to "have it all." A portion of Gilberto Perez's explanation for Godard's recent lack of an audience would apply at least as strongly to Straub/Huillet.
If Godard is out of fashion nowadays, so, in many quarters, is beauty. Postmodernists mostly disown it. As a quality men see in women ("Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing," said Santayana), feminists largely discountenance it. The Thatcherite aesthetician Roger Scruton thinks it too imprecise a notion for meaningful consideration; but an aesthetician who cannot talk about beauty had better find another line of work. On the left, beauty is suspected both of being elitist, the plaything of a privileged few, and of being a whore seductively selling the ideology of the ruling class. In the puritanism of today, a puritanism
on the right and on the left, beauty is to be approached with the protective crucifix of (right or left) political correctness.[6]
Martin Schaub, writing in 1976, takes the most extreme position against Straub/Huillet's claim to political relevance for their aesthetic method. "With Othon (1969) Straub and Huillet lost their footing in the base that sustained them. No matter how much they insist they have shown Othon in French factories and that it was the workers who best understood the revolutionary message of this film (in form and content), I have trouble believing it. And Moses and Aaron (1975) also seems to me to be more of a demonstration of method than a lever in the political struggle Straub still maintains he is waging."[7] After condemning Straub/Huillet films as "pedagogical" and "radically rationalistic," Schaub goes so far as a biting personal attack: "The development Straub has demonstrated in his life in past years is unsettling. I would term it 'loss of reality.' Moses and Aaron is dedicated to Holger Meins, and somehow I can compare Straub's [sic ] development with that of the Red Army Faction. The Federal Republic, or even 'liberal' Europe, seems to compel such developments."[8]
The return to interrupted traditions in cinema, culture, and politics is required in order to break out of this paralysis. For this reason, Straub/Huillet deny that their films are non-narrative or anticinematic, as if the overthrow of traditional forms were their primary goal, as if radical aesthetics were their point of departure. This interpretation of the process is entirely backward and imputes to Straub/Huillet just the kind of formalistic pseudoradicalism with which the culture industry readily titillates itself. Walter Benjamin was perhaps not the first to note the ability of the culture industry to absorb criticism and turn it into just another disposable product.[9] Just as subsidized institutions of "high culture" allow privileged groups to cultivate the illusion that they do not participate in the culture industry, a destructive avant-garde serves to perpetuate the illusion of flexibility and freedom.[10] In a wasteful society, destructiveness is highly marketable as an aesthetic principle. Therefore, avant-garde art that merely negates the conventions and traditions of "high culture" still relies on this same artificial isolation of art, otherwise such taunts would be uninteresting. This kind of avant-garde is only apparently political. As Dana Polan puts it,
This is why contemporary culture can accommodate formally subversive art: as long as such an art does not connect its formal subversion to an analysis of social situations, such art becomes little more than a further example of the disturbances that go on as we live through a day. And a work of art which defeats formal expectations does not lead to protest against a culture that deals continually in the defeating of expectations.[11]
In this regard, the statements of Straub/Huillet on their work have a rather conservative tone. They constantly stress how little is really new in the methods
they use, how the traditions of cinema are indeed present in everything they do. Straub has expressed his aversion to the catchword "revolutionary" and insists, "we move forward only in very small steps."[12]
It is also backward to assume that Straub/Huillet came to their aesthetic innovations by intending to make political films. Political relevance is an effect of their work, not a cause. One need not have a political reason to depart from aesthetic norms. Such departure from the norm only develops political implications when it is understood that adhering to the norms is also a political act. As Straub puts it, echoing Godard, he does not try to make political films; he makes films politically.[13]
The moral claim Straub/Huillet make, then, is closer to André Bazin's description of neorealism than avant-garde experimentation or culinary "visual pleasure." Rolf Aurich cites Bazin: "To respect the real means in fact not to multiply its appearances; on the contrary it means to free it of all that is inessential in order to reach completeness in simplicity." Aurich then goes on, regarding Too Early, Too Late and Empedocles , "These are films that owe their richness precisely to their lack of ornament and their strict handwriting; these films reach that point where neorealism arrives at classical abstraction and universality (Bazin) and then extend it with substantial innovations. Huillet/Straub extend the neorealist film; they are therefore advanced moralists."[14]
One way out of the impasse of political modernism might be to examine what intellectuals to the East and South have made out of the same European heritage in the context of other political struggles over "realism" and the avant-garde. A lot of theoretical work in Eastern Europe and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), for instance, virtually unknown in the West, developed around the work of Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, or the Russian formalists.[15] But, as Straub/Huillet imply with most of their films, true change can only come with the natural replacement of one generation with another. This perhaps will also bring a new reception of Straub/Huillet. An example would be the Parallel Cinema and sinefantom in Russia, just becoming known in the West. A new film journal in Hanover, filmwärts , has also self-consciously dedicated much space to a renewal of interest in Straub/Huillet in Germany. They have done so specifically in regard to the "negative" national identity we have located in the New German Cinema. For instance, a note on Reinhard Hauff's Stammheim , a film about the trial of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, puts it in the context of "thoughts on Germany." The film's clichéd presentation of political violence is contrasted with Norbert Elias's "Thoughts on the Federal Republic,"[16] which accounts for the violence and radicalism of West German political culture via "the so-called economic miracle, fascism in Germany and above all the irreconcilability of the pre-war and post-war generations." Here the filmwärts editor sees a connection to Straub/Huillet's Not Reconciled , which is then recommended, along with Kluge's Patriot , as a correction to the Stammheim view of German history.[17]
In general, then, it is important to distinguish radical politics from radical aesthetics, not to use one as an alibi for the other or to assume that they are the same thing. Politics and aesthetics, like theory and practice, must be seen as concretely distinct but necessary to one another. The nature and development of the radicalism of Straub/Huillet must be traced carefully and concretely, since it consists, in the main, of a materialist approach to filmmaking.
Brecht, for instance, like Straub/Huillet, did not believe in innovation for its own sake but instead appealed constantly to classical traditions. He was highly distressed by the idea that his innovations might later be adopted for purely formalistic reasons, as indeed has often been the case.[18] As he wrote in his Arbeitsjournal ,
since i am an innovator in my field, some always scream that i am a formalist. they don't find the old forms in my works, and what is worse, they find new ones. then they think it is the forms which interest me. but i have found that i care rather little about form. at different times i have studied the old forms of poetry, short story, drama and theater and have only given them up when they stood in the way of what i wanted to say.[19]
The above could apply as well to Straub/Huillet as to Brecht with little modification. The phrase "what i wanted to say" illuminates the distinction made earlier regarding Straub/Huillet's opposition to film "language." Of course this does not mean that the filmmakers withdraw from the film's impact entirely and leave the audience merely provoked and confused by an endlessly equivocal work of art. The renunciation of the conventions of film language is meant to avoid equivocation, while documenting the reality of contradiction. It is an alternative to the deception and manipulation of the viewer, which convey little "meaning" as far as the world outside the film is concerned. Indeed, such manipulation subtracts more from the viewers' experience than it adds. A similar opinion is reflected by Brecht's appeal for the simplicity and freedom of classicism.
on abbreviation in the classical style: if i leave out enough on a page, i receive for the single word "night"—for instance in the phrase "as night came"—a full measure of imagination on the part of the reader. inflation is the death of every economy. it would be best for the words to dismiss their entourage entirely and meet each other with all the dignity they can generate from within themselves. it is quite wrong to say that the classicists forget the senses of the reader; on the contrary, they count on them.[20]
The classicism of Straub/Huillet films similarly consists of an exclusion of the unnecessary, the reproduction of feelings or pieces of information that the viewer already possesses. For this reason, it is wrong to say that Straub/Huillet films are non-narrative. They merely reduce narrative to its simplest form and
refuse to subordinate visual narrative to that of a text. Conventional, commercial film is "pornographic," in Straub's opinion, and he describes the process of reducing the Brecht or Böll texts as that of removing all that is merely anecdotal. In regard to naturalism, Straub/Huillet also speak of "inflation." Like Brecht, they strive for realism, but their means are different from Brecht's. Straub commented in 1971, "I think that more and more the work we've got to do—though I have some reservations—is to make films which radically eliminate art, so that there is no equivocation. This may lose us some people, but it is essential to eliminate all the artistic, filmic surface to bring people face to face with the ideas in their naked state."[21]
Film language and film art are the "old forms" that stand in the way of ideas, of aesthetic confrontations with reality. The behavior of the artist, in stepping aside from industrialized production to rejoin an older history, is necessarily negative, reductive. The artist takes the revolutionary "tiger's leap" of history, as Benjamin called it, dialectics in practice. Arnold Schoenberg described his idea of rejoining artistic tradition in a similar way: "There is only one way to connect directly to the past and to tradition: to begin everything over again, as if all that had gone before were false; to grapple once again with the essence of the thing most exactly, instead of reducing oneself to developing the technique of a preexistent material."[22]
Here we arrive at a definition of artistic activity much closer to Adorno's than to Brecht's. But the relationship of the artist to history and to social change is a crucial issue for both of them, as well as for Straub/Huillet. If the artist can only produce authentic art by stepping outside of the reigning tradition, by reinventing language and form, then the bonds are severed which connect artist and audience. Rather than the language of a past culture, art now must speak the language of a culture that can only be imagined, a utopia. But the price for the freedom to create the new language is the surrender of the hope of transforming society by way of the old.
Thus Brecht and Adorno arrive by different routes at the same dilemma, with a similar hope. Both rejected a mimetic theory of art in favor of one projected toward the future. But this departure from mimesis leaves the future audience of art unimaginable, abstract, because any image of it would be a return to mimesis and an affirmation of the current order. Neither theorist was able to describe the prospect of a step beyond this contradiction, least of all in the medium of film. The films of Straub/Huillet, however, point toward this striven-for unity of theory and practice as well as the obstacles to it in contemporary Western society. The classicism of form and the simplicity of content remove from Straub/Huillet films the expectation of an image of society. Yet the historical materials, the aesthetic forms, and the contradictions between these and images from contemporary reality project a movement toward such a future society. Indeed, film only functions as a medium through its ability to suggest a world through a glimpse of a few fragments. The
audience for such works is not the future society in which these contradictions will be resolved, however, but those who dare to imagine it now. Brecht claimed, "The alienation effect [der V-Effekt ] is a social measure."[23] One might now conclude, materialist filmmaking does not replace social action; it requires it. The challenge is to find the audience of the future in the cultural marketplace of the present.