1. Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 93. Cited hereafter as NGC. [BACK]

2. On various aspects of the frustration of political action and a resulting melancholy withdrawal since the 1960s, see, e.g., Todd Gitlin, Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 246; Russell Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 43, 98; and Richard W. McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 17. Since Straub/Huillet's political engagement arose in the "apolitical"

1950s, they could represent what Gitlin refers to as the "missing radical generation"; see Gitlin, Years of Hope, 176. [BACK]

3. "Entretien Dominique Païni-Jean Narboni," in Der Tod des Empedokles/La mort d'Empédocle, ed. Jacques Déniel and Dominique Païni (Dunkerque: Studio 43/Paris: DOPA Films/Ecole des beaux-arts régionale, 1987), 62. This book is hereafter cited as Dunkerque. [BACK]

4. Both Kluge and Wenders criticize Straub/Huillet for not reaching a wider audience. See Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 32; Alexander Kluge, "Gespräch mit Alexander Kluge," Filmkritik 12 (1976):588-589; and Tim Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 121. Peter Handke's similar inclination to depoliticize Straub/Huillet's aesthetic radicalism will be discussed in chap. 11. [BACK]

5. Cited in Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 101. [BACK]

6. Gilberto Perez, "Bell-Bottom Blues," Nation (18 February 1991):211. [BACK]

7. Martin Schaub, "Bilderarbeit," Cinema 3 (1976):43. [BACK]

8. Ibid. [BACK]

9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1978), 231, 241, 251n. [BACK]

10. See Elsaesser, NGC, 49. [BACK]

11. D. B. Polan, "Brecht and the Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema," Jump Cut 17 (April 1978):30. [BACK]

12. "Andi Engel Talks to Jean-Marie Straub," Cinemantics 1 (1 January 1970):21. [BACK]

13. "Balayez-moi tout ça!" [Interview], Les Lettres Françaises, 13 January 1971. [BACK]

14. Rolf Aurich, "'Irgendwo muß ein Punkt sein, daß man sieht, da brennt etwas': Versuch darüber, was der Neo-Realismus, André Bazin, Roberto Rossellini und eine Moral mit den Filmen von Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub zu tun haben könnten," filmwärts [Straub/Huillet issue] 9 (December 1987):9. [BACK]

15. See Peter Wuss, Die Tiefenstruktur des Filmkunstwerks: Zur Analyse von Spielfilmen mit offener Komposition (Berlin: Henschel, 1990), and Filmanalyse und Psychologie: Strukturen des Films im Wahrnehmungsprozeß (Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1993). [BACK]

16. Norbert Elias, "Gedanken zur Bundesrepublik," Merkur 9/10 (1985):733-755. [BACK]

17. Rolf Aurich, "Magazin: Eine letzte Anmerkung," filmwärts 3 (May 1986):16. [BACK]

18. Klaus-Detlef Müller, Die Funktion der Geschichte im Werk Bertolt Brechts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967), 29. [BACK]

19. Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, 2 vols., ed. Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 1:18 (3 March 1938). [BACK]

20. Ibid., 1:144 (9 August 1940). [BACK]

21. "After Othon, before History Lessons: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith Talks to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet," Enthusiasm 1 (December 1975):31. [BACK]

22. Cited in "A Work Journal of the Straub/Huillet Film Moses and Aaron by Gregory Woods," Enthusiasm 1 (December 1975):48. [BACK]

23. Cited in K.-D. Müller, Funktion der Geschichte, 29. [BACK]

24. See Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); James Franklin, New German Cinema: From Oberhausen to Hamburg (Boston: Twayne, 1983); Eric Rentschler, West German Film in

the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, N.Y.: Redgrave, 1984); John Sandford, The New German Cinema (London: Oswald Wolff, 1980), 27-36; and Maureen Turim, "Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: Oblique Angles on Film as Ideological Intervention," in West German Filmmakers, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Ungar, 1984), 335-358. [BACK]

25. See Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat; Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Elsaesser, NGC . [BACK]

26. Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat , 9, 18-20. [BACK]

27. See Elsaesser, NGC , esp. 8-35; Elsaesser downplays the importance of politics in the decade before 1967, however. Perhaps the audience was not as political as later, but the motives and positions among young filmmakers and critics certainly were. See also Rentschler, West German Film . [BACK]

28. Franklin, New German Cinema , 35. [BACK]

29. See Elsaesser, NGC , 24, 27. [BACK]

30. Harun Farocki, unpublished interview with the author, February 1992. [BACK]

31. Elsaesser, NGC , 20. [BACK]

32. "Le cinema du Papa est mort" had been the title of a French review of Last Year at Marienbad . See Hans-Dieter Roos, "Brief aus Paris: Papas Kino ist tot," Filmkritik 1 (1962):7. [BACK]

33. Sylvia Harvey cites the importance of Brecht and Benjamin for French film theory in the 1960s as well, especially in Cahiers du cinéma and Cinétique: May '68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 69. [BACK]

34. See Filmkritik 5 (1968). [BACK]

35. Enno Patalas, "Herr K. erobert Venedig," Filmkritik 10 (1966):547. [BACK]

36. Wilhelm Roth, "Nachlese in Mannheim," Filmkritik 11 (1968):740. [BACK]

37. Frankfurter Rundschau , 30 November 1965. [BACK]

38. On the importance of the festival to the New German Cinema, see Rentschler, West German Film , 75, and Franklin, New German Cinema , 21. [BACK]

39. See the discussion in chap. 4. [BACK]

40. Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte, eds., Herzog/Kluge/Straub (Munich: Carl Hansen Verlag, 1976), 13. [BACK]

41. Franklin, New German Cinema , 47-48, 130, 136, 141. [BACK]

42. Enno Patalas, "Ansichten einer Gruppe," Filmkritik 5 (1966):247. [BACK]

43. In a 1980 interview, Straub/Huillet name the following as those whose work they admired while in Germany: Vlado Kristl, Peter Nestler, Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke, Max Zihlmann, Hellmuth Costard, Werner Nekes. See Jochen Brunow, "Der Maschine Widerstand leisten," Filme 1 (1980):31-32. On the marginality of Thome and Lemke and their alternative to Oberhausen, cf. Elsaesser, NGC , 120, 136. [BACK]

44. See Elsaesser, NGC , 43-44, 74. [BACK]

45. Ibid., 78. [BACK]

46. Ibid., 73. [BACK]

47. See, e.g., Schaub, "Bilderarbeit," 33, 43; Ulrich Greiner, "Achtung Liebe! Vorsicht Kino!" Die Zeit , 2 March 1984. [BACK]

48. The groundbreaking work for many of these interpretations was Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich's The Inability to Mourn (London: Tavistock, 1975). [BACK]

49. Santner, Stranded Objects , 30. [BACK]

50. Jochen Brunow, "Der Maschine Widerstand leisten: Begegnung mit Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub," Filme 1 (1980):31. [BACK]

51. Ibid. [BACK]

52. Peter Gidal, "Straub/Huillet Talking and Short Notes on Some Contentious Issues," Ark/Journal from the Royal College of Art (January 1976):97. [BACK]

53. "Andi Engel Talks to Jean-Marie Straub," 21. [BACK]

54. Ibid. [BACK]

55. Cited in "Straub and Huillet on Filmmakers They Like and Related Matters," Film at the Public program, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 1982, 5.

Straub/Huillet returned to this example in the press conference after the Berlin premiere of Antigone in 1992, this time identifying with Artur Brauner, the Jewish producer of those films, whose Europa, Europa (directed by Agneszka Holland) was refused the imprimatur of a "German" film. [BACK]

56. Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat , 19, 114. [BACK]

57. See B. Ruby Rich's criticism of this tone in Kluge's authorial voice: "She Says, He Says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist Film Politics," Discourse [Special issue: German Avant-Garde Cinema: The Seventies] 6 (Fall 1983):31-46. [BACK]

58. "Andi Engel Talks to Jean-Marie Straub," 21. [BACK]

59. Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat , 120, 239. [BACK]

60. Cited in Elsaesser, NGC , 136. [BACK]

61. Ibid. [BACK]

62. Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat , 132. [BACK]

63. Santner, Stranded Objects , xiii. [BACK]

64. Brechts Antigone des Sophokles , ed. Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988) 100, ll. 447-450. Since the subtitles have not been translated, I have left the original German in the text. For a rather free translation of Brecht's version, see Judith Malina, Sophocles' Antigone, Adapted by Bertolt Brecht, Based on the German Translation by Friedrich Hölderlin (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1990). A more literal rendering:

It's false. Earth is a burden. Home is not only
Earth, not house only. Not where one has poured out sweat
Not the house that helplessly sees the approaching fire
Not where he bowed his neck, not that calls he home.

65. I discuss this issue in more detail in the chapters on Not Reconciled and History Lessons . See also James E. Young, "The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today," Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992):267-296. [BACK]

66. Martin Walsh, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema , ed. Keith M. Griffiths (London: British Film Institute, 1981), 59. [BACK]

67. Antigone , press materials courtesy Edition Manfred Salzgeber, Berlin. [BACK]

68. Elsaesser, NGC , 298; Corrigan, New German Film , 22-23. See also Pierre Sorlin, "Challenging Hollywood," in European Cinemas, European Societies 1939-1990 (London: Routledge, 1991), 138ff. [BACK]

69. Peter Zach, "Vom Unglück in einer Maschine zu sein, die viele Freiheiten beinahe hat, aber in sich das Glück nur ab und zu zeigt" [Interview with Straub/Huillet], Blimp (March 1985):16; "Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet," in Dunkerque , 34. [BACK]

70. Elsaesser, NGC , 284-289. [BACK]

71. Kuby wrote a number of works critical of rearmament and the West German Right, particularly Franz Josef Strauss. See his Das ist des Deutschen Vaterland: 70 Millionen in zwei Wartesälen (Stuttgart: Scherz and Goverts, 1957), and Franz Josef Strauss: Ein Typus unserer Zeit [with Eugen Kogon, Otto von Loewenstern, and Jürgen Seifert] (Vienna: Kurt Desch, 1963). Howard Vernon is perhaps best known for his roles in Godard's Alphaville and Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse . [BACK]

72. Straub/Huillet criticize this abandonment of Germany and the German language by Fassbinder and Wenders, arguing it diminished the space for their own films to function. See Zach, "Vom Unglück in einer Maschine zu sein," 16. [BACK]

73. Zach, "Vom Unglück in einer Maschine zu sein," 20. [BACK]

74. Michael Klier, Porträts der Filmemacher: Jean-Marie Straub , WDR, Cologne, 1970. Film. [BACK]