Preface and Acknowledgments

Not Reconciled was the first Straub/Huillet film I ever saw, and I remember the shock vividly to this day. The breathtaking frustration the film provoked can only compare to my first reaction to Kafka's German: How can anything so simple be so incomprehensible, so threatening? How can anything so short seem so long? And, like Kafka, the film kept drawing me back with its ability to crystallize the burden of the past and the impulse to resist in just a few seconds of film time.

I want to thank Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub for their generosity and friendship, as well as for their films, which led me to look at the world and read German literature in a different way. I hope the following does a bit of the same, while it reveals their humor and compassion as well. For instance, Jean-Marie Straub noticed there were a lot of churches in St. Louis. They ought to like Moses and Aaron here, he said, since it is "a film about the man who invented God." And walking around my typically run-down urban midwestern neighborhood in South St. Louis, Danièle Huillet agreed that it is ugly, "but not only ugly." I realize that in my education and academic career I have partly been searching for some kind of cultural "authenticity," since my starting points were the midwestern assumption of cultural inferiority, especially in regard to Europe, and the intriguing way American mass culture has of affirming European high culture as a model, even while making fun of it. The connection between high culture and the culture industry, which Critical Theory seeks to understand, is also a connection I have to make on a very personal level: I teach German language, literature, and film to U.S. students, for whom European bourgeois culture is also distant and strange, yet its authority and influence remain. Having given up on the search for cultural authenticity, at

least in the canon of European culture, I still have a strong wish to understand its power, especially in the context of the power of a united Germany as a state, which I feel more than ever must be distinguished from the values present in "German" culture. In this distinction lies a potential utopian space, for non-Germans looking at Germany and its history and art but even more crucially perhaps for the Germans themselves. Straub/Huillet films raise fascinating questions about "What is German" and what is not and about the artificiality of the divisions between "high" culture and "mass" culture.

Many, many people have helped me in large and small ways in the process of writing this book. Four chapters had their origins in my dissertation at Washington University in St. Louis, and I want to thank my committee for their help and encouragement then and since: Egon Schwarz, William H. Matheson, Thomas Elsaesser, Thomas Rimer, Michel Rybalka, Marcus Bullock, and Patricia Herminghouse. I would not have begun this work at all were it not for George Dolis, who introduced me to Straub/Huillet when he screened Not Reconciled for a group of graduate students in Ridgeley Hall at Washington University in the late 1970s on his old Graflex projector, and Richard Abel, who introduced me to the field of film studies at Drake University.

I have received an enormous amount of help in gaining access to Straub/Huillet films and other research materials. I want to thank the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Dean Lee R. Edwards; and former Dean Murray M. Schwartz. Jules Chametsky and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities; Catherine Portuges and the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies; Margaret Irwin-Brandon and the Arcadia Players; Deborah Linderman, Hans Vaget, and Dave Vikre at Smith College; and Lorna Peterson and the Five College Film Council all helped me bring Straub/Huillet films to the area for screenings and discussions. At the University Library, Edla Holm and the staff of the interlibrary loan division and John Stacey and the staff of the audiovisual division were extremely helpful. New Yorker Films provided access to films and photographs; thanks to Dan Talbot, John Montague, and Harris Due. Thanks also to Roberta Boehm of Photoreporters, Inc., and to Terry Geesken of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive. Others who generously provided material, information, help, and encouragement include James E. Cathey, Ramona Curry, John E. Davidson, Aris Fioretos, Patricia Galvis-Assmus, Joseph Gaubinger, Gerd Gemünden, Janine Heifner, Jeffrey High, Susan Jahoda, Elizabeth Keitel, Christine Kodis of the Goethe Institut Boston, Dave Korowski, Sara Lennox, David Levin, Mary Maynard, Charles Moran, Stephen Nissenbaum, Marcia Pauly, Andrew Reich, Karen Remmler, Christian Rogowski, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Eric Santner, Harry Seelig, Sunka Simon, Irene Starr, Harlan Sturm, Robert Sullivan, and especially Jan Whitaker, who helped me keep the project on track.

For a travel grant to Berlin, I want to thank Heidrun Suhr and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In Berlin, the amount of help I received was simply phenomenal, particularly from the staff at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin: Ute Jensky, Peter Latta, Anne-Marie Lorenz-Tröstrum, Marian Martchewski, Christa Schabaz, Rolf Wentz, Renate Wilhelmi, Ria van der Zee, and Rosemarie van der Zee. Also in Berlin I received help from Bernd Koll and Edition Manfred Salzgeber, Frieda Behlen, Thomas Birkner, Michael Esser, Harun Farocki, Salomea Genin, Hans Hurch, Michael Klier, Friedrich Knilli, Stephen Laufer, Peter Nau, Astrid Ofner, Dieter and Silvia Schlenstedt, Ekko von Schwichow, Stephan Settele, and Lynn Whittemore.

Earlier versions of chapters 6 and 8 appeared in, respectively, Essays on Brecht = Versuche über Brecht , Brecht Yearbook, vol. 15, ed. Marc Silberman et al. (Madison: International Brecht Society, 1990), and Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions , vol. 1 (Oxford: Berg Press, 1993). I am grateful to the editors of those publications, Marc Silberman, Sandy Frieden, Rick McCormick, Vibeke Petersen, and Melissa Vogelsang, for their helpful suggestions and for permission to republish here.

I am especially indebted to those who read and responded in detail to later stages of the manuscript: Thom Andersen, Susan Cocalis, Norman Cowie, Carol Donelan, John Gianvito, Michael Pauen, Catherine Portuges, Lawrence Ryan, Robert Stern, and Maureen Turim. Special thanks to John Gianvito for the title suggestion as well. Finally, thanks to those who guided the editing and production of this book for the University of California Press: Michelle Bonnice, Stephanie Emerson, and Sheila Berg; and to film editor Edward Dimendberg for his commitment to a book on Straub/Huillet and his kind support of this project.

That the name of my friend and co-worker Sigi Brauner appears in a memorial dedication and not just among these words of thanks is a source of deep sorrow. I hope these pages have at least a reflected spark of Sigi's passion for the beauty of the world and her defiant spirit.

HAYDENVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS
JANUARY 1995