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Danièle Huillet / Jean-Marie Straub
Danièle Huillet 14 November 06
Section: huillet-straub
Categories: Mention
With shock and terrible sadness I have just found out that Danièle Huillet has died. I don’t know what to say. My mind races with banal thoughts along the lines of “she always seemed so healthy” and how I never considered the possibility of her dying.
And how I can’t imagine Straub making a film again. These two great artists were to cinema precisely what Cézanne was to painting. Their uncompromising heart/art, political consciousness and esthetic leave most other filmmakers in their shadows. Their unpretentiousness, passion and respect for humanity have imprinted my life decisively, I think of them and their work almost every day.
I first met them in Paris in 1982 where they invited me to “assist” for a day on the shooting of En rachachant, a film based on a story by Marguerite Duras. The cinematographer was Henri Alekan, who had also done the cinematography on Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast →. The elderly Alekan remained seated most of the time, giving instructions to assistants who adjusted the lights in the Montmarte schoolhouse where they were filming. Straub finely adjusted the position of the enormous 35mm camera with one assistant, often going to the floor in the camera’s field of view and removing some piece of dust or dirt, or adjusting an object in the room, or a fold in some cloth, before then having Danièle or Alekan look through the viewfinder to approve or disapprove, which sometimes led to further adjustments.
For the Straubs there was no difference between the integrity of the Einstellung of the camera and their own Einstellung →, their own view of, and approach to, life.
I will have to come back to this, I will have more to say.
Links
news.scotsman.com/obituaries →
guardian.co.uk/france/story →
Also visit my section on Huillet-Straub’s films on the right under “Sections On.”
Quote from Guardian article above
They courted controversy right until the end, when their latest film, Ces Rencontres avec Eux (These Encounters of Theirs), based on Pavese, was shown in competition at this year’s Venice film festival. Explaining their non-attendance at the festival, they sent a message that said they would be “unable to be festive at a festival where there are so many public and private police looking for a terrorist … but so long as there’s American imperialistic capitalism, there’ll never be enough terrorists in the world.” Nevertheless, the jury gave them a special prize “for invention of cinematic language in the ensemble of their work”. They replied that it was “too late for their lives, but too early for their deaths”.
- Title: Danièle Huillet
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