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Jul 01, 2009
Huillet-Straub : 2,400 year side-trip. (4/8)
The second digression takes us on an even more unexpected trip.
As Cézanne-Huillet evokes the combination of atoms at the beginning of the world and Lucrèce’s « De natura rerum », « action » abruptly shifts to what looks very much like a German sword and sandal movie : a middle-aged character dressed like an ancient Greek declaims poetry in German in a green landscape.
His words are less « rachâché » than beautifully articulated and, even to French ears, their German accents sound surprisingly harmonious. Huillet-Straub’s « greatest hit » was devoted to Bach ; here too, we care more for the music than the words and resent the French subtitles for polluting the image and even the melody as they try and urge our attention back to the poem lyrics.
Less than ever, the film feels the need to tell us where we are or what we are witness to, as the true Huillet-Straub fan instantly identifies an excerpt from one of the couple’s more famous works, « Der Tod des Empedocles » : Empedocles’s death.
An adaptation of the eponymous poem by German writer Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote it in 1798-1800, the film tells the story of pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Etna crater.
We understand from the French subtitles, tiny bits of German and the actor’s play that Empedocles is waxing lyrical about nature and how it came into being.
In the interview -which looks increasingly like the user’s manual to their film or the « Cézanne » chapter of « Huillet-Straub for dummies »-, Jean-Marie Straub confirms the connection between Empedocles and Cézanne runs through Lucrèce and the similarities between the two ancient writers’ cosmogonies and the painter’s own search for the reality of things.
It was also an offer, which con artists could not refuse, to recycle and promote their own work.
The film « user’s manual » also discusses apparently much more down to earth matters, such as the filmmakers’ painstaking effort to film Cézanne’s paintings at such a distance and under such angles that they would suffer absolutely no distortion when shown on screen.
These concerns somehow echo comments by French music composer and conductor Pierre Boulez -famous and notorious for many of the same reasons as Huillet and Straub-, who explained his number one priority, when directing Wagner’s « Ring » in Bayreuth : to ensure the operas « libretti » were perfectly articulated, accented and therefore understandable to the German-speaking audience.
A similar priority seems to have presided, with respect to Hölderlin’s verse, over Huillet-Straub’s « Der Tod des Empedocles », and the film and music directors « back to the basics » comments sound like a pleasant break from the lofty and often inscrutable motives to which they are more often associated.
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