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Jul 06, 2009
Huillet-Straub : off screen entertainment. (6/8)
« Cézanne, dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet » suggests films are only the tip of the Huillet-Straub iceberg.
Watching them is nothing but an initial investment ; additional ones are needed in order to get, hopefully, a pay back.
Like in a poker game, you must increase your stakes for the right to see all of the other players’ hands.
Except for happy few know-it-all, Huillet-Straub films are not self-explanatory : on their own and out of context, they elude you.
As you feel bored, irritated or even cheated, you may call your losses and refuse to know any more about them.
They can alternatively intrigue you into wishing to understand what they are truly about. Oddly, Huillet-Straub movies are teasers.
The incremental effort is often rewarding : « Cézanne, dialogue avec Joachim Gasquet » is nearly fun to watch once you know the film was financed and refused by Musée d’Orsay.
Without the curiosity to check about Joachim Gasquet, Empedocles, Hölderlin, the film remains an enigma at its core and challenges you to try and resolve it through your own creativity and imagination.
Your personal interpretation may run counter to the filmmakers’ intentions, but Huillet-Straub put so few clues in their films they cannot later complain about unexpected and controversial readings of them.
The film background and the way Huillet-Straub discuss its making also suggest doing films which are not very funny may be fun and Huillet-Straub, as individuals, are more entertaining than their cinema : their cult following may have more to do with their personal charisma and characters than with their movies.
In their interviews, both appear like true cinema lovers, « majority cinema » included. Jean-Marie Straub quotes with sardonic pleasure John Ford, who said about -then- contemporary films : « If I had directed them, I would feel in a state of deadly sin ». Many sequences of intense boredom shall be forgiven to filmmakers who like Ford and Renoir.
Jean-Marie Straub can act as grumpy as Ford and displays much more storytelling verve off screen -or on screen but for other directors- than his films do.
Clowns are said to be as funny in the circus ring as dreary out of it. Huillet-Straub may just be the opposite : fun in their privates lives, heavily self-conscious with their « important author »’s mask on.
They seem to take themselves less seriously than their admirers do : did they become prisoners of their own cult ?
They appear too much in control in their image for such a risk and Jean-Marie Straub’s narrative verve seems susceptible to « embellishments » of its own, like Joachim Gasquet’s memory, if only to make a story better.
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