From the Cloud to the Resistance, an incredibly unique and visceral film, comes to the Harvard Film Archive today as part of their retrospective on the prolific duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.  Their many works are intensely concerned with the mechanisms of resistance (as the title of this selection indicates) – usually of the anti-Fascist kind. Thus, their version of cinema commits to the realm of the political through a highly controlled method, composing mythically rich, firmly poetic explorations that subvert the senses – and, by extension, our very conception of consciousness – as well as the typical structure of narrative film.  The setting is first a mythological landscape, later becoming the site of a village with a violent past.  Two texts by the influential Italian writer Cesare Pavese are juxtaposed in this transition, as well as the harsh, cruel realities of the modern and the fabled idealism of the fantastical and allegorical.

In this narrative division between mystic and material reality, Straub-Huillet (as they are most often called, suggesting a single body) demand viewers to provide their undivided attention.  This is the characteristic rigor of Straub-Huillet’s work; their pacing, their specific focus on empty landscapes and space, the composure of their shots and the degree to which they cling, with the camera, to moments where nothing seems to be happening, has led scholars to debate the idea that their films were designed to be seen in a particular way, by a particular audience.  But it is more likely that they had a vision of an audience-in-the-making, in the same way that a political body is constantly reconstituting and reshaping itself to suit the particular demands of history, in all of its explosive capacities. Their work indicates the revolutionary potential of cinema to recreate both the artistic and the political subject, one that engages with their world in the same manner, with the same kind of rigor, that Straub-Huillet demand from their compositions of image and sound.

From the Cloud to the Resistance
1979
dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
105 min.

Screens Saturday, 9/17, 7:00 @Harvard Film Archive
Part of the Harvard Film Archive’s series: ‘Not Reconciled.  The Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’