Quei loro incontri (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Italy/France)

By Olaf Möller

As Venice began, friends of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub said that the couple wouldn’t make it to the festival to present Quei loro incontri (Ces rencontres avec eux/These Encounters of Theirs) in competition: the rumour was that she was ill and he was taking care of her. And besides, they joked, Straub would go ballistic if he saw the security measures the festival had put in place. Sure enough, he sent a short, oft-discussed but seldom appreciated memoire-manifesto about his experiences with Venice, and, quoting Franco Fortini, why a certain kind of terrorism matters. So nobody gave their absence a second thought.

For the last two years, rumours about Straub being seriously ill made the rounds, but nobody ever said anything about Huillet. Then, suddenly, she was gone. Afterwards, it was said that she was diagnosed with cancer last year, and she’d decided to forego treatment. At that point, Huillet and Straub were already at work on Quei loro incontri: the film was shot sometime in summer 2005 and finished by winter 2005-6; their habitual initial presentation of their work as a theatre piece was in late May 2005 (the taping Quei loro incontri. Gli uomini... gli dei is from May 23). As Huillet and Straub claim it took about a year, the work with the actors and the text must have begun in mid-2004. Surely this means that Quei loro incontri was only to be another film in their lifelong struggle, even if its lucidity, serenity, and talk of man’s mortality—and the folly of it all—make it feel like a testament, a quintessential last film.

In fact, Quei loro incontri might not be their final work, as afterwards—or maybe in between—they made an unsigned cinetract called Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre, the first of a series commissioned by Enrico Ghezzi for Fuori Orario (a legendary mavericks-and-visionaries-only Italian TV show) to celebrate Roberto Rossellini’s centenary. Asked to imagine a moment in the life or the death of Ingrid Bergman’s character in Europa ‘51 (1952), their reading of Rossellini yielded a video-ugly pamphlet—as subtle as a knee to the groin—mourning the death of two Parisian youngsters who, chased by the police, hid in a high-voltage electric transformer and burned to death. A little later, the banlieus were burning. The film is like nothing else in Huillet and Straub’s oeuvre since Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (1972), their tract on Modernism and collaborationism, WWII and Vietnam, the Old World, the New World, and the Third World.

Only 12 minutes long, Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre is obviously an incidental work, but it’s nevertheless/therefore important, for it reminds us that Huillet and Straub are political artists who recurrently tackled very real, precise, and timely political subjects, something too many of their self-appointed acolytes couldn’t be bothered with. And even if Straub’s overly judgmental musings get on one’s nerves, they’re still preferable to the docile, “understanding” silences or demagogic ravings which make up the present style of political non-discussions: with Huillet and Straub one can at least fight. They possess unquiet hearts and minds, unreconciled, unconsoled, hopeful. They care.

Like their previous film, Une visite au Louvre (2004), which revisited Cezanne: Conversation with Joachim Gasquet (1989), Quei loro incontri is a return to and a reconsideration of an earlier work, From the Clouds to the Resistance (1978), whose first half, like the whole of Quei loro incontri, is based upon Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. In the earlier film, Huillet and Straub worked with the first plus five more somewhat earlier of Pavese’s 27 dialogues between Hellenic Gods; now it’s the final five. In From the Clouds to the Resistance, Huillet and Straub clad their actors in historical garb, and the characters address each other by their mythological names; in Quei loro incontri the actors wear nondescript clothes, never pretending to represent anybody other than themselves: man-made Gods, literally, who in the first dialogue wonder about why Their Highest went amongst those humans. What fools these immortals be.

From its look and feel, Quei loro incontri is closest to the diptych Operai, contadini (2001) and Il ritorno del figlio prodigo—Umiliati (2003), even if Pavese, as the couple point out, is different from Elio Vittorini. Huillet and Straub date the film 1947-2005: it’s a work from a time after a war. Operai, contadini is set in the aftermath of WWII and tells of the way life begins again, how a new community is forged from the rubble of a culture divided, how by forgiving, by believing, love once again becomes possible. On the other hand, Il ritorno del figlio prodigo—Umiliati talks about how quickly all this ends, for the war continues, as does the struggle.

Accordingly, Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre is a brusque reminder that the war still rages. When Straub in his Venice missive quotes Franco Fortini—“As long as there’s American imperialist capitalism, there can’t be enough terrorists in the world”—it’s effectively a call to arms. Quei loro incontri’s peace, its humble devotion to nature, the skies of our innocence regained/remembered, the soothing greens, sunlight bouncing off leaves in a breeze, and stones slowly smoothed by millennia of rain and wind—this all comes at a price. It has to be fought for: love has its conditions, as does peace, as does serenity. Considering life on philosophical and mythological levels, Huillet and Straub go beyond obvious needs to try looking at us from the perspective of time indefinite, to find new courage in that most essential realization: life has gone on for so long and it should go on, even if right now it looks unlikely. They also know it’s tempting to get lost in those hopeful, melancholic musings, but as long as the war continues, Arcadia remains far distant.

So Quei loro incontri is a paean to mankind’s essential goodness, its potential. Beings from above and beyond, Gods talk about us; they’re sad and not a little disappointed, but still hopeful. Their five dialogues are full of wonder and puzzlement, sorrow and amusement, confidence, even spunkiness. Huillet and Straub present images of light to re-awaken life, images  simple, open, evident, and wedded to each other in a way that never feels forced yet is never taken for granted. These are images that were meant for each other, as a community, a demos. It’s a stable construction so light and transparent one feels as if one could hear its makers’ breaths the way one can hear musicians inhale.

Around the time of From the Clouds to the Resistance, Huillet and Straub were sometimes faulted for believing that there is something like an essence of goodness to be found in simplicity—that humility might be man’s saving grace, that man is, fundamentally and for all his faults, good. Despite ever-gathering evidence to the contrary, their conviction in this has only grown. The second half of From the Clouds to the Resistance comes from Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires. The dialogues tell the story of a burning farm that belonged to an exploiter, of a girl who betrayed the resistance and was shot, her body thrown unceremoniously on a pyre. This functions as a counterweight to the more metaphysical first half, both segments dealing with the question of sacrifices. There is no counterweight in Quei loro incontri: only the presence of a hope and a belief.

—Olaf Möller

Quei loro incontri

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