Sabato’s Reviews > Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub > Status Update

- Suspense is generated because something could go wrong, be lost or forgotten. The fictional confrontation with documentary reality traces the border between present and past, between life and living memory and death.

- The historical memory evoked in the audience by a film about a major cultural figure is juxtaposed in the fiction with the private memory of his wife. This memory, in turn, resonates with the tension and use of memory involved in any performance. The musicians and actors are also acting out a memory, both in performing a past composition in the present and in reciting a memorized text. -

The "fiction" of the Bach film is carefully defined as that aspect of the film that arises almost in a shock effect by the confrontation between documentary and fiction. The music and the manuscripts presented to the camera and the documentation of the present performance confront the fiction of Anna Magdalena Bach's remembering these images as her husband. -

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inflation is the death of every economy. it would be best for the words to dismiss their entourage entirely and meet each other with all the dignity they can generate from within themselves. it is quite wrong to say that the classicists forget the senses of the reader; on the contrary, they count on them.

A similar opinion is reflected by Brecht's appeal for the simplicity and freedom of classicism.

on abbreviation in the classical style: if i leave out enough on a page, i receive for the single word "night"—for instance in the phrase "as night came"—a full measure of imagination on the part of the reader.

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The renunciation of the conventions of film language is meant to avoid equivocation, while documenting the reality of contradiction. It is an alternative to the deception and manipulation of the viewer, which convey little "meaning" as far as the world outside the film is concerned. Indeed, such manipulation subtracts more from the viewers' experience than it adds. -

- The Thatcherite aesthetician Roger Scruton thinks it too imprecise a notion for meaningful consideration; but an aesthetician who cannot talk about beauty had better find another line of work. On the left, beauty is suspected both of being elitist, the plaything of a privileged few, and of being a whore seductively selling the ideology of the ruling class. -

A portion of Gilberto Perez's explanation for Godard's recent lack of an audience would apply at least as strongly to Straub/Huillet.
If Godard is out of fashion nowadays, so, in many quarters, is beauty. Postmodernists mostly disown it. As a quality men see in women ("Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing," said Santayana), feminists largely discountenance it. -