May 1 - Danièle Huillet

Happy Birthday, Danièle Huillet (pronounced hwee-YAY)! Born today in 1936, this French film director was half of the fiercely intellectual filmmaking duo Straub–Huillet. This was with her French film director husband Jean-Marie Straub. 

  

Their films are noted for their rigorous, intellectually stimulating style and radical, communist politics. Together, they had made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006. Though both were French, they worked mostly in Germany and Italy. 

  

Among the duo's works, the 1979 Italian drama film 'Dalla nube alla resistenza' ('From the Clouds to the Resistance') and the 1999 Italian black and white drama film 'Sicilia!' ('Sicily!') are their best regarded. 

  

The feature of which they are also best known is their 1982 French/Egyptian documentary film 'Trop tôt/Trop tard' ('Too Early/Too Late'). 

This essay film contrasts Egyptian and French peasant revolts. It also explores the often tentative, yet urgent conditions of revolution. 

  

The film is a sequence of long, panning shots of rural landscapes accompanied by readings of texts about the struggles of poor farmers, followed by another sequence of shots in Egypt.  

  

The film had been inspired by a letter written by German philosopher, historian, communist, social scientist, sociologist, journalist and businessman Friedrich Engels. 

This was of a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime. 

  

It was decade-spanning oeuvre of Straub-Huillet that aimed to spark a revolution among the masses. 

  

American curator for the Museum of Modern Art Joshua Siegel once said of the Straub-Huillet team that they were "One of the most intense, challenging and controversial collaborations in the history of cinema". 

  

Hailed by critics, academics, and filmmakers alike, Straub–Huillet's collection of works is at once among cinema's most pluralistic – spanning shorts and features, documentaries and fiction, contemporary stories and period pieces – and most rigorous, forged by an ascetic and intellectually demanding style. 

  

Huillet had been married to Straub from 1959 until her passing in the Lore Valley in France on October 12, 2006. She was 70.

In May 2001, American film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: This 1981 color documentary by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, one of their few works in 16-millimeter, is almost certainly my favorite landscape film. 

There are no characters in this 105-minute feature about places, yet paradoxically it’s the most densely populated work in their oeuvre to date. 

 

One of the film’s formal inspirations is Beethoven’s late quartets, and its slow rhythm is central to the experience it yields; what’s remarkable about Straub and Huillet’s beautiful long takes is how their rigorous attention to both sound and image seems to open up an entire universe, whether in front of a large urban factory or out on a country road. 

As in Jacques Tati’s studio-made Playtime, their subject is the sheer richness of the world we live in."  

Throughout their career, the duo had completed twenty-seven films together. Huillet's husband Straub currently survives her at 87. 

  

Self-proclaimed materialist filmmakers, Straub-Huillet made films around the concept of "resistance: the resistance of texts to bodies, of location to texts, of bodies to locations." (French movie critic Serge Daney).

French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéme once said of the filmmaking duo: "Who else, in the history of world cinema, has done such a work, which is first respect for the languages that humans speak, respect for the voices of actors, for the meanings of words, and for the identity of spectators? The answer is simple: no one." 

  

Huillet had been active from 1959–2006. 

  

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