The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach by Straub and Huillet as a Prelude to and Reflection of the (Cinematographic) Transformations of 1968

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Notes

1 This expression from political theory was used, for example, in Tronti (2013) and Bensaid and Krivine (1987).

2 Concerning the end of this cycle of social movements in response to the economic transformations of the seventies, consult this article in relation with the series of changes that occurred in 1979 (Bösch 2016).

3 See, for example, the comments about how the official left fell short when thinking of everyday life, the city, and space that Henri Lefebvre made in Lefebvre (1991), or the critiques that feminist theorists have made against the lack of consideration of sexuality and the role of women in leftist party programmes and writings in Federici (2012), or Arruzza (2013).

4 The world-system theory has been developed by the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein in numerous essays. His aim is to study the economic relationships in history within a global structure or framework, in which the rich nations play a dominant role over the peripheral countries. To study the phenomenon of ’68 it has been applied specifically in Wallerstein (1991, 65–84).

5 For a general overview of ’68, see Ross (2004).

6 Clearly we must say that there was concern for these problems before the cultural context of the revolts that took place in 1968. For example, there were reflections on the relationship with everyday life, sexuality and the role of women in the reproduction of labor in the texts of Aleksándra Kolontái among many others in the 1920s in the Soviet Union. However, we would have to wait until the final years of the sixties and the seventies to see how these questions would lead to a series of social movements and interactions between them. With this in mind, Arruzza writes: “The new feminism developed out of a whole range of the 1960s and 1970s movements – students and youth, new workers’ rebellions, national liberation struggles, civil rights, and black power… Youth rebellions challenged existing society, criticizing not only the relations of production but also social relations. They challenged the stereotypes and frameworks imposed on them, the culture of conformity… They took on authoritarianism and myriad of social power relations.” (Arruzza 2013, 50).

7 As is well-known, this is the title of an essay by Lenin published in 1902 where he presents specific lines about the organization and strategy that the workers’ party should follow. “What is to be done?” is also the title of a manifesto by the Dziga Vertov group (founded by Jean-Luc Godard) which dates back to 1970 in which they plead for directors to make movies “politically” (Il faut faire politiquement des films).

8 See the importance that television had from the beginning of the sixties in the field of the arts by consulting Farmer (2001).

9 For a general overview of the phenomenon of ’68 in the cinema, see Faroult and Leblanc (1998), de Baecque (2008), Atack (1999), Cortés and Fernández-Savater (2008), and Comolli (2012).

10 The concept of heterotopy or “other space” developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault had an enormous impact on the sphere of plastic and visual arts in the seventies and beyond. Specifically the philosopher speaks of it in Foucault (1984).

11 The term Structural Film comes from the theorist P. Adams Sitney and was coined in 1969 to classify a set of films normally created by filmmakers on the New York scene, such as Michael Snow, George Landow, Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, and Ernie Gehr. According to Adams, these filmmakers share the use of a series of techniques such as the flicker effect, the repetition of elements, loops, and fixed camera work, which proved that cinema is a (formal) event in itself. This structural film classification by Adams Sitney, included in his article of the same name, would later receive a response from the English critic Peter Gidal. He expressed his Structuralist/Materialist Film theory in a series of texts. The theory held that cinema that questions the device itself and above all aims for to break down or deconstruct illusionism and traditional narrative structures, as well as to evoke the materiality or physical presence of the images being filmed (see Sitney 1970, 326–348; Gidal 1978). There were many other forms of classifying the cinematographic variety of those years. Peter Wollen, for example, argued that the divide should be made between a current more closely linked to the world of art deeply rooted in the United States and the political cinema led by Godard along with Straub and Huillet that was much more widespread in Europe. See his classic work Wollen (1975). Along these lines, in our article, however, we speak of the two largest pathways in the avant-garde European cinema that emerged around 1968. We use the term analytical, dialectic or structural to designate the current of filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Harun Farocki or Straub and Huillet who were related to the experiences that Adams and Gidal refer to: they also desired to break down or deconstruct illusionism and evoke the materiality or physical presence of the images, questioning the device itself, but also strongly underlining the fact that it was necessary to put the analytical resources of cinema at the service of the new conception of politics that took root in the streets around 1968. As we mentioned above, opposite this analytical current were amateur and radical cinema groups, more concerned with recovering a lost verism in the dominant and commercial cinema to thus document political events. We have thus used the term in that general, comparative or differential sense to refer to the European context.

12 See the classic work Walsh (1981).

13 Godard illustrated this clash of the two attitudes which would lead him to hold a debate with Chris Marker and some of the members of the Medvedkin groups, with this play on words: he would oppose the term cinema-vérité with ciné ma vérité. Concerning this conflict and to discover more about the political cinema groups in general, see Stark (2012).

14 For an analysis of the general characteristics of the feminist cinema of the era, see Kaplan (1983, 83–195). Also McFadden (2016) or Kuhn (1982).

15 We borrow the expression from the fundamental title of the television series, later turned into a book, Ways of seeing (1972) by John Berger, whose intention was precisely to highlight that looking at something or a body is a conscious and political act.

16 At that time, Straub and Huillet lived in Munich, because he had fled France in 1958 in order to avoid being conscripted into the Algerian war (see Fisher 2010, 48). In 2014 Straub filmed The Algerian War!, a short film composed of five shots with Straub’s voice over layered on top of a musical piece by Schubert. The central theme of the film focuses precisely on the circumstance of his desertion. Although the film is only slightly more than 2 min long, it contains different superimposed layers of time, as well as numerous juxtaposed references: psychiatry, politics, personal matters, historical events, individual pain, collective pain, colonial wars, Nazism, and French collaborationism. Straub does not seek to create synthesis between these references, but rather to produce the contingent and traumatic collision between them.

17 As Barton Byg claims: “Although Straub claimed only the title came from Esther Meynell's book, The Little Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, the narrational gesture and the chronological sequence of music and events parallel its structure.”

18 In effect, in both Pasolini and Rocha as well as in Straub and Huillet there is no legacy of the present time but rather we find an inclination for figures such as allegories or parabolas to think of time. That is to say, their films almost always feature a game that superimposes layers of time in a way that never speaks of the present without producing a gaze that grounds its roots in the past, or as Rocha said, in the ages of the earth. Concerning allegories in Pasoloni, see Trentin (2013). Concerning allegories in Rocha, see Xavier (1997). The importance of the past and anachronism in Straub and Huillet has been studied in Asín and González (2016).

19 Taken from Byg (1995, 66).

20 Straub and Huillet, Écrits, 55.

21 Ibid, 107.

22 Ibid, 106.

23 As Deleuze points out: “When speech-acts are taken to be pure, that is, are no longer components or dimensions of the visual image, the status of the image changes, because the visual and the sound have become two autonomous components of a single, truly audio-visual image (e.g., Rossellini). But this movement cannot be stopped: the visual and the sound will give way to two heautonomous images, an auditory image and an optical image, continually separated, dissociated, or unhooked by irrational cuts between them (Robbe-Grillet, Straub, and Marguerite Duras). Nevertheless, the image, having become audio-visual, does not burst into pieces; on the contrary, it gains a new consistency which depends on a more complex link between the visual image and the sound image.” Deleuze (1997, 252).

24 Ibid, 252.

25 A brief comparison between Not Reconciled, whose original title is Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht (Not reconciled or It only helps violence where violence prevails) and Chronicle is enlightening. Both are, in fact, an exercise of historical study of two important transformational periods in German History: the decades following WWII in Not Reconciled, the first half of the eighteenth century in Chronicle. Both narrate the history of individuals who have no intention of reconciling themselves with the society they live in, but rather that they must fight against it: in the first case a family in postwar Germany buoyed by economic growth, but in which the Nazi past is still very much alive; and in the other, we watch Bach’s struggles to defend his interests against guilds, aristocrats, and other authorities. This is what Glauber Rocha commented on concerning Chronicle: “It is the analysis of an era. Bach without reconciliation?”

26 Straub and Huillet, Écrits, 54. This representation of an action or idea by shot was what Glauber Rocha called the “comprehensive shot.”

27 We can say that authors, such as Tronti—and the feminists somewhat later—were slowly noticing throughout 1966, that “the more that capitalist development advances, which is to say, the greater the penetration and extension of the production of relative surplus-value, the more necessarily production-distribution-exchange-consumption form a complete circuit – that is, the relation between capitalist production and society, between factory and society, between society and state, becomes increasingly organic. At the highest level of capitalist development, this social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production, the whole society lives in function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive dominion over the whole society… Yet, when the factory extends its control over the whole society – all of social production is turned into industrial production – the specific traits of the factory are lost amid the generic traits of society.” Taken from Tronti (2019, 49 and 61).

28 Straub and Huillet, Écrits, 54.

29 Ibid.

30 Straub and Huillet, Écrits, 35.

31 Straub and Huillet, Écrits, 53–58.

32 Straub and Huillet, Écrits, 53.

33 See, for example, the diagnosis of 1968 made in the book by Cinzia Arruzza cited above.

34 Straub and Huillet (see note 29 above).

35 Straub and Huillet (see note 34 above).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the MINECO (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiviness) under Grant FFI2015-70273-P, and by a CER-Institut de Cultura (UPF) Aid.

Notes on contributors

Sonia Arribas

Sonia Arribas is Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Department at the Pompeu Fabra University. Her areas of specialization are German critical theory, with an emphasis on literature and visual arts. Her essays have been published in Textual Practice, Oxford German Studies, Studia Neophilologica, Constellations, and in several edited collections.

Irene Valle-Corpas

Irene Valle Corpas is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Granada (research group Observatorio de Prospectiva Cultural). She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Granada. She has published articles on art historiography, cinema, contemporary art, and urban space (that have appeared, among other journals, in Isegoría, Revista de filosofía moral y política, Boletín de arte, and Theory Now. Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought).