6 - Industrial Civilization for the Last Time: Class Relations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
This chapter analyses in detail Straub-Huillet's Kafka adaptation Class Relations, with special attention paid to language and power in the film and the filmmakers’ use of space, as this was their first film from which each scene was filmed from only one camera position. What this choice does to the place of the spectator in relation to the film's protagonist is related to the poems George Oppen wrote in his Discrete Series, especially in his effacing the role of an “I” narrator.
Keywords: Kafka, Straub-Huillet, Oppen, Discrete Series, Class Relations
“Above we affirmed that such languages and letters were under the sovereignty of the vulgar of the various peoples, whence both are called vulgar. In virtue of this sovereignty over language and letters, the free peoples must also be masters of their laws, for they impose on the laws the senses in which they constrain the powerful to observe them, even against their will.”
– Giambattista Vico, The New ScienceShot over thirteen weeks from 2 July to 20 September 1983, Class Relations is an important film in Huillet and Straub's work for several reasons. It is their first film shot entirely in black and white since Bridegroom (excluding En rachâchant (1982), which in a certain sense is a preparatory film) and it marks their return to Germany (Hamburg and Bremen), abandoned since 1968, as well as the German language, abandoned since Moses and Aaron. And starting with this film, Straub invented and applied very systematically the principle of the “strategic point”, which causes a shift in the filmmakers’ thinking about the representation of space—a question Straub insisted upon in interviews and that becomes as discriminating for him as the treatment of language.
Trials
Structure
In Class Relations, the idea of a “tribunal” becomes an obsession and, as Narboni describes, the film “establishes a rigorous tribunal staging that makes the articulation, weight, and speed of the legal and procedural words more evident”:
[The actors] are called to testify rather than merely be present on-screen and the entire film unfolds like a legal proceeding. Differences between protagonists and sidekicks, main and secondary characters, heroes and extras are erased in favour of a division of the roles between the accused, judge, prosecutor, lawyer, and witness.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub'Objectivists' in Cinema, pp. 239 - 274Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020