The films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub make up a cinematographic constellation; they create radically dialectic, meteoric works that resist any typology. Their films storm and rage, criticise everything and everyone, refuse any compromise: they denounce fascism, capitalism, blind faith in progress, the society of the spectacle. Their cinema is unashamedly political and they use it to claim their unconditional belief in Marxist thought. In Kommunisten (2014), Jean-Marie Straub quotes these sentences from Elio Vittorini: ‘Communism does not want to build a collective soul. It wants to create a society where false differences are abolished. And once they are abolished, all the potentialities of true differences will become available.’

Kommunisten was made after the death of Danièle Huillet in 2006; it presents, in condensed form, in one film, the entire trajectory of the Straub-Huillets, made up of resistance, protests, dialectic anger, refusals to submit. Jean-Marie Straub uses various fragments of their previous films (Workers, Peasants (2001), Black Sin (1988), The Death of Empedocles (1986), Too Early/ Too Late (1981), Fortini/Cani (1976)) to create a homogeneous monument in which words and telluric forces endow the act of resistance with renewed vitality. In Straub’s images, the earth and speech acts are indivisible, and their combined power turns the screen into a dialogic fortress. This is what Gilles Deleuze pointed out:

[In the films of the Straub-Huillets,] history is inseparable from the earth [terre], struggle is underground [sous terre], and if we want to grasp an event, we must not show it, we must not pass along the event, but plunge into it, go through all the geological layers that are its internal history (and not simply a more or less distant past).3

For Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, one of the bloody consequences of capitalism has been the destruction, the negation and the colonisation of nature. Their works never use nature as a backdrop, or pretend to; they never subjugate nature by placing actors in it as if they were pieces on a chessboard. The Straubs, in their later films, strongly advocated for a ‘return to nature’. Nevertheless, even if the two filmmakers sought an open-ended confrontation with the rustling richness of eternal forces, one should not conclude from it that they give in to lyrical nostalgia.