Abstract

This chapter defines the scope of the book Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema, beginning with Jacques Rivette's proposal of a kind of ‘objectivity’ in cinema and the ways in which films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet have adhered to it almost to the letter in their use of pre-existing texts adapted seemingly without interpretation. It introduces an American poetry movement, Objectivism, and the poetic theories and axioms of Louis Zukofsky, highlighting their similarities to the filmmaking of Straub and Huillet.

Keywords: Straub-Huillet, Zukofsky, Objectivism

“How many difficulties, all caused by the ‘variables’ of time and change of state, are suggested to informed friends by saying that Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's Iliad, and Pericles his Odyssey. Or by saying that Bach's dates (1685-1750) and Vico's (1668-1744) agree as music-perceived-as-history.”

The first point that strikes the unsuspecting spectator, a few minutes into the film, is the diagrammatic, or rather expository aspect instantly assumed by the unfolding of the images: as though what we were watching were less the mise-en-scène of a script than simply the reading of this script, presented to us just as it is, without embellishment. Without personal comment of any kind on the part of the storyteller either. So one might be tempted to talk about a purely objective mise-en-scène, if such a thing were possible: more prudent, therefore, to suppose this to be some stratagem, and wait to see what happens.