Landscapes of Resistance

Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet - who have lived and worked together for almost forty years - may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. This study traces the career of the two filmmakers and explores their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School. Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Boll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Holderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.