ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

I
n a famously emblematic scene from Godard’s
I Le Mépris [Contempt, 1963] set in a projection
room in Cinecittà, Fritz Lang, archetypal director
of archetypal myths past (Die Nibelungen, 1924),
present (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933),
and futuristic (Metropolis, 1927), now playing
the fictional director of a screen remake of
Homer’s Odyssey, concludes an acrimonious leslie hill
exchange with his producer Jeremy Prokosh
(Jack Palance) by recalling the final stanza of
Hölderlin’s celebrated poem ‘‘Dichterberuf’’ ‘‘O HIMMLISCH
[The Poet’s Vocation], much concerned with
the figure of the artist as mediator between LICHT!’’
humans and the gods. ‘‘Furchtlos bleibt aber, so cinema and the
er es muß, der Mann,’’ quotes Lang, in the
original German, ‘‘/ Einsam vor Gott, es schützet withdrawal of the gods
die Einfalt ihn, / Und keiner Waffen brauchts
und keiner / Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilft (straub - huillet, ho« lderlin,
[Undaunted however man remains, as he must, / godard, brecht)
Solitary before God, simplicity affords him
protection, / And need he has none of either
arms or / Cunning, so long as God’s absence as a medium divided between trade and art,
comes to his aid].’’1 Hölderlin’s closing line, Lang entertainment and propaganda, consumer prod-
explains, was significantly reworked by the poet. uct and aesthetic statement. Spoken by a mythic
It originally ran: ‘‘so lange der Gott nicht fehlet director still searching to represent on screen, as
[so long as the god is not absent].’’ This was then he puts it, the ‘‘fight of the individual against the
amended to read: ‘‘so lange der Gott uns nah circumstances,’’ of ‘‘man against the gods,’’
bleibt [so long as the god remains near to us],’’ Hölderlin’s words are also used to illustrate a
only to be replaced in turn by the version cited in further aspect of cinema’s historical predicament.
the projection room which, though apparently For even as the art of motion pictures (as Lang
contradicting its two predecessors, still offered, insists on calling it) seeks to fulfil its ambition of
according to Lang, a more faithful description of capturing the numinous intensity of worldly
the predicament facing the beleaguered artist. presence by objective means, in André Bazin’s
In the course of Le Mépris, Lang is the source influential formula, so it finds itself, by a
of several other quotations, borrowed for the profound paradox, with no alternative than to
occasion from such authorities as Dante, depict a reality radically bereft of mythic or
Corneille, the Nazis, Sam Goldwyn, or Brecht, sacred transcendence. The gods, in other words,
and each dramatising the contested status of film Lang reminds Prokosh, were not responsible for

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/12/040139^17 ß 2012 Taylor & Francis

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creating man; it was man who created gods. Or as was forcibly excluded, left unspoken and unseen,
Jean-Luc Nancy more recently concluded, by the dialectic of representation? Was cinema’s
project of taking possession of the real in that
[c]inema is indeed the art – at any rate the sense an act of sacrificial resurrection or an
technology – of a world that suspends myths.
exercise in sacrificial ruination, an enduring
Even when it puts itself in the service of
consecration of the visible or its sceptical
myths, it always ends up, at the limit, by
sweeping them aside, dragging each and every
dismantling? In a world without gods, was it the
epiphany of meaning and immobile presence task of cinema to fill the resulting void or to
into the evidentiality of movement. A world exacerbate its emptiness? The question is one that
that keeps moving, keeps going from one film Godard’s film omits or, better, refuses to answer,
to another, and tells, very slowly, of another knowing as it does that the one is never possible
way to make sense.2 without the risk or promise of the other.
At the end of Le Mépris, as failed scriptwriter
And this is why, when faced with Homeric myth, Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) departs from the film
not to mention cinema’s own legendary past, as set in Capri, leaving Prokosch and his estranged
embodied in the figure of Lang himself, alongside wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) both spectacularly
the memory of the early United Artists of dead, the sacrificial victims of a vengeful encoun-
Griffiths and Chaplin, to whom the film also ter between an Italian fuel tanker and a red Alfa
pays passing homage, all Le Mépris can do, Romeo sports car, the fictional Lang, aided by
beyond all possible nostalgia, is to offer its own Godard in the role of assistant director, speaks of
vision of disenchantment in return, ironically the need always to finish what one has started. An
emphasising the contemporary world’s tawdry end appears in view. But as far as the final shot of
alternatives – its plaster-of-Paris gods and demi- Le Mépris is concerned, notwithstanding the
gods, its vainglorious producers and promoters, confidence with which Ulysses’ imminent return
its stereotyped starlets and secretaries, its latter- to Ithaca is announced, the errant hero’s home-
day blind husbands and foolish wives – in the land remains stubbornly out of sight, featuring at
hope that, in voicing its distress, like Hölderlin’s best as an almost imperceptible trace on the
poem, Godard’s film might all the more power- horizon (see Fig. 1). There is no safe return to the
fully testify to cinema’s future, in so far as what island, no discovery by Telemachus, no recogni-
now comes to its assistance is not the secret tion by Penelope, no intervention of the gods.
persistence of the gods, nor their covert proxim- The finality to which the artwork is said to aspire
ity, but, more radically still, their enduring is given only in the form of infinite suspension.
absence. The end provides no closure, then, merely a
True enough, the verdict remains an ambigu- lingering silence (‘‘silenzio,’’ viewers may recall,
ous one. Was it that the withdrawal of the gods is the last word in the film). So if the essence of
now meant humans could reign supreme, shaping cinema, according to Bazin, lay in its singular
the world in their image and subjecting it to their ability to preserve the spatio-temporal continuity
mastery, or was it that, denied divine protection, of worldly experience, it was only thanks to
they would now be forever prey to metaphysical something else – not least the possibility of
anxiety? If it was true, for instance, in the spatio-temporal differentiation in general – that,
apocryphal words attributed to Bazin at the end prior to all worldly experience, necessarily pre-
of the credit sequence of Le Mépris (but which ceded and exceeded the visible frame as such. As
the film in fact did little to endorse), that Bazin conceded, realism was never whole. ‘‘It will
‘‘cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that always be necessary,’’ he put it in an essay on
corresponds to our desires,’’ was this to celebrate Welles and Rossellini, ‘‘to sacrifice something of
film’s transfigurative power or to condemn it for reality to reality.’’3 Realism in the cinema, then,
its monocular voyeurism? Was it the role of the relied less on what it showed than on what it
image to redeem the world by sacrificing it to its excluded from show, from which it followed that
own spectacle or to seek to respond to that which cinema might deliver the sensuous presence of

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Fig. 1. ‘‘Ulysses’ first gaze upon seeing his homeland again.’’ Le Me¤pris, Rome ^Paris Films, Concordia, and Compagnia
Cinematografia Champion,1963.

the visible only by dint of something that resists nothingness lingers, and the entire power of the
presence and, being neither visible nor invisible, image can be expressed only by appealing to
subsists only in the manner of a ghostly sacrificial that nothingness. One ought perhaps to add,
too: that the image, which has the capacity to
remnant or remainder.
negate nothingness, is also the gaze of nothing-
Cinema, wrote André Malraux in 1946, did not
ness upon us. The image is light, and nothing-
begin with the moving image, but the sequential ness immeasurably heavy; the image glimmers,
composition of shots, not with spectacle as such, while nothingness is the diffuse impenetrability
therefore, but its interruption.4 Before it was an in which nothing is shown.5
art of the visible, then, film arguably had deeper
roots elsewhere, in the deferral of all immediacy, ‘‘C’est très étrange,’’ murmurs Lang, now speak-
even in the intimate exteriority of touch perhaps, ing in French, as he ponders the implications of
as suggested, with a nod to Diderot and Hölderlin’s final revision. How to say this in
Wittgenstein (perhaps even Derrida too), by the Italian?, he asks his interpreter Francesca Vanini
figure of Godard’s blind film editor in JLG/JLG: (Georgia Moll). ‘‘Strano,’’ she replies, and as this
autoportrait de décembre (1995), as she navigates Babelian exchange confirms, it is as though,
her way through lengths of celluloid by hand, together with the departure of the gods, so too the
carefully counting frames in her head, as though promise of universal language embodied in the
traversing a foreign country inhabited not by medium of cinema, as glimpsed by such early
people or things but by their invisible doubles. pioneers as Lang and others, has henceforth also
Never one, always two: such is every image; and been withdrawn, leaving in its wake a modern
this explains Godard’s enduring fascination with world – the world of cinema described in the cod
a passage from an essay on Malraux by Maurice quotation from Bazin – characterised only by
Blanchot, probably first read by the future infidelity, incommunicability, and misunder-
filmmaker as early as 1951 and subsequently standing. With this shattering of shared language
recycled, in adjusted and often fragmentary form, and purpose, suggests Godard, now taking a leaf
in such later works as Histoire(s) du cinéma out of Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia [Journey to
(1998), Éloge de l’amour (2001), and Notre Italy, 1953], without, however, indulging the
mythic prospect of final reconciliation through
musique (2003), not forgetting The Old Place
the Virgin Mary (thanks to whose iconic inter-
(1999) done in collaboration with Anne-Marie
vention the marital difficulties of Rossellini’s
Miéville. Cinema, ran the passage, duly rephrased
couple are magically resolved), what remains is
by Godard,
mere contempt, a deleterious and nihilistic
had nothing to fear from others or from itself. It disregard for art, love, and myth.
was not sheltered from time, but was a shelter Unless, of course, it is the reverse, unless it is
for time. Yes, the image is joy – but alongside it the radical absence of universal language, the

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radical absence of shared values, and the radical suspending it, challenged the politico-religious
absence of myth itself, that, like other art forms, power of the dialectic of sacrifice itself.
makes cinema possible at all. ‘‘Nah ist / Und
schwer zu fassen der Gott [Near is / And hard to
II
grasp the god],’’ Hölderlin went on, in his poem
‘‘Patmos,’’ before adding, in a much-cited phrase, Throughout the twentieth century, in the work of
that ‘‘Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende Benjamin, Heidegger, Blanchot, Adorno, Lacoue-
auch [Where however there is danger, grows / Labarthe, Nancy, and others, the afterlife of
Too that which saves].’’6 In which case the future Hölderlin’s poetry is extensive. Filmic treat-
of cinema might be thought not to lie in its ments, not surprisingly, are, however, few and
technological prowess, its attempts, through ever far between. But three times over, between 1986
more dazzling visual or auditory effects, to and 1992, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub,
capture presence and, ensnaring audiences in a having already based films on texts by Böll,
sacrificial, identificatory dialectic of investment Corneille, Brecht, Schoenberg, Fortini, Mallarmé,
and return, reinforce the hegemony of what Guy Pavese, Engels, and Kafka,9 turned their atten-
Debord in La Société du spectacle in 1967, and tion first to the initial, abandoned version of
again in the 1973 film of the same name, Hölderlin’s tragedy or mourning play Der Tod
accompanying his words with various appropri- des Empedokles [The Death of Empedocles,
ately inappropriate citational images, famously 1798], which they filmed on location in Sicily,
denounced not as ‘‘a supplement to the real world and again, two years later, to the similarly
nor its surface decoration’’ but as ‘‘the very heart unfinished third version of the play (1799),
of the unreality of real society.’’ ‘‘In all its which they also shot on location, before finally
particular forms, as information or propaganda, putting on (at the Berlin Schaubühne in May
advertising or the direct consumption of enter- 1991) and subsequently filming (in Sicily’s
tainment,’’ he went on, ‘‘the spectacle constitutes ancient Teatro di Segesta) Hölderlin’s translation
the present model of socially dominant life.’’7 of Sophocles’ Antigone, not, however, in the
If so, the crisis of the end of cinema diagnosed poet’s original 1804 version but the reworked
in Le Mépris might prove to be the seventh art’s stage adaptation done by Brecht in 1948 shortly
most precious resource, and the realisation that after his return to Europe after a decade and a
‘‘cinema was an invention without a future,’’ half in exile, spent partly in Hollywood (Lang in
according to Louis Lumière’s now proverbial Le Mépris, it will be remembered, quotes
response in 1895 to Georges Méliès (or, according Brecht’s 1942 poem ‘‘Hollywood,’’ misdescribing
to some commentators, to Félix Mesguich), it, however, as drawn from the writer’s 1922
ironically displayed in Italian beneath the autobiographical ballad ‘‘Vom armen B.B. [Of
screen in Godard’s Cinecittà projection room, Poor B.B.]’’ – not least in order to draw attention
similarly reveal itself in the end, beyond the to the initials of the film’s female star, who, like
power of any model, to be a sign of cinema’s the would-be screenwriter, was similarly caught
perpetual rebeginning – as always other than what up in sacrificing herself to the exploitative,
it seemed. For in this absence of a future prostitutional economy of the spectacle).
(Lumière, out of magnanimity or, more likely, Three films, then, whose titles, long and short,
economic self-interest, was in fact alluding to the each in fact a quotation, range from the revision-
limited commercial prospects of the cinemato- ist to the allusive to the circumstantial: Der Tod
graph)8 there also spoke perhaps the promise of a des Empedokles, oder Wenn dann der Erde Grün
different modality of what was to come: i.e., not von neuem euch erglänzt [The Death of
the future as the living present endlessly Empedocles, or When the Green of Earth Now
reproduced but the future as what resisted the Glistens in Your Eyes Anew, 1986]; Schwarze
present and, transforming it into the flickering Sünde [Black Sin, 1988]; and Die Antigone des
alterity of a projecting machine, radically Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung
deferred spectacle and, interrupting or für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht (Suhrkamp

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Verlag, 1948) [Sophocles’ Antigone Based on the same as the others, as far as camera position,
Hölderlin’s Translation, as Adapted for the camera angle, use of lens, shot length, editing, or
Stage by Brecht (published by Suhrkamp, 1948), spoken text were concerned, but each differing
1992].10 But these three films were not three, as from the others, at times almost imperceptibly,
though preparing some final summation, but by dint of the film material used. So, while
already several. The 1986 film, for instance, remaining entire in itself, each version also
exists in four concurrent prints, each comprising carried a distinctive signature of its own, less
the same 147 shots, but differing in so far as an overt proof of its identity with itself, however,
alternative take of each shot was selected, than a covert sign of its divergence from its three
displaying minor variations in the actors’ perfor- invisible or silent companions. Variation here was
mance, the quality of the light (due to the no longer secondary, affecting only what was
changeable weather), or the unscripted interven- already identifiable as such, but primary, consti-
tion of this or that background sound or other tutive of the actuality of each film text. For
contingent circumstance. The first, most widely Straub and Huillet, filming Der Tod des
available cut, known as the Berlin version (since Empedokles was no longer a matter of preserving
it was first shown at the Berlin Film Festival), is on screen the immediacy of a given pro-filmic
distinguished by a lizard scurrying for a second or performance but, beyond narrative and beyond
two across the lower part of the frame during the spectacle, of accentuating the infinite variability
sequence roughly halfway through the film in and recalcitrant materiality of the audiovisual
which Empedocles liberates his three slaves, text. Viewers of Straub and Huillet’s film(s) were
while the second or Paris version, delivered for no longer confronted with a subservient adapta-
subtitling and international distribution to the tion of a neglected literary classic, but a series of
Films du Losange (who co-produced the film), carefully choreographed, singular iterations of
began more gloomily, before brightening up as Hölderlin’s unfinished play, the effect of which,
the sun came out. The third, Hamburg version, four times over, differentiating the work from
completed with a class of students at the city’s itself by repeating it as other than it was, was to
Filmhaus in March 1987, is characterised after resist the assimilation of Der Tod des
some twenty-two minutes of screen time, just as Empedokles, both the film(s) and the literary
the protagonist berates himself for his hubris, by work(s), as an object of spectacular, ideological
the sound of a cock crowing, while the fourth, consumption.
‘‘Cricket version,’’ has insects chirping off-screen This approach adopted by Huillet and Straub
during the scene with the slaves. A further was no simple stylistic or auteurist formula. It
hallmark of the four versions was the layout of was prompted not only by a desire to challenge
the opening and closing credits: now aligned left the prevailing politics of film production and
(Berlin), now right (Hamburg), now centred in distribution but also by the specific nature of the
French (Paris), now centred in German Empedokles material itself. For in the case of
(‘‘Cricket’’). And there were significant differ- Hölderlin’s text, too, there was a vertiginous
ences too in the processing of the four prints.11 proliferation of variant manuscript readings of
This multiplication of parallel film texts which it was often impossible to tell what was due
meant, of course, that none of the extant versions to be retained and what was due for deletion. This
of Der Tod des Empedokles could be considered was no haphazard circumstance. It was evidence
as more or less authoritative than any of the of the poet’s own struggle, in each of the three
others (in principle, given the footage available, versions of the tragedy, amidst numerous other
comprising more than twenty alternate takes of historical, political, and personal upheavals, to
the same shot in some cases, several more stage that culminating, yet perpetually deferred
versions could have been made). There was, in and ultimately impossible moment of self-sacri-
other words, no privileged master text, but in its fice by which his protagonist would plunge into
place a repetitive series of precisely calculated yet the volcano at Mount Etna (as the historical
forcibly provisional versions, each almost exactly Empedocles is reputed to have done in the early

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fifth century BCE) in order to reconcile the epoch proof, so to speak, of the status of Stroheim’s own
with itself by way of a spectacular fusion of the movies as sacrificial remnants of a career blighted
finite with the infinite, history with eternity, man by intolerance – Straub reached for a word to
with nature. This was the plan adumbrated in the describe this ability of film, at least under certain
early (and the only complete) synopsis of the play circumstances, to render the elemental existence
written in Frankfurt in the summer of 1797. It of things, figures, space, even the air. That word
was never carried through to its conclusion, was: monumentality. ‘‘An image,’’ he explained,
however. The failure, in part, was a result of what ‘‘somehow has to stand upright. It’s not some-
Hölderlin’s Empedocles had endeavoured to thing arbitrary. When an image stands up, it
overcome from the outset, addressing his com- describes nothing. An image exists in itself.’’12
plaint to the Kant of the first Critique, i.e., ‘‘the Der Tod des Empedokles was not the first time
law of succession,’’ that law of temporal sequenti- that Huillet and Straub had sought to harness
ality, of one thing after another, without which, the audiovisual text’s powers of resistance in this
almost exactly a century later, however much way. It is a signature effect common to all the
Lumière at times may have delighted in reversing pair’s films, from their two earliest film projects
its effects (witness the famous sequence in which onwards. These were first conceived in the mid-
a recently demolished wall is rebuilt by the to late 1950s, but came to fruition only a decade
simple expedient of running the film backwards), or more later: Chronik der Anna Magdalena
the cinematograph could not have been invented Bach (1967) and Moses und Aron (1974). Like
at all. Der Tod des Empedokles, which it preceded by
Hölderlin’s unfinished story of Empedocles some twelve years, the 1974 film was also an
was therefore not indifferent to cinema. The rock unfinished story of sacrifice interrupted. It was
on which it foundered, and was the reason for its based on Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron,
obstinate resistance to the prospect of comple- which the composer began writing in July 1930 in
tion, as Straub and Huillet’s multiplication of Lugano, against the sinister backdrop of political
film texts shows, was that the dialectic of sacrifice developments in Germany, and abandoned in
never occurred without remainder. Something Barcelona in March 1932, after completing the
ruinous or ruined (though not necessarily any- second of a projected three acts.13 For their film
thing negative) was always left, challenging the version Straub and Huillet insisted on shooting in
success, even the possibility, of the operation the open, in the amphitheatre at Alba Fucense in
itself. Sacrifice, then, was not all, and, for the Abruzzo, and using direct sound, as least as far as
exact same reason, much the same was true of the singers and chorus were concerned (the
spectacle. By exposing the idea of the finished orchestra under the direction of Michael Gielen
artwork to the contestatory force of its always recorded its part in Vienna). Unlike other
alternative, residual versions, what Huillet and directors in the 1970s and after, Straub and
Straub reaffirmed was the capacity of film in Huillet, in making an operatic film, were not,
general, and their own film(s) of Der Tod des however, intent on creating a culturally presti-
Empedokles in particular, to resist the power of gious object of aesthetic consumption. Rather,
the dialectic of sacrifice. It owed that resistance, their film sought to respond to the historical
however, not to extreme visual effects or gran- circumstances in which Schoenberg’s opera was
diloquent verbal declarations but to its painstak- written, and arguably because of which it had
ingly precise and densely recalcitrant literalism. remained unfinished, and in that sense to explore
Speaking with Manfred Blank apropos the films through the medium of film the relationship
of von Stroheim, notably an early silent such as between religion, politics, and art in the latter
Foolish Wives (1922), with its elaborate studio half of the twentieth century. In 1972 Huillet and
reconstruction of Monte Carlo, or even a later Straub had already announced as much with a
sound film such as Hello, Sister! (1933, originally sixteen-minute short presenting Schoenberg’s
Walking Down Broadway), from which the future soundtrack for an absent film, his 1930
director was removed by studio heads – silent Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene

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[Accompanying Music to a Film Scene, op. 34], of an unresolved contradiction or, perhaps more
which they placed in its historical context, before accurately, a radical aporia. At any event, it
and during a performance of the music itself, by plunges Moses into despair: ‘‘So war alles
stressing Schoenberg’s subtitle (‘‘Drohende Wahnsinn, / was ich gedacht habe,’’ he cries, ‘‘/
Gefahr, Angst, Katastrophe,’’ i.e., ‘‘Imminent und kann, / und darf nicht gesagt werden! [So
Danger, Fear, Catastrophe’’) and having a col- everything was madness / that I thought, / and
laborator seated in a recording studio read on- cannot, / may not be spoken!].’’ At this point, Act
screen, in irregular, syncopated fashion, a series III was due to start. What followed was scripted
of extracts from two letters by Schoenberg to by Schoenberg, and, importantly, filmed by
Kandinsky (written 19 April and 4 May 1923) Straub and Huillet, but no music written,
protesting at what the composer judged to be the interrupting Moses’ theocratic, nation-building
latter’s anti-Semitism. There followed the reading project and forcing it to stall.
of a passage from Brecht’s June 1935 speech to The predicament was simultaneously theolog-
the First International Writers’ Congress in Paris, ical, political, and aesthetic. Cinema, at any
insisting on the deep complicity between fascism event, was not immune from its implications. As
and capitalism, which in turn gave way to a series Huillet and Straub embarked on their film, they
of images including a famous photograph of the too therefore were necessarily drawn, within the
murdered Communards of 1871, a sequence work itself, to explore its conditions of possibil-
showing bombs being readied and dropped ity. Not only did they push the technical
from B-52s on Vietnam, and two news cuttings feasibility of the project to its limit with their
reporting the acquittal of the architects respon- uncompromising commitment to shooting in the
sible for designing the Auschwitz gas chambers at open with direct sound (and only succeeded in
their trial in Vienna in March 1972.14 this thanks to their veteran sound engineer, Louis
The aim was not, however, to exploit Moses Hochet), they also thereby forced the film to
und Aron for any narrow, dogmatic agenda, but confront and reflect upon its dense materiality as
to respond to a broader set of artistic and political audiovisual text. Explicit in Schoenberg’s biblical
concerns. For not unlike Hölderlin at the close of story was the conflict between two seemingly
the eighteenth century, Schoenberg in the early irreconcilable logics or economies of the image.
twentieth century faced a difficult challenge. Just The first was that of Moses, which, allegedly
as Hölderlin had to contend with the problem of grounded in a refusal of all representation, finds
emulating the model of ancient Greek tragedy, so appropriately nondescript embodiment in the
Schoenberg had to come to terms with the legacy burning bush (Schoenberg’s text calls it a thorn-
of Wagner. Such was the prestige of the bush) from which an off-screen voice emerges,
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, comments demanding blind submission to its austere
Lacoue-Labarthe, that all subsequent writing for authority. The second was that of Aron, who
opera is forced to ponder the question of its allows the Israelites to indulge in ritualistic
possibility as opera at all.15 This Moses und Aron idolatry, as represented by the spectacle of the
does in various ways, most audibly by giving its golden calf, before which offerings are made,
protagonists two strongly contrasting vocal styles, involving displays of human nudity and the
rugged baritone Sprechgesang here (Moses), killing of animals. Between the one and the other
mellifluous fully-scored tenor there (Aron). And the antagonism is clear. What both share,
it was not by accident that Schoenberg’s music however, is an appeal to sacrifice. Aron’s predi-
came to a sudden halt at the end of Act II, just as lection for graven images plainly testifies as
Moses, tongue-tied and inarticulate, gropes in much. But Moses’ injunction to his people is no
vain for the word that might bridge the chasm less unforgiving, as suggested from the outset by
between the human and the divine and allow him Huillet and Straub’s brief prologue picturing
to express the inexpressible thought of an Luther’s translation of Exodus 32.25–28, read off-
unrepresentable God. That word, however, screen by Huillet, reminding viewers of Moses’
remains absent, the victim, suggests Adorno,16 righteous indignation culminating in the slaying

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Fig. 2. ‘‘One, Eternal, Omnipresent, Invisible, and Unrepresentable God!’’ Moses und Aron, O«sterreichischer Rundfunk
(ORF) and Arbeitsgemeinschaft der o«ffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD),
1974.

of some three thousand Israelites. ‘‘Der Einzige, in three roughly equal parts, done with a 75 mm
Ewige, Allmächtige, Allgegenwärtige, lens. During the first part (40 3500 ), the camera,
Unsichtbare, Unvorstellbare, verlangt kein without moving, frames the back of Moses’ head
Opfer von euch [The One, the Eternal, the and left shoulder while he addresses or is
Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, the Invisible, the addressed by the voice in the thorn-bush, sung
Unrepresentable, desires no sacrifice from you],’’ off-screen by a group of six solo voices (see
Moses declares, only then to decree, thereby Fig. 2). As Moses protests his slowness of speech,
aggravating the burden rather than relieving it, the camera embarks on a gradual, regular left-
that God ‘‘will nicht den Teil, er fordert das hand pan (lasting 30 0500 ), following the ruined
Ganze [wants not the part, but demands the perimeter of the amphitheatre and the line of
whole].’’ As Aron later suggests, the difference rocks and vegetation forming the near horizon,
here between himself and Moses is arguably less lingering in particular on the contrast between
one of kind than of degree. The fate of the two the ground and the blue but cloudy sky,
brothers hangs together, with the risk that defeat eventually covering some 300 , before finally
for Aron may also mean defeat for Moses, in coming to rest on two distant mountains com-
which case responsibility for the promised land of prising the far horizon (see Fig. 3), just as the
the future would fall to neither prophet, but, voice of God tells Moses of the Exodus of the
beyond representation or nationhood, to the Jews that is to come. The camera holds that
Jewish people alone. position for a further two minutes as Moses
Schoenberg makes little secret of his own listens in silence to the voice enjoining him to
preference for Moses. But Straub and Huillet’s obey, before fading to black. Throughout, Huillet
film is more reserved, more wary of the contra- and Straub’s camera obstructs the viewer’s desire
diction in Moses’ position, not least because of for spectacle. The voice in the thorn-bush is
the different attention it needs to pay to the refused visibility, and a similar withdrawal affects
materiality of visible space, making it less prone Moses too, whose face is not properly seen even
to assimilation by theology. A single example once. Emphasis, then, falls not on the protago-
may suffice. The opening sequence in the film is nists, human or divine, whether characters or
photographed in a single shot, some 90 4000 long, performers, but on the material space in which

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Fig. 3. ‘‘I will lead you there, where you will be at one with the Eternal and an example to all peoples.’’Moses und Aron,
ORF and ARD,1974.

the encounter between God and man, if it instance, was still traumatised by the legacy of
happens, is staged. Passing in the course of a that vicious circle of sacrificial violence resulting
single shot through three distinct phases, now from government reaction to left-wing terrorism
immobile and close at hand, now mobile and and vice versa during the previous decade, as the
surveying the limits of the space within which it collectively authored film Deutschland im Herbst
is confined, now immobile again and reaching [Germany in Autumn] (Böll, Brustellin, Cloos,
into the distance, the camera offers a dynamic, Fassbinder, Kluge, Mainka, Reitz, Rupé,
iterative counterpart to the musical score, sub- Schlöndorff, Sinkel, and Steinbach, 1978), using
jecting pro-filmic space to spiralling centrifugal as its main structuring device an updated version
pressure, and exposing to the force of the outside of the story of Antigone, duly testified. In Italy,
not only the area first seen by the viewer, too, against a backdrop of continuing political
occupied by Moses alone, but also the bounded violence, the so-called years of lead (‘‘anni di
ancient arena inside which the other performers, piombo’’) took their toll, while in France the
including, most importantly of all, the chorus, failures associated with the Mitterrand presidency
i.e., the Jewish people, will later appear, not were likewise a major source of disillusionment
forgetting those unbounded, far-off lands towards with politics in general, further evidence for which
which the Jews, leaving Egypt at last, according lay not only in the decline of the once-influential
to God’s covenant with Moses, but without Communist Party but also the rise of the violently
knowing where they were heading, would in the demagogic Front National. In Eastern Europe,
end seek freedom for themselves and others. too, disquiet prevailed. As repressive, dysfunc-
Straub and Huillet’s camerawork remains insis- tional regimes clung to power, if only for a short
tently literal. Immanence takes precedence over while longer, there was mounting concern that
transcendence, resistance over revelation, matter popular insurgency might be exploited to benefit
over myth, fragment over fulfilment. the reintroduction of free-market capitalism. It
was only a matter of time before Francis
Fukuyama, from the heights of the RAND
III Corporation, would declare an end to history.17
In the Europe of the 1980s, politics in the eyes of What better moment, then, to reaffirm
many had reached an impasse. West Germany, for the unfulfilled promise of communism? But, if

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so, how to refound something resembling narrowness of his own epoch.21 (Some, like
politics? Peter Weiss in his 1971 play Hölderlin, would
Huillet and Straub were not alone in raising attribute the poet’s later madness to a despairing,
these questions. During the early part of the self-destructive gesture of political protest.) And
decade, in response to the crisis with which in Robespierre’s attempts in 1794 to replace the
politics was increasingly synonymous, Lacoue- Christianity of old with the new Cult of the
Labarthe and Nancy had similarly launched an Supreme Being Hölderlin may have found sup-
inquiry into the foundations of the political. They port for his own aspirations to found ‘‘a new
concentrated attention on two notable test cases. mythology’’ and ‘‘new religion,’’ as explained in
The first was Heidegger, whose disastrous polit- that influential document from 1795 or 1796,
ical involvements in 1933 and after were no doubt ‘‘The Oldest Systematic Programme of German
in part what lay behind the notorious claim, made Idealism,’’ of which, alongside Hegel and
in his posthumous 1976 Spiegel interview, that Schelling, he is generally credited with being
‘‘only another God can save us.’’18 The second the author.22
was Bataille, whose politics could not have been At the heart of Straub and Huillet’s engage-
more different, but who in 1959, as he looked ment with Hölderlin, then, lay the question of a
back at his own pre-war political activities, possible refoundation of the political. ‘‘No polit-
nevertheless found himself ruefully conceding ical film without morality,’’ Straub once put it,
that the error had been ‘‘if not to found a echoing Péguy, ‘‘no political film without theol-
religion, at least to go part of the way towards ogy, no political film without mysticism.’’23 In
it.’’19 Notwithstanding their divergences, what this regard, there was direct continuity between
the work of the two men exemplified, according Moses und Aron and Der Tod des Empedokles.
to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, was the tenacious The one ended, Huillet and Straub agreed, where
and potent influence of the profound nexus the other began.24 Both took place at a time of
binding art, religion, and politics under the upheaval, as one theological edifice, legal frame-
tutelage of myth. And myth, they argued, in turn work, political power, or conception of the
relied on a dialectic of sacrifice whose roots were artwork gave way to another, resulting in an
deeply embedded in the history of the West. interregnum in which what was at stake was the
‘‘Nothing, perhaps, designates the West more promise or threat of the future. Both texts,
precisely (albeit obscurely),’’ Nancy observed in moreover, were stories of sacrifice, and it is
1989, ‘‘than the dialectical assumption, or sub- notable that in developing Der Tod des
sumption, of sacrifice.’’20 Empedokles Straub and Huillet drew on two
Straub and Huillet’s turn to Hölderlin in the other films: Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky
mid-1980s could not, then, have been more (1938) and John Ford’s Seven Women (1966),
timely. Hölderlin too had begun work on Der both of which are likewise stories of heroic
Tod des Empedokles at a time of contestation and sacrificial deeds, constitutive as such of political,
disillusionment in the wake of the French religious, moral authority.25
Revolution, of which he was initially a fervent Der Tod des Empedokles is in two acts made
supporter. Indeed, alongside the difficulties of up of nine scenes of varying length. The plot is
the material itself, it is often argued that a further quickly summarised. Like Hölderlin’s play,
reason for Hölderlin’s failure to complete the play which it follows closely, the film opens with the
was the collapse in Spring 1799 of prospects for a protagonist’s fall from grace. Empedocles
democratic Swabian Republic on the French (Andreas von Rauch), thinker, poet, healer, in
model. For it was in the context of that desired an exuberant act of hubris, has declared himself a
outcome, according to Pierre Bertaux, that in his god, and been responsible for much wild cele-
novel Hyperion (written 1792–98) Hölderlin had bration on the part of the townsfolk. The
first turned to Empedocles, in the hope of finding authorities, however, the priest Hermocrates
in the willing self-sacrifice of ‘‘the great Sicilian’’ (Howard Vernon) and the archon Critias
an heroic alternative to the Procrustean (William Berger), whose daughter Panthea

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Fig. 4. ‘‘This is the time of kings no longer.’’ DerTod des Empedokles, Janus Film and Les Films du Losange,1986.

(Martina Baratta) was once saved by Empedocles die Augen auf zur göttlichen Natur, / wenn
and remains devoted to him, have become dann der Geist sich an des Himmels Licht /
intensely suspicious of the protagonist and suc- entzündet, süßer Lebensothem euch / den
cessfully turn the city of Acragas against him, not Busen, wie zum erstenmale tränkt . . .
least because of his uneven temper. Angry and [So, dare to act! what you have inherited and
resentful, Empedocles is banished from the city, acquired, / what the lips of your forefathers
and together with his youthful follower Pausanias have told and taught you, / laws and customs,
(Vladimiro Baratta) is next found climbing the and the names of ancient gods, / boldly forget
slopes towards Etna. But a sudden reversal all this, and lift up your eyes, / as if born anew,
intervenes. Brought closer to nature, to godly nature, / when then the spirit with
Empedocles now declares himself reconciled heaven’s light / ignites, life’s sweet breath fills
/ your bosom as from the very first . . .].
with gods and men. Immediately after, represen-
tatives of the townsfolk, having now changed Again done in a single shot, now lasting some
their allegiance, accompanied by Hermocrates 50 1500 , the whole speech is delivered off-screen,
and Critias, come to find Empedocles to invite with the camera lingering motionless on the
him to become king. He refuses, explaining, in an grassland and the woods leading up to Etna, just
obvious reference to January 1793, that ‘‘Diß ist about visible in the distance, while the wind
die Zeit der Könige nicht mehr [This is the time ruffles the grass and treetops, and the sun dims
of kings no longer]’’ (see Fig. 4). and brightens with the passing clouds, creating a
He goes on to deliver a lengthy speech, from subtly shifting visual text, silently responding to
which the film’s subtitle is taken, urging a future the protagonist’s words (see Fig. 5). Some twenty
in which act and glory will be shared and each minutes later, for the closing 20 3000 of the film,
will be the same as all: the camera returns to a similar shot, pointing
So wagts! was ihr geerbt, was ihr erworben, / slightly higher and further into the distance.
was euch der Väter Mund erzählt, gelehrt, / Empedocles declares his joy, and the film ends
Gesez und Bräuch, der alten Götter Nahmen, / abruptly, leaving the same Bach violin sonata
vergeßt es kühn, und hebt, wie Neugeborne, / featured at the beginning of the film to play out

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Fig. 5. ‘‘So, dare to act!’’ DerTod des Empedokles, Janus Film and Les Films du Losange,1986.

the closing credits, followed by the ominous redrafting his play, Hölderlin, it is sometimes
sound of thunder – or Etna erupting. (In May argued, was finding his way towards a dramatic
1830, on the eve of the July Revolution, the language entirely his own. Huillet and Straub’s
French politician Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy, film proves similarly distrustful of ready-made
during a state visit by the king of the Two theatrical idiom. The treatment of the sometimes
Sicilies, famously remarked to the future king, convoluted syntax of Hölderlin’s prosody is
Louis-Philippe: ‘‘Please note the very Neapolitan particularly striking. Disregarding the frequency
Feast: we are dancing on a volcano!’’) with which Hölderlin’s clauses spill over into two
The dramaturgy adopted by Huillet and or more lines of verses, and likewise ignoring
Straub was nothing if not distinctive. The film’s those cases where periods occur within a line,
cast comprised a diverse range of mainly non- Straub and Huillet’s performers pause momen-
professional actors, several of whom were not tarily at the end of each pentameter, delivering it
native German speakers. According to Rembert as though it were a free-standing, paratactical
Hüser, they included a Dutch opera singer, an unit.27 Rhythm takes over from meaning, which
Italian philosophy professor (and Gramsci spe- is frequently deferred to the point of near
cialist), a German ballet dancer, and a pair of obscurity. The effects of the diverse spoken
Italian siblings, joined by the seventy-two-year- accents of the actors, together with differences in
old Howard Vernon, better known as No. 12, age and sex, are also significant, and Hölderlin’s
agent of the reincarnated Dr. Mabuse in Lang’s text is made to resist itself by dint of its own
last film in the series, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. acoustic materiality. Differences between charac-
Mabuse [The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 1960] or ters do not suggest psychological individuation
for the role of Professor Léonard Vonbraun (aka but emphasise bodily variation instead. In this
Nosferatu) in Godard’s Alphaville (1965), not to respect, as already in the case of such films as
mention numerous collaborations with Jesús Machorka-Muff (1962) or Nicht versöhnt [Not
Franco.26 As always with Straub and Huillet, Reconciled, 1965], Huillet and Straub’s approach
rehearsals were intensive and left their mark on to their text is less theatrical than radically
the film in unexpected ways. In drafting and citational. Events, such as they are, are

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Fig. 6. Delia (left) to Panthea (right): ‘‘Him who is without limit you love without limit.’’ DerTod des Empedokles, Janus
Film and Les Films du Losange,1986.

overwritten by words and bodies. The language of camera cross-cuts several times, but without ever
power is consequently challenged throughout by having recourse to an eyeline match or any shot/
the power of language and of that which in reverse shot continuity. Moreover, it is only at the
speech, as rhythm, tone, accent, or gesture, is no end of the sequence that Panthea comes into shot
longer or not yet meaning. from an off-screen position, which she does from
This decomposition of hierarchical discourse the right, only then to leave immediately from the
affects the film’s visual style and editing strategy left. On the one hand, as the drawings devised for
too. The opening scene is a case in point. Its this purpose indicate, in determining camera
nominal purpose, as in Hölderlin’s original, is positions, in selecting lenses, and in choreograph-
dramatic exposition. It begins, however, with no ing the movements of their actors, Straub and
establishing shot, only a medium shot of empty Huillet took great pains to create, as economically
grassland and woods, and returns to this view as possible, a condensed and dynamic material
again some minutes later. The main action space.28 This did not, however, imply any
concerns two women, Panthea and Delia (Ute commitment to that suturing of the gazes of
Cremer), the second of whom is newly arrived in character, camera, and spectator underpinning
Sicily, as they discuss Empedocles’ reputation. the illusion of cinematographic realism. On the
The scene as a whole is 90 4000 long, and consists of contrary, throughout Der Tod des Empedokles,
fifteen shots varying in duration from 20 0400 to 200 . gazes are frequently left without object, are rarely
The camera remains motionless throughout, and returned, and most often tend to be lost entirely.
though the two women are presumed to be Off-screen space resists being assimilated to the
speaking to one another, it is only after more than visible frame, with the result that, rather than
seven minutes that they appear together on screen being offered to the audience as an aesthetic
(see Fig. 6). Before, then, and again at the end of object to be grasped, the film is repeatedly
the scene, they are each shown alone, statuesque disjoined from itself as a fragmentary remnant of
in their immobility. For most of the shots, the the work it refuses to be, less sacrificial spectacle,
framing is off-centre, with considerable visual in other words, than a block of recalcitrant
space left empty. Between the two women, the materiality interrupted by that which, being

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neither visible nor invisible, resists apprehension defending his decision by reminding his listeners
in the present. that the gods too are young. ‘‘Dir weich’ ich
Like Hölderlin’s tragedy, Straub and Huillet’s gerne, Lieber,’’ he adds,
film also turns on an aporia. For if Empedocles is
right that a new age of republican equality is lebe du / nach mir, ich war die Morgenwolke
nur, / geschäfftslos und vergänglich! und es
dawning, then the people of Acragas have no
schlief / indeß ich einsam blühte, noch die
need to be informed of this, particularly by a man Welt, / doch du, du bist zum klaren Tag
who, already reluctant to be king, knows that, as geboren.
far as nature is concerned, words are superfluous.
What this also implies is that Empedocles’ [I gladly cede my place to you, dear friend,
live on / after me, I was but the morning
intended suicide (through which he aims to join
cloud, / idle and transitory! and it slept on, /
together as one the boundlessness of experience
even as I flourished alone, did the world, / but
and the boundlessness of nature by leaping gladly you, you were born for the clear light of day].
into Etna’s flames) is entirely without purpose.
True enough, in the film’s closing lines he This repeated reference to the light of day is no
declares himself content, concerned only with isolated gesture. Already one of Empedocles’
finding his place of sacrifice. In itself, however, if earliest speeches was a hymn, ‘‘O himmlisch
it comes (and nothing guarantees that it does), his Licht! [O heavenly light!],’’ delivered to the absent
sacrifice founds and consecrates nothing. It is less sky above. (‘‘But what you do not yet realise is that
an heroic act than a forlorn recognition that the beneath the earth there is rock, and that the sky
time of sacrifices, too, is no more. Empedocles’ which is most blue is that which is most empty,’’
only task, in other words, as he quickly realises, is says Tiresias in one of Pavese’s Dialoghi con
not to erect a mausoleum to himself but to Leucò dramatised in Huillet and Straub’s Dalla
disappear. As his only epitaph he offers the nube alla resistenza [From the Clouds to the
following lines: Resistance, 1978].) This was not to say that light in
Hölderlin was necessarily a beneficent divinity.
veralten sollt / er nicht und Tage zählen, Throughout Der Tod des Empedokles, it is always
dienen nicht / der Sorg und Krankheit, double. For if it illuminates, it also blinds; if it
ungesehen gieng / er weg und keines
saves, it also destroys; it is not just the beginning
Menschen Hand begrub ihn, / und keines
of things, but also their end. In so far as it is
Auge weiß von seiner Asche, / denn anders
ziemt es nicht für ihn, vor dem / in
the prior condition of both, it cannot in fact be
Todesfroher Stund am heilgen Tage / das equated either with the visible or with the
Göttliche den Schleier abgeworfen – invisible, but radically exceeds both. In
Hölderlin’s text, it announces the presence of the
[he ought not grow old / to count the days, nor sacred, but that presence is nothing present. ‘‘The
be the slave / of sickness and worry, unseen he
Sacred is daylight,’’ explains Blanchot,
went / away and no hand of man interred him,
/ the eye of none knows of his ashes, / for in no but not the day as opposed to the night, nor
other way was it meet for him, before whom / the light as it radiates from above, nor the
in the hour of joyous death on that holy day / flame Empedocles seeks below. It is the day,
that which is divine cast aside its veil –]. but prior to the day, and always prior to itself,
a day before the day, a brightness before the
If Der Tod des Empedokles in ending evokes the brightness.29
future, it is no longer a future dictated by an act
of sacrificial politico-religious foundation, but It always already precedes itself as different from
one that is premised instead on a radical absence what it is, as that in light which is inassimilable to
of foundation: with the withdrawal of the gods light. But this too is why cinema always already
and the unredeemed abyss of Etna’s flames. outstrips all possibility of manifestation, and why
As Empedocles prepares to depart, he pro- it is never merely synonymous with sensuous
poses faithful Pausanias as his heir and equal, presence, but always already holds out the

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promise of that which, being neither visible nor Empedocles in his experience or non-experience
invisible, has never yet been seen at all. of death’s inaccessibility, Manes reminds the poet
Hölderlin’s play knows this, and so does Straub that death will come anyway; all mastery over it is
and Huillet’s film. pure illusion. The moment of decision, in other
words, suspends or postpones itself. No sacrifice
in the present can occur. The law of succession
IV
makes it impossible. Realising this, the film
Hölderlin’s first version of the play was not his keeps running, outlasting its end, always ever a
last, nor was Der Tod des Empedokles to be remainder reaching beyond what it shows in
Straub and Huillet’s last word either. In 1988 order to bear witness to what it cannot show.
they returned with Schwarze Sühne, a forty-two- Approaching Empedocles’ impossible death
minute film based on Hölderlin’s third unfinished for a second time, Huillet and Straub framed
attempt at the material. In approach and manner, their film with two quotations. The first, preced-
much remained the same, were it not that ing the opening credits and accompanied by the
repetition, for Huillet and Straub, was also a rumbling of the main crater at Etna, was in the
means of probing a text’s difference from itself. form of two brief but sustained shots showing two
Using some of the same cast (Andreas von Rauch, sculptures by Ernst Barlach (1870–1938), the
Vladimiro Baratta, Howard Vernon), all visibly expressionist writer, sculptor, and graphic artist,
older than before, but a different lighting cam- whose work was among those denounced as
eraman, William Lubtchansky, instead of Renato ‘‘degenerate’’ by the Nazis. The first piece was in
Berta, the film begins on the slopes of Etna, again wood and entitled ‘‘Mutter Erde’’ [Mother Earth,
closely following Hölderlin, where Empedocles, 1920], the second in copper, called ‘‘Der Rächer’’
already banished from the city, now finds himself [The Avenger, 1914].31 Only in the final credits
together with Pausanias. First impressions of this were titles and provenance revealed, by which
new location are effusive. ‘‘Hier oben,’’ declares time their political meaning was already clear.
Empedocles, ‘‘ist ein neues Vaterland [Up here is The second intervention came in the closing five
a new homeland].’’30 But disagreements between minutes of the film. As Empedocles hesitates,
the pair soon emerge, and eulogy gives way to suggesting to Manes that his mortal time has not
elegy. As already the case in Hölderlin’s yet come and may indeed never come, the film
Frankfurt Plan, the law of succession is a major breaks off to insert two extracts comprising the
stumbling block. ‘‘Kein zeitlich Bündniß bleibet, first twelve bars (grave, ma non troppo tratto),
wie es ist [No bond measured in time remains as then bars 12 to 44 (allegro), from the last
it is],’’ Empedocles is forced to acknowledge, and movement of the last major work completed by
as though to emphasise that temporal and spatial Beethoven before his death, the F Major String
differentiation cannot be overcome, Straub and Quartet, op. 135, sometimes known under the
Huillet’s camera, for the very first time in its title it was given in manuscript, ‘‘Der schwer
dealings with Hölderlin, embarks on a slow right- gefaßte Entschluß [The weighty decision],’’ with
hand pan across the green Sicilian hills. its famous epigraph: ‘‘Muß es sein? Es muß sein!
Admittedly, lasting only 4100 , the movement Es muß sein! [Must it be? It must be! It must
soon comes to a halt, but only for an almost be!].’’ Between the two pieces of music fell a
exactly similar shot to start up again, for another fragmentary interjection, already found in
5700 , some 70 4800 later, immediately preceding the Hölderlin, delivered on-screen by Huillet to
final breach with Pausanias. And when Pausanias protagonists and audience alike as an invitation
does depart, leaving the protagonist alone to bid and a promise, asserting simply: ‘‘Neue Welt
farewell to the world, the young man is imme- [New World].’’ Beyond vision, beyond sound,
diately replaced, standing in the exact same spot, there was, in other words, something else, an
by the much older figure of Manes the Egyptian inescapable exigency or demand which could not
(Vernon), cast in the role of the protagonist’s be negated, only ever underwritten, affirmed, and
sceptical, contestatory double. More learned than prolonged. Its implications were at once aesthetic

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 ‘‘o himmlisch licht!’’

and political. Of this the recording used for the commitment not to the past but to the future
soundtrack of Schwarze Sühne was already proof and a conviction that if, in Benjamin’s famous
enough, for it was made in London in 1935 by the words, every document of civilisation is a docu-
Busch Quartet, whose members had refused to ment of barbarism, then it was imperative to
remain in Germany under Nazi rule and promptly resist the sacrificial dialectic of spectacle, and to
emigrated. Emphasising the point, the film’s final affirm instead, beyond visibility
credits were again accompanied by the imminent and invisibility alike, in the
rumble of Etna. absence of the gods, the futural
When Huillet and Straub returned to promise of that which in film
Hölderlin two years later, it was not surprising, itself interrupts all presence.
then, that they should reach for Brecht’s 1948
adaptation of the poet’s Antigone translation. In notes
the post-war period Hölderlin was, of course, still
1 See Ho«lderlin, Sa«mtliche Gedichte, ed. Jochen
disputed territory between the political right and
Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 2005)
left.32 In substantially reworking Antigone, 307. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations
retaining intact less than a third of Hölderlin’s are my own.
original text, Brecht was able to substitute for
Sophocles’ appeal to destiny a less mythical, more 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, L’E¤vidence du film/The Evidence of
Film, trans. Christine Irizarry and Verena
contemporary story of capitalist exploitation and
Andermatt Conley (Paris: Klincksieck, 2007)
imperialist dictatorship. Like Straub and Huillet, 78 ^79; translation modified.
he had first been attracted to the 1804 translation
by the density of its Swabian idiom, and it is not 3 Andre¤ Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cine¤ma? (Paris:
difficult to imagine him, like Hölderlin on his Cerf,1985) 273.
return from Bordeaux in 1802, perhaps even the 4 See Andre¤ Malraux, uvres comple'tes, 5 vols.
peripatetic Huillet and Straub too, murmuring, in (Paris: Gallimard,1989^2004) IV: 8 ^9.
the words of Hölderlin’s famous poem
5 Maurice Blanchot, L’Amitie¤ (Paris: Gallimard,
‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ ‘‘Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungs- 1971) 48, 50 ^51. I discuss Godard’s use of this pas-
los / Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast / Die sage in ‘‘‘A Form that Thinks’: Godard, Blanchot,
Sprache in der Fremde verloren [A sign we are, Citation’’ in For Ever Godard, eds. Michael Temple,
without meaning, / Without pain we are and have James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London:
nearly / Lost our language in foreign lands].’’33 Black Dog, 2004) 396 ^ 415, 435^37.
Brecht also claimed to find in Hölderlin’s
6 Ho«lderlin, Sa«mtliche Gedichte 350.
translation ‘‘something Hegelian.’’34 But, as
Lacoue-Labarthe has shown, what distinguishes 7 Guy Debord, uvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2006)
Hölderlin’s Antigone is less its desire to show the 767; emphasis in original.
collision between rival gods and legislations, and 8 See Michel Faucheux, Auguste et Louis Lumie're
their subsequent reconciliation, equalisation, or (Paris: Gallimard, 2011) 118 ^19.
mediation, as Hegel’s theory of tragedy required,
9 For a detailed listing of Straub and Huillet’s
than its unstinting sensitivity to the irreducible work, see Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance:
dissymmetry between its warring antagonists.35 The German Films of Danie'le Huillet and Jean-Marie
As Brecht no doubt realised, it was this resistance Straub (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), avail-
of Hölderlin’s text to the sacrificial logic of able5http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4m3nb2jk/4;
Hegelian tragedy that made his own avoidance of Beno|Πt Turquety, Danie'le Huillet et Jean-Marie
tragedy both possible and necessary. And it Straub: ‘‘Objectivistes’’ en cine¤ma (Lausanne: L’¢ge
would similarly be the irreconcilability between d’homme, 2009) 537^78; and the website5http://
Antigone and Creon that Straub and Huillet in straub-huillet.net/4.
their film would emphasise at length. 10 The textual history of Ho«lderlin’s work is
At any event, what the pair shared with exceptionally complex. For an accessible overview,
Hölderlin, Brecht, Godard too, was a see Ho«lderlin, The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning

154
 hill
Play, trans. David Farrell Krell (Albany: State U of Paris recorded by Philippe Lafosse in his documen-
New York P, 2008). As Rembert Hu«ser explains in tary Dites-moi quelque chose (2007^10).
his ‘‘Stummfilm mit Sprache,’’ filmwa«rts 9 (1987):
22 See Ho«lderlin, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsa«tze,
17^23, the text used by Huillet and Straub in 1986
U«bersetzungen, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt:
(and likewise in1988) was their own, based on D.E.
Deutscher Klassiker, 2008) 575^77 (577).
Sattler’s Frankfurt Ho«lderlin edition, reviewed in
the light of the original manuscripts. Bilingual 23 Straub and Huillet, ‘‘Cine¤ma [et] politique,’’
German^French scripts for all three films interview by Franc ois Albera (19 Mar. 2001),
appeared as follows: La Mort d’Empe¤docle Leucothe¤a 1 (Apr. 2009): 146 ^ 66 (146).
(Toulouse: Ombres, 1986); Empe¤docle sur l’Etna
24 Straub and Huillet, ‘‘Pourquoi Empe¤docle?’’ in
(Toulouse: Ombres, 1989); and Antigone Jean-Marie Straub. Danie'le Huillet (n.p.: Antigone,
(Toulouse: Ombres,1992). 1990) 9^10 (10).
11 On the different versions, see ‘‘Jean-Marie 25 Ibid.
Straub zu seinem Film Der Tod des Empedokles,’’
Filmfaust XI.62 (1987) 10; Byg, Landscapes of 26 See Hu«ser,‘‘Stummfilm mit Sprache’’ 20 ^21.
Resistance 180; and Hu«ser, ‘‘Stummfilm mit 27 On parataxis in Ho«lderlin, see Adorno’s
Sprache’’ 20. Cameraman Jean-Paul Toraille’s video famous essay with that selfsame title in
diary, Avatars de ‘‘La Mort d’Empe¤docle’’ (1986), Gesammelte Schriften XI: 447^91.
shows the logistical problems that faced actors
and crew during the 1986 shoot. 28 See Straub and Huillet, ‘‘Faire un plan. A
propos du tournage de La Mort d’Empe¤docle’’ in
12 See Manfred Blank, Wie will ich lustig lachen Jean-Marie Straub. Danie'le Huillet 79^93 (82, 85, 91);
(1984). and ‘‘Conception d’un film’’ in Confrontations (Paris:
13 See Karl H. Wo«rner, Schoenberg’s ‘‘Moses and FEMIS,1990) 51^ 64.
Aaron’’ (London: Faber,1963) 103. 29 Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris:
14 For analysis of the 1972 film, see Ursula Bo«ser, Gallimard,1949) 124.
The Art of Seeing, the Art of Listening: The Politics of 30 Ho«lderlin, Empe¤docle sur l’Etna 12.
Representation in the Work of Jean-Marie Straub and
Danie'le Huillet (Frankfurt: Lang, 2004). 31 See Rencontres avec Jean-Marie Straub and
Danie'le Huillet, ed. Jean-Louis Raymond (Paris:
15 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica ficta Beaux-arts, 2008) 20.
(figures deWagner) (Paris: Bourgois,1991) 222^23.
32 See Robert Savage, Ho«lderlin after the
16 SeeTheodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Catastrophe: Heidegger^Adorno^Brecht (Rochester:
Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, Camden, 2008).
1970 ^ 86) XVI: 454 ^75 (454).
33 Ho«lderlin, Sa«mtliche Gedichte 1033.
17 See Francis Fukuyama,The End of Historyand the
Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1992). 34 Bertolt Brecht, Materialien zur ‘‘Antigone’’
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1965) 109.
18 Heidegger, Antwort. Martin Heidegger in
Gespra«ch, ed. Gu«nter Neske and Emil Kettering 35 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Me¤taphrasis,
(Pfullingen: Neske,1988) 81^114 (99^100). suivi de Le the¤a“tre de Ho«lderlin (Paris: PUF, 1998)
24 ^25.
19 See Georges Bataille, uvres comple'tes,12 vols.
(Paris: Gallimard,1970 ^ 88) VI: 369.
20 Jean-Luc Nancy, Une pense¤e finie (Paris: Galile¤e,
1990) 67. Leslie Hill
21 See Pierre Bertaux, Ho«lderlin und die Department of French Studies
Franzo«sische Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, University of Warwick
1969). Straub mentions Bertaux’s work (without, Coventry CV4 7AL
however, naming him) in one of the question-and- UK
answer sessions at the Reflet Me¤dicis cinema in E-mail: [email protected]
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