Resistência e Reversibilidade em Straub-Huillet

Abstract

This article unfolds the relationship between acts of resistance and temporal reversibility in the cinema of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. The problem of resistance is presented as inseparable from that of time, if each state of things – against which the characters in this cinema struggle – reenact an unreflective exercise of habit and law. The text is composed of three moments: initially, it considers procedures for a reversible coalescence between perception and memory, or between the Earth and thought, with the passage from a visible plane to a legible plane, crafted to produce an eye capable of unearthing events; then, it highlights sound strategies of disidentification and musical accentuation that emphasize the impropriety of the voice and a communication that is no longer interactive, nor reflective; finally, it is suggested that analytical models are inept to face the task of translating what Jacques Rancière called “post-Brechtian” cinema. More than denouncing the internal limits of dialectics, this cinema will be rich in bodily attitudes and lapidary landscapes that demand a work of reading, of guessing, of exploring time as a memory that is no longer psychological or personal, but of the world.