Barton Byg: Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1995)

“Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet—who have lived and worked together since the 1950s—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. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring 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 Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Hölderlin. 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.”

Publisher University of California Press, 1995
Open access
ISBN 0520089081, 9780520089082
xiii+303 pages

Reviews: Ulrich Kriest (Medienwissenschaft 1997, DE), Margret Eifler (The German Quarterly 2000).

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