M AY 2 3 , 2 0 1 7

Danile Huillet at Work

Ted Fendt has gifted us the following translation from the German of the only
interview, to our knowledge, that Danile Huillet did without Jean-Marie Straub. It
comes from a 1982 issue of Frauen und Film.

Photo courtesy of Cristina Fernandes

The Fire in the Mountain

A conversation with Danile Huillet by Helge Heberle and Monika Funke Stern
Danile I was born in May 1936. In 1954, I did one year in a preparatory school for
IDHEC. I saw a lot of films like Bunuel's Los Olvidados which interested me,
and I wanted to try making documentary films. At the end there was even an exam
that I took. But after the film that they projected for us, I simply handed in a blank
piece of paper and said that it was a shame to project a film like that for an exam.
I met Jean-Marie in November. I still know this exactly because the Algerian
Revolution was beginning. He had his idea for a film about Bach and asked me if I
would help him write the thing together. In 58 he had to leave France because of the
Algerian War. He didn't want to shoot Algerians and at the end of 59. I also came to
Germany. That's everything.

Monika And youve done everything together?

Danile Yes, we've done everything together. Only, that at the time it wasn't
fashionable to mention women. No one noticed. Until it came into fashion, then they
suddenly noticed that I was always in the credits. That was funny.

Helge Did you develop the conception of your films together? Theyre so distinctive
and different from the films of the time.

Danile Yes, but that also came through our lives.

Helge You came to Germany as emigrants. Did you first start learning German here?

Danile I had learned a little German before, but only with the texts of Bach's
cantatas and that was already a strange German. In any case, I didnt learn German
so well because together we speak more in French. There are things that we can only
say in German, but otherwise we mainly speak French together.

Helge Having left it again, what does your time in Germany mean for you?

Danile The time in Germany was the discovery of the class struggle and a violence
that also exists in Italy and France but that does not appear so openly and clearly,
probably because the hypocrisy is greater.

Monika The discourse about the class struggle often conceals that men and women
are also two different classes. The difference can also be seen in the way your film
work has gained recognition. In the book Kluge/Herzog/Straub there is in the back
eventually also something about Huillet with a short biography and Karsten Witte is
at least polite enough to talk about the Straubs - is your name actually Straub or
Huillet?

Danile Well, we aren't married. I kept my name. But it isn't so easy to pronounce.
Straub is much easier. I don't think its so important. It's never bothered me. I don't
really like talking about things and answering questions. Everyone has his or her own
style and what you dont do well, you shouldnt do. There are other things that I do
better and besides, what were interested in are the products and not the names.

Monika The distribution of your films is important to you. You go around with you
films and talk about them. I feel that your silence is a form of denying auteur cinema
and representation.

Danile We won't be able to talk about the films anymore when were dead. Film
material is very sensitive and the negatives won't last forever, but the films will
outlive us for a certain amount of time and I hope that they will still speak to people.
We talk about the films because in general the distribution system does not work
anymore. Straub talks better than I do. I don't know if he enjoys doing it. I think that
one destroys bit of the work that way.

Helge What do you mean by destroys some of it?

Danile A film is a work that youve carried through to the end. A discussion is
always something where you only say half-truths or force things that you have tried
to keep balanced in the film. Also, in a discussion you can never take time to really
reflect. Otherwise, you would say: it is going to take eight days before I can give you
a proper answer. So, per forza, as the Italians say, sometimes you answer too quickly
and sometimes falsely. However, whenever you make a film, you try out every
possibility so the film remains open to people who will see and hear it.

Monika What does your role in the work look like?

Danile With Too Early, Too Late, for example. A certain Straschek he is a friend
of ours came to visit as we were recording the orchestral part of Moses and Aron in
Vienna in 1974. He brought two suitcases full of books the entire correspondence
between Marx and Engels. I thought that I'd never read so many books. I don't have
enough time. I can only read a little before going to bed. Nevertheless, I read
everything and the letter from Engels was in it too. I read it aloud to Straub and he
said: Maybe we can make something about France. Then we went to Egypt because
of Moses and Aron. We wanted to see how people in Egypt live, what clothes, what
gestures, what living conditions, etc., before we looked for costumes. In Egypt, we
asked ourselves questions besides ones relating to the film. In Rome, Jean-Marie saw
a book called Class Struggles in Egypt with statistics and explanations about what
was going on there at the time. We were always nostalgic to go back to Egypt. I think
that I said then: We could make a film out of these two things. It was easier with
Engels' text, which in some way stood on its own. We had to check the information
since Engels had written it to Kautsky from his memories of a Russian historian.
There were false quotations in it. We verified everything in the archives in Paris
where the parishes had sent the cahiers in 1789 in the great hope that something
would change if someone recounted what was wrong. The notebooks are still lying
there and are used very infrequently. Its somehow moving when you get them in
your hands. Then we checked the figures and the names, drove to the locations and
together we looked for where the camera could be placed, what be can seen, and
sometimes we argued very fiercely as well.
It was easier in France. We always went back to the locations. In Egypt we
could only do this once and it was difficult to find the locations. There are no maps
aside from the ones made by the colonial administration. The names on these are in
Egyptian and underneath in European. We looked for the places using photocopies of
them. The people there, five kilometers away from a village, don't know what the
next village is called. We scouted locations with a friend from Paris, an Egyptian, in
his car. Sometimes, we needed an entire day to find a village. So, about the same
work as the people who had drawn the maps. Except that we only had about twenty
days in Egypt. The organization came after we returned. What you can do with the
money you have. What you have to pay for immediately and what later. These kinds
of necessary discussions I do this more than him. If he says, I'm not doing it this
way, then I try it differently. Then comes the shooting. People must be paid, hotels
arranged, etc. During production, I'm more involved with the sound and he's more
involved with the camera. He frames the shots. During editing, I operate the editing
table. Now and then he does something that an assistant usually does, like rewinding
the reels, etc. We had an editor for the first short film. That lasted a week. As Jean-
Marie began to say, here we have to take out five frames and three here, the guy had
a nervous fit. Ever since, we've never had a third party. We always watch the rushes
silent because I never went to let the sound out of my hands as long as it hasnt been
transferred, because I have good friends who have lost part of the location sound
between the shooting location and the transfer. Or where the transfer isnt right, if
they mixed or dubbed. I want to be present for that. Jean-Marie is also present
because while listening to the sound you can discover things that you wouldnt hear
otherwise. The hardest comes when we're cutting and begin to make choices: we
have three, ten, fifteen takes of the same shot choosing one is sometimes painful.

Monika If you take the raw material the documents from the 18th century, the
reports about villages and Engels' text entirely different images could be imagined
for them. For example, the reports say this many families are impoverished, this
many can still live, this many are rich and in the images, we don't see a single
family now, not a single person. Today, now, we occasionally see a truck drive by
over the asphalt highway, the village sign. How do arrive at this visual conception?

Danile It was clear from the beginning what we were interested in. It was seeing
what traces remain there today and what has entirely changed. For example, a city
like Rennes, where it's stated that a third of the population was living in constant risk
of pauperization, is now much richer. A lot has been built there. But at the beginning,
we see villages in Brittany that have perhaps become poorer. What we were
interested in was seeing what traces remain today and what was swept away and left
no trace. And in this regard, a topographical film: with camera and Nagra, with
picture and location sound as the tools of an investigation.

Helge That reminds me of the talk at the DFFB. You said there that the long drive
along the canal goes through as few villages as possible because driving through
villages seems intrusive to you. So this investigation has a distanced relationship to
the people.

Danile Yes...

Helge And in a different context during the discussion it was said that humans arent
center stage in this film. But I perceived this entirely differently because through the
panning movements and the intrusion into the space from the sides whether from
birds or butterflies, from bushes we in fact feel the presence of the filmmakers very
clearly. I mean that, on one hand, it is a world that is visibly desolate, but over which
stands a human presence that has no face.

Danile But this research is also applied to the landscape. There are obviously
humans there because these landscapes are arranged and altered. The nature there has
been completely changed by humans. That's one thing. But what we were also
interested in understanding was a landscape. Why a village was built there, what it is
like. Why irrigation in Egypt works with a large canal and smaller ones. It's clear that
this is all from people. Us not wanting to drive through a village that was not the
subject because the narration is telling how struggles and revolts happened and when
we see, for example, the plains of Luxor: first the camera is still, then it pans left to
the mountains where a there is a village, then we come back to the right then how
many people were massacred is recounted.

Monika Yes, it is also entirely clear from the text that someone is there, and the
landscape is being considered from a particular perspective and intention. That's
what I find fascinating in your films, that you consistently renounce any form of
staging these landscapes: they are shown here and now, not as a costumes or a re-
enactment of past times, but now, they way they are now with all the details and
historical forces like wind, water, and rain that move the land. This point of view is
charged with histories through these elements and above all through the text that is
being read.
But these are texts that come out of a particular class conflict, the text by
Engels as well, just as in History Lessons with the text by Brecht. For them, class
conflicts are defined through property and not, for example, through gender relations.
 In my opinion, these images of landscapes, of a city like Rome with its
cobblestones, are charged with history, but this history misappropriates the history of
women who have participated to a great extent in history and whose sweat, blood,
and tears have been drunk by the cobblestones of Rome as much as the blood, sweat,
and tears of the men being named and quoted. I don't know how much this interests
you and how aware you are about making things from women present in the
historical charge of the images.

Danile I can say three things about this. First I've already said this there are
rules of the game that we must obey. For example, sticking a woman into Brecht
where he did not have one would also be false for the woman. In front of a factory in
Egypt, we see one woman who is entirely dressed in black go through the frame. She
is carrying something on her head; she's probably bringing her husband or her son
something to eat. And we see a second woman who is dressed like a European out of
the factory probably a secretary. And no other women, only men milling about. We
see more women on the country roads: at one point, a woman with a child on a
donkey. During the long tracking shot we also see a woman on a donkey who is
reading a book and probably going to school or coming from school.
That is one answer. I think a second answer is a film like The Bridegroom, the
Actress, and the Pimp. That is a film in which the oppression of women is very clear.
That's a subject that comes more from us. The construction doesn't come from
anyone else.
There are in fact no sentences in it that come from us. There are only texts
from other people, but the construction and the story come from us and it began like
this: we were in Munich we lived there at the time and went to a cinema
downtown. We were coming back on foot because it was too late and there were no
more buses. It was pretty far and we found this street where women were standing on
the sidewalk and only men in trucks or cars were driving by and stopping. The rest of
the film was organized around this. We drove down the street twice and we even
covered up the license plate on the car because there were also pimps watching this.
That is a second answer and my third answer is that I think things will go
much faster and easier and on this point Marx was right in some sense for women
to become liberated if there is a total revolution. For example, in Vietnam, women
gained equality in one burst. That doesn't mean that afterwards the reaction didn't
shut this down. As in all other areas, the struggle is just as necessary when the war is
over. That's clear. But I mean, something happened there very suddenly because
there is an entire movement and not only with women, but the women were part of it.

Monika Hope for the third world, for a total revolution that also solves the side
contradictions, things with women, is also very clear in your films.

Danile But the Egyptian woman at the Q&A at the Arsenal Cinema represented
something even more radical. It really upset me because she came with arguments
that originate with politicians and that she adopted. Of course, if we hear this from
men it is already dumb, but it's even worse from a woman. She is not only colonized
as an Egyptian, but also as a woman. She said that no revolution can be expected
from workers because they cant read. There is some truth to this argument, but still,
I can't listen to it anymore. What is funny and sad is that not only the first revolts, but
also revolutions partly came from workers, for example here in Germany. And they
were also unable to read. But they had a culture, just not the clergys.

Monika The absence of women from the images is also a historical document. But
thats not what I mean. You two decide on particular texts that interpret history.
That's a decision, whether you choose Engels or Brecht, or if you criticize them in
your view of history. That is what the new women's movement does, for example.
I'm very skeptical that the position of women will change with a revolution. Maybe
intermittently in periods when they are needed and they help. That's always been the
case, if women are needed for work during and after a war, but their own thing
doesn't fundamentally change. I don't know if you were interested in dealing with
these subjects with other texts that deal with women's things.

Danile But this is also an encounter. A love story doesn't only happen when we
meet a person, it can also be a text in which something seems right. It is always only
partially true. I think we both agree that we can't make films with general ideas, that
we must have something concrete and precise, and the text by Engels is concrete and
precise for something very, very small and limited. We could make another film that
is critical of it but that is not the same film and some kind of an encounter must
happen in that regard.

Monika You could find something is missing, for example, and then develop it.
Speaking for myself, it is possible for this kind of process of awakening
consciousness to happen. After the discussion at the DFFB, you said: after History
Lessons something like an absence opens. At the end, there is this fountain statue, a
woman although a very mythologized one who I didn't really recognize as a
woman with water flowing out of her mouth, she's vomiting. She says the final
words of the film: vomit over the path of history. In one of your earlier films, the Bll
adaptation Not Reconciled, the subtitle is Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules.
For me, that is a male saying that also determines politics, armament politics, for
example. The ideology that we must make weapons because the enemy is making
weapons, so only violence helps against violence...

Danile I'll interrupt only to say that "violence" is not only violence with weapons. A
strike is also a form of violence. Let's take a utopia, the biggest utopia there is: that
suddenly every intellectual, women and men, would go on strike and this shit society
would collapse. That would also be a form of violence that would essentially be
bigger than every possible form of it.

Monika But you have shown the rudiments of alternative figures. The old Fhmel
woman...

Danile Yes, she stands for a kind of counter violence, but it is destroyed. And the
pressure is so strong that she is also destroyed. Not only the pressure of the war or of
all time, but also the pressure she has to feel and experience as a woman.

Helge I'd like to know which films by women you like. Can you find anything in
common with Marguerite Duras, for example?

Danile I admire her a lot. She has a lot of energy and is really sharp, but I have a lot
more admiration for a woman who leads an everyday life, not only as an intellectual,
but a woman who does this with a husband and children, who doesn't kill herself, and
can live like this. I find that much harder than making films.

Monika But you don't want that?

Danile I don't have the strength for both together.

Monika You prefer making films?

Danile That is also a love story. You choose when you're very young and
experience comes later. Maybe there are women who can do both. Maybe Caroline
[Champetier] will do this, a husband and daughter or several daughters. But with the
younger generation... It is very hard, not to oppress others, which would also not be a
solution.

Monika What do you think of Chantal Akerman's films, Jeanne Dielman, for
example?

Danile I can say that I couldn't bear some of it. For example, the way the actress
Delphine Seyrig peels potatoes and you notice that she never does it in real life. That
doesn't work. And what I also don't like in the film are the obstinately systematic
shots so that if someone stands up, for example, their head is cut off.

Monika But, I mean, you've gone pretty clearly against the film language developed
in Hollywood shot/reverse shot where what is important at the moment always
appears in the image, the head, and somehow this must have come to you a
particular obstinacy in the staging that maybe focuses more on a dress or a random
detail...

Danile But I don't think that you can replace one form of oppression with another
and I also don't think that you can combat one system through another because then
one thing simply becomes rigid and that's all.

Helge So you feel that the film grammar there is very arbitrary?

Danile It somehow becomes systematic and that doesn't work for me. That's all.

Monika But I find your films very systematic in their resistance, in their reflection on
the commercialization of film language.

Danile But I think, I hope, that it is not so much a system as a method to investigate
something; that can also be blown up, for example a shot. I think it is the third
village we see in Egypt, where we have the sign at the beginning and then pan left,
then come back right again, then we see the village and people walking in the
background. And a donkey. In the foreground, on the road, wagons, a truck, a cart
and a donkey are coming that is happening very much in the foreground. That was
not planned. It was a surprise for us as well and so we wanted to keep it because we
didn't want to clear away reality and only keep the shot as we had planned it.
Because otherwise, if we had done a shot with what was happening on the street, we
would never have cut it like that...

Monika Don't you also think that to understand your films, you also need a lot of
knowledge about film history?

Danile Well, empirically, people who have seen barely any or very few films are
very moved. I think there are two kinds: there are people who have a film culture and
have seen many films, who receive the films very well and are therefore interested.
But people who are moved the most and, I think, perhaps perceive the films best are
the ones with no film culture.

Helge Does that mean they have no film culture? Today there is also TV...

Danile But people see more news and sports on TV and the people I'm talking
about also barely see feature films. The see TV the way we used to read the
newspaper. Or yes, sports. They're right because that is the only thing that is well
filmed. It gets hard with people who believe they know what film is and what film
should be. They come in and immediately say, like the Egyptian woman: this is not a
film; this is not what films are like. That's a barrier. They think film must be like this
and that, and don't accept that it can also be different. And was different too.

Helge In the interview you did with Karsten Witte, you say that you want to make
films that can't be understand through cinema, through film history, but that can be
understood on their own.
Monika But I think there is something like tradition and a tradition of film language
that people are trained in. Somewhere ideas like dream factory or "inspiring
illusions" become combined with cinema, conventional cinema. And I think this is
also something one shouldn't say pejoratively. Because with the possibility of
constructing illusions, there also exists the possibility to think of, conceive, and
dream utopias which is also positive...

Danile ...but I don't think that has a lot to do with utopias. Our dreams come from
reality and are only partly different from reality and are an attempt to escape from it.
But always from reality and not from nothing...

Monika Yes. Sure. We can also make this very intellectual. But I think your images
are somehow renunciations and are therefore barren and rigorous.

Danile I hope not only. I hope that sensuality and delight can also be felt in them.
And the scent of things. Right?

Monika Im fascinated by your appeal to Czanne who painted the mountain again
and again, always the outside of the mountain, and who knew that the mountain had
burned. But he always painted the outside. The fire begins to appear through his
energy.

Danile I can say something else about Czanne. I saw pictures by Czanne in a
museum for the first time when I was around fourteen. It was the bold thing with the
naked women, Les Grandes Baigneuses. At first, I felt that he couldn't paint, that it
was poorly painted. And yet, something in it made it so that I engaged with it for a
long time and could no longer see the pictures from the other painters that were
hanging there because I felt that they painted poorly.
 * 1:06 AM

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