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7:00 PM-9:30 PM
Opening: Film Retrospective Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub
Film Retrospective|Machorka-Muff (1963) and L’Aquarium et la Nation (2015)
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Cinematek
- Language French and English
- Price 6€
- Part of series: Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub
The work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub is considered to be one of the most distinctive, beautiful and uncompromising oeuvres of modern cinema. It is therefore with great pleasure that the Goethe-Institut Brussels and CINEMATEK Royal Film Archive of Belgium present the first complete retrospective of their work in Belgium.
You are cordially invited to the opening and film screening on 05 October at 19:00. Philosopher Barbara Ulrich-Straub and filmmaker Christophe Clavert, former collaborators of Jean-Marie Straub, will be present.
Heiner Braun, Gino Cardella, Johannes Eckardt /
bw / 18' / subtitled: FR
‘A metaphorically abstract dream, not a story’, is how Jean-Marie Straub introduced his and Danièle Huillet’s first film, made in West Germany. The film presents the dreamlike reflections of the former Nazi major and newly promoted general Erich von Machorka-Muff, who comes to the West German capital to see his lover and to lay the foundation of the ‘Academy of Military Memories’. A scathing criticism of West Germany’s remilitarisation and the persistence of Nazi ideology and personnel after the war.
‘Machorka-Muff is the story of a rape, the rape of a country on which an army has been imposed, a country which would have been happier without one. What does it mean to make films in Germany, or rather, to make films against that stupidity, depravity, and mental laziness which, as Brecht remarked, are so characteristic of this country? Hyperion would reply that it signifies that one is willing to bleed oneself white. And to this I would add: it means that I will be unable to reach that wide public I want my work to have. But, as a Frenchman, what attracted me was the chance to make in Germany a film that no German could make – just as no German was able to make Germany, Year Zero, no American The Southerner or The Young One, and no Italian could have written The Charterhouse of Parma.’ (J.-M. Straub, 1966)
Aimé Agnel, Christiane Veschambre /
color / 31' / subtitled: EN
A reflection on history, the passage of time and the fate of man, the film is a dialectical assemblage of images, music, texts and documents: a shot of a fish aquarium, the orchestral version of Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, a reading by psychoanalyst, film writer and sound editor Aimé Agnel of an excerpt from André Malraux’s last novel The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, published in 1948, and a sequence from Jean Renoir’s 1938 film La Marseillaise.
You are cordially invited to the opening and film screening on 05 October at 19:00. Philosopher Barbara Ulrich-Straub and filmmaker Christophe Clavert, former collaborators of Jean-Marie Straub, will be present.
Machorka-Muff
Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, FRG 1963 /Heiner Braun, Gino Cardella, Johannes Eckardt /
bw / 18' / subtitled: FR
‘A metaphorically abstract dream, not a story’, is how Jean-Marie Straub introduced his and Danièle Huillet’s first film, made in West Germany. The film presents the dreamlike reflections of the former Nazi major and newly promoted general Erich von Machorka-Muff, who comes to the West German capital to see his lover and to lay the foundation of the ‘Academy of Military Memories’. A scathing criticism of West Germany’s remilitarisation and the persistence of Nazi ideology and personnel after the war.
‘Machorka-Muff is the story of a rape, the rape of a country on which an army has been imposed, a country which would have been happier without one. What does it mean to make films in Germany, or rather, to make films against that stupidity, depravity, and mental laziness which, as Brecht remarked, are so characteristic of this country? Hyperion would reply that it signifies that one is willing to bleed oneself white. And to this I would add: it means that I will be unable to reach that wide public I want my work to have. But, as a Frenchman, what attracted me was the chance to make in Germany a film that no German could make – just as no German was able to make Germany, Year Zero, no American The Southerner or The Young One, and no Italian could have written The Charterhouse of Parma.’ (J.-M. Straub, 1966)
L’Aquarium et la Nation
Jean-Marie Straub, France 2015 /Aimé Agnel, Christiane Veschambre /
color / 31' / subtitled: EN
‘We know that we did not choose to be born, that we would not choose to die. That we did not choose our parents. That we can do nothing about the passage of time. That between each one of us and universal life there is a sort of...gulf. When I say that every man is deeply conscious of the existence of fate, I mean he is conscious – and almost always tragically so, at certain moments, at least – of the world’s independence of him.’ (André Malraux, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, 1948)
A reflection on history, the passage of time and the fate of man, the film is a dialectical assemblage of images, music, texts and documents: a shot of a fish aquarium, the orchestral version of Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, a reading by psychoanalyst, film writer and sound editor Aimé Agnel of an excerpt from André Malraux’s last novel The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, published in 1948, and a sequence from Jean Renoir’s 1938 film La Marseillaise.