A screening celebrating International Workers’ Day.
‘Capitalism is a system of dependencies’ said Kafka, and his unfinished novel
The Man Who Disappeared a.k.a. Amerika, on which
Class Relations is based, chronicles ‘a world where a sense of justice has no place’ (D. Huillet). The film was shot in Germany (with one sequence filmed in the United States) and follows the path of the young German bourgeois Karl Rossman, who, forced by his parents to emigrate to America, an idealised land of opportunity, keeps finding himself involved in strange adventures, in situations of injustice and oppression, pushed around, defenceless yet still striving forward. ‘Kafka, for us, is the only major poet of industrial civilisation, I mean, a civilisation where people depend on their work to survive. That’s why there is this permanent fear of losing your job, there are traces left by the fact of having been afraid, and there is constantly misery that appears and is threatening’, said Straub.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work ... shows, how Harun Farocki, an admirer and, for a period, a student of Jean-Marie Straub, is rehearsing his part of "Delamarche" in
Klassenverhältnisse under Straub's direction.
Class Relations is presented in a new digital restoration.
The screening is introduced by Kirill Adibekov.
Kirill Adibekov is as a film curator, essay filmmaker and independent distributor based in London and Moscow. He is currently working at the V-A-C Foundation as a film curator, while doing MA dissertation at Roehampton University. He has curated several programmes featuring works of Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, namely
Fascination: sound (2012), a retrospective of Peter Nestler films (2013) and a film programme accompanying
Expanding Space project exhibition (2016). He also contributed to the collection of texts
L’internationale straubienne: à propos des films de Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub (Les éditions de l’Œil, 2016).
Klassenverhältnisse,
Class Relations, Dirs: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, West Germany, 1984, 35mm/DCP, b&w, 130 min. In German with English subtitles.
Jean-Marie Straub und Danièle Huillet bei der Arbeit an einem Film nach Franz Kafkas Romanfragment Amerika, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a Film based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Harun Farocki, West Germany, 1983, 16mm/Digital, 26 min., In German with English subtitles.
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