Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1970) (Patreon)

Ooh, this was a toughie. Every once and awhile someone asks me what film might be a good place to start exploring the work of Straub/Huillet, and I usually tell them Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Not Reconciled, or Moses and Aaron. I had never seen this one, and I can tell you, by no means should anyone ever start the journey here. It's brutal.

But I came away with a respect for it that I wouldn't even qualify as "grudging." In certain respects, this film with the long-ass title (which has previously been known in English simply as Othon, after the play by Corneille that serves as its basis) is a crystallization of the most basic elements of Straub-Huillet's film practice. It's just that it doesn't offer all that much more, and once you suss out what they are up to, there's not a lot of discovery left, aside from pleasures in the margins, like a bored looking performer or a strange turn of phrase in the text.

As you can see in the still selected above, Straub and Huillet have staged Othon, a play about power struggles in ancient Rome, without attempting to disguise the fact that it is being filmed in 1970. Although their filming location, Mount Palatine, contains scattered ruins that lend an air of plausibility, we can frequently see modern buildings and cars and buses in the background. This, along with their commitment to shooting with direct sound, emphasizes the documentary aspect of film recording, the fact that we are watching the concrete record of a consideration of history, not a magical conjuring of it.

The film also works with offscreen space, using zooms to excise characters from the frame before the speak. Straub and Huillet use the distinction between close-ups and two- and three-shots to emphasize the relationship between performance and the organization of cinematic space. And, as the film goes along, you can see that they are toying with certain aspects of Corneille's text and the problem of "acting." Some of the characters, like Othon (Adriano Aprá), rush through the text with no inflection whatsoever. Princess Camille (Olimpia Carlisi), meanwhile, not only seems to emote, but emphasizes the rhythm of the French verse, where others try to disguise the rhymes. Some of them speak French with a distinct Italian accent, while others do not. 

And I was even able to grasp Othon's basic narrative, even though it took awhile. This, too, seems to be part of the project, to make the historical distance of Corneille's text -- a 17th century play about ancient Rome -- feel more remote, rather than bring it nearer. Once you latch onto its primary themes (love vs. duty, the jockeying for power among various historical footnotes), the material seems even less "relevant." As historical materialists, Straub and Huillet want us to encounter the past as "another country," not as an older iteration of our own concerns.

Having said all that, the Othon film is a tough watch, one of the pair's most punishing films. I get that this is by design, but it's still a bit of an intellectual chore. So why did I submit myself to it? I shouldn't do these things . . .