Huillet-Straub in modern cinema: authorship as primacy of material and libertarian spectatorship

Abstract

Although their nomadic trajectory (resulting from exile) sometimes prevents a nominal link between Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub to the new postwar European cinematographic movements, the filmmaker couple was formed in the cinephile and critic bulge that would give rise to the Nouvelle Vague and fomented the emergence of Junger Deutscher Film — in addition to their work updating the problem of realism. Through the contextualization of Huillet-Straub’s early career and summary filmic analyses, the aim of this paper is to introduce the Huillet-Straubian conception of authorship, which is similar to but differs from both the Politique des auteurs and the Autorenfilm, being characterized by the primacy of material and by a libertarian spectatorship.

Keywords
authorship; Danièle Huillet; Jean-Marie Straub; modern cinema