Screening of Straub-Huillet’s Class Relations, with a talk by Annett Busch

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub directed twenty-eight feature films in their fifty-two years of shared life and work, creating an oeuvre that is one of the most unique and uncompromising in modern cinema. Their vast filmography is as diverse as the material that served as the bases of many of their narratives, including writings by Brecht, Hölderlin, Duras, Kafka, Pavese, and Vittorini, as well as music by Bach and Schoenberg. Straub and Huillet often reinterpreted forgotten or overlooked classical works, investing them with a renewed polemical relevance. Their films bring stories of class struggle and resistance to the surface, examining post-war power relations and offering a critique of capitalism throughout history and across linguistic and territorial borders. Created with intense rigor, beauty, and political commitment, each of their deeply inventive films demands our full attention at every moment, presenting cinema as something both surprising and necessary.

Annett Busch is a curator, writer, and translator and is currently teaching at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art / NTNU. She was an editor at the pop-culture magazine Spex (1997-2002), and has co-edited the book Ousmane Sembène: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). She co-curated (with Florian Schneider) Of a people who are missing, an exhibition and ciné-club on films by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub in Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2009). Together with Anselm Franke, she co-curated the exhibition After Year Zero at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt – HKW, Berlin (2013) and an extended version at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2015). Her focus has also been on audacious female artists, administrators, philosophers, and fighters, co-developing Women on Aeroplanes (since 2017, with MH Gutberlet, Magda Lipska, and The Otolith Collective), and co-editing the accompanying Inflight Magazine. She is co-curator (together with Tobias Herring) of the 2017 retrospective project on Straub-Huillet’s work titled Tell it to the Stones, and co-editor of the eponymous book published by Sternberg Press in 2021.