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

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.

For over four decades, the films of Danièle Huillet (1936–2006) and Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) have been woven into the history of modern cinema as a continuous thread. While both were French, they worked mostly in Germany and Italy, and made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006. Their films, often adapted from theatrical or literary works, are distinguished by their deliberate use of Brechtian distancing techniques and strong Marxist political overtones. Aesthetically their work has been described as austere with minimal camera movements, long takes, simple, stark settings and restrained acting performances. Rare documents of aesthetic and political resistance to the world’s conditions, their works are characteristic of a great lyrical beauty and radical social formulas. when regarded today, Huillet and Straub’s oeuvre is an always fresh, exciting, and inimitable succession of films on history, painting, nature, politics, music, language, bodies, rhythms, and forms.