The French, though resolutely multilingual, filmmaking duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet produced a series of experimental and challenging films that have routinely been described as ‘Brechtian’. Yet this designation may appear somewhat puzzling. Visually, Straub / Huillet’s films resemble neither Brechtian theatre nor the films that Brecht had a hand in making (including Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe [1932] and Fritz Lang’s Hangmen also Die! [1943]). Even the duo’s direct adaptations of Brecht in History Lessons (1972) and Antigone (1992) take as their starting point relatively neglected and obscure parts of his oeuvre that are far from representative of a Brechtian ‘style’. To adapt a text is not, of course, to adopt wholesale the aesthetic precepts of its author and Straub / Huillet’s routine association with Brecht owes just as much to the championing of their work by journals such as Screen and Cahiers du cinéma, both of which were deeply influenced by a Brechtian mode of film theory in the 1970s.
Whilst such lines of connection between Brecht and Straub / Huillet have previously attracted scholarly commentary, far less attention has been paid to the crucial role of translation in these processes of intermedial adaptation and critical reception. In this presentation, I will explore the relation between Brecht and Straub / Huillet through the lens of translation, grasped in its multiple forms. By considering their films as a continuation of Brecht’s own tendency to recycle, modify, and defamiliarize his own body of work, I will sketch a materialist politics of translation integral to Straub / Huillet’s filmmaking.
Liam Johnston-McCondach recently completed a DPhil at Oxford University and is currently Lecturer in German at St John’s College. His doctoral research considered the reception of Bertolt Brecht in the writing of Roland Barthes and explored the transformation of European literary politics across the mid-twentieth century. He has also published on contemporary German poetry and the playwright, Heiner Müller.
