Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: Objectivists in Cinema

By Benoît Turquety

Dani le Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich H lderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini. The impact of their work comes in part from a search for radical objectivity, a theme present in certain underground currents of modernist art and theory in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno as well as in the Objectivist movement, a crucial group within American modernist poetry whose members included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff, with connections to William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Through a detailed analysis of the films of Straub and Huillet, the works they adapted, and Objectivist poems and essays, Beno t Turquety locates common practices and explores a singular aesthetic approach where a work of art is conceived as an object, the artist an anonymous artisan, and where the force of politics and formal research attempt to reconcile with one another.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1041177917
• ISBN13: 9781041177913
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"