Straub and Huillet. Towards a Deterritorialisation of the Gaze

Júlia Pérez Gonell, M.A.

Between 1970 and 2006, much of Straub and Huillet’s filmography centred on Italian productions characterised, on the one hand, by the influence of Italian authors (Vittorini, Fortini, Pavese) and, on the other, by a vision of utopian communism in which nature is placed at the centre as a mythical reserve. This research explores the relationship between territory and language through the filmography of Straub-Huillet, proposing as its central theme the deterritorialisation of the gaze directed towards the spaces on which the couple of filmmakers have focused part of their work: the Apuan Alps, Sicily and Buti, territories imbued with the symbolic imagery of national narrative, where the Straubs’ approach offers a different perspective. This proposal implies moving beyond the hegemonic assertions that constitute these spaces, through a representation based on recognition, in order to conceive of the territory in terms of the flows, forces and intensities that constitute it. Their cinema, imbued with a political inhabiting and rooted in the physical reality of the local territory, presupposes the promotion of new perspectives, avoiding the closure of identity as polarisation or as a form petrified in predetermined positions, in which every process of reterritorialisation makes possible the emergence of new landscapes, both physical and psychic, and affirms multiplicity, unfolding lines of flight.