Hölderlin, Flaubert, Cézanne, Mallarmé, Kafka, Schoenberg, and Brecht, as well as Benjamin and Adorno, Fritz Lang according to Rivette, or Chaplin according to Zukofsky: the artists encountered here in connection with Huillet and Straub's work all share a very deep link to the (strange) question of objectivity, even if this is inflected in many different ways. They all expressed and translated in their respective works these kinds of preoccupations through the forms they invented and themes they developed. Similar underground forces are at work from Hölderlin's “sacred sobriety” to Benjamin's “expressionless”, including the “limitless objectivity” Rilke saw in Cézanne and Mallarmé's “impersonality”.

Huillet and Straub find their place in this obscurely coherent tradition—a place they constructed by radicalizing their filmmaking and moving even closer to the asymptote of which their predecessors dreamed. And since their goal was an objectivity that can be qualified as radical, they needed to discover methods that would bring them as close as possible to this unattainable place. They were Objectivists.

The Objectivist position remains highly original in its manner of keeping together the terms of what many consider a dilemma, not wanting to choose between options others perceive as irreconcilable. While others were summoned to choose between political engagement and advanced artistic research, between social realism and elitist formalism, between Lenin and Pound, the Objectivists decided that not only were they compatible, but that only the strictest formal requirements could create a true political presence for an artistic work.