Abstract

This chapter looks at two of Straub-Hullet's later films, The Death of Empedocles and Workers, Peasants. Both films deal with the theme of dissolution—of the protagonist in nature or the individual in a community as well as the dissolution of a community itself. Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, a long-form poem that quotes verbatim witness transcripts from American legal trials, is discussed with special attention paid to how the poetic versified the transcripts and put them in relation to one another. The result on the page is a text that looks strikingly similar to the published script of Workers, Peasants, a film based on Elio Vittorini's novel Women of Messina and that also deals with witness testimony.

Keywords: Reznikoff, Straub-Huillet, Objectivists, Empedocles, Workers, Peasants, Vittorini

“One of the greatest powers of cinema is its animism. On-screen, nature is never inanimate.”

It is this repetition on which the law of the mourning play is founded. Its events are allegorical schemata, symbolic mirror-images of a different game. […] The time of the mourning play is not fulfilled, but nevertheless it is finite. It is nonindividual, but without historical universality. […] The nature of repetition in time is such that no unified form can be based on it. [Tragedy is] formally unified. […] The mourning play, on the other hand, is inherently nonunified drama, and the idea of its resolution no longer dwells within the realm of drama itself. […] Perhaps there is a parallel here: just as tragedy marks the transition from historical to dramatic time, the mourning play represents the transition from dramatic time to musical time.