I. Intensive Translation

It may be an ironic tribute to Straub and Huillet's perdurable modernity that their work has resisted academic interpretation for so many decades. As recently as 2004, one commentator noted that “there is little indication” of a larger attention to their work, citing others who described their status as “dinosauresque” relative to the cinematic mainstream. Even the discovery of film music as a topic of research has largely passed them by in favor of Hollywood cinema's “unheard melodies” or New German cinema's more obviously semantically coded use of music. The difficulty of Straub and Huillet's art—its “resistance” (Byg) not only to forms of domination, but even to comprehension itself—is a classically modernist one, which Niklas Luhmann has described as one of communication:

It is precisely the blocking of the “difference between communication and message” that has continued to frustrate the reception of these films (preventing the “Anschluss” of communication that enables the latter, whether public or scholarly).