EVERY REVOLUTION IS A THROW OF THE DICE Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France, 16mm > digital, 11 min, 1977
Straub and Huillet invited friends to recite Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”, with its radically modern use of free verse, in a park alongside the wall in Père Lachaise cemetery where the last 147 men and women of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot dead in 1871. It is not hard to understand why these ambitious filmmakers were drawn to Mallarmé’s late 19th-century poem, which casts readers adrift in a sea of elusive meanings, a playfully and hermetically cubist constellation of words that can assume myriad visual, aural, and symbolic forms.—MoMA There’s always a pool of blood somewhere that we’re walking in without knowing it. There are always cadavers under a hill.—Jean-Marie Straub Jean-Marie Straub (1933–2022) and Danièle Huillet (1936–2006). 40+ films in collaboration from 1963–2006; complete retrospectives at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Austrian Film Museum, Berlin Academy of Arts, and Centre Pompidou, among numerous screenings around the world across decades. Lifetime Achievement Awards from Locarno Film Festival (2017) and Venice International Film Festival (2006).
