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).

Standard Time

Michael Snow, Canada, 16mm, 8 min, 1967

The camera swivels (pans) left to right, over and over again, then tilts, up and down, over and over again, establishing movement as such as the given condition of perception and existence … The bombarding impulses, through the “repeated” pans/tilts, permit (for each viewer, each time) different moments of reality to become relevant, exciting, etc. The speed at which the camera sees the given visually creates frustration at not being able to hold (the) experience, to pattern it in a conventional manner. … Snow’s film activates one’s internal mechanisms for grasping (idiosyncratically, in time) the substances one is faced with, it negates objective experience once and for all.—Peter Gidal

Michael Snow (1928–2023). Worked in film, photography, sculpture, installation, holography, music; 25+ films from 1956–2019. Grand Prize for Wavelength (1967) at EXPRMNTL 4; major retrospectives at venues including Centre Pompidou and The Museum of Modern Art.

Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres (1995), Governor General’s Award (2000), Companion of the Order of Canada (2007). Performance, screening, and re-issue of CCMC Vol. III LP at MCFF (2013). Greatly missed.