Sightlines · a concept

regime straub huillet

the speech-act as resistance/struggle over a stratigraphic, "telluric" empty earth-space.

On screen: a voice of the buried past over a depopulated landscape

• Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) — A testimonial voice of the buried past laid over authentic, depopulated Baroque interiors — the film is the foundational instance of the regime Deleuze defines through Straub-Huillet.
• Shoah (1985) — The governing configuration of the whole film: a voice of the buried past laid over depopulated Polish landscapes, the land mute until speech resurrects it
• Landscape Suicide (1987) — Flatly recited case-record language set beside depopulated terrain, the camera having arrived after the event; the lineage debt to Straub-Huillet's Fortini/Cani (1976) is explicit in the method.
• Last and First Men (2020) — A composed literary text (Stapledon, 1930) recited in a cool, unhurried voice over emptied WWII memorial ground in the former Yugoslavia — with the polarity inverted, since the buried thing is a…