The Straubs and boringness

I was listening to Channel 4 radio, a show called The Turner Round in which "people who know absolutely nothing about art are mic'ed up and sent to explore and respond to the work of the Turner Prize Nominees for 2006". In one episode where these guineapigs look at video installations by Phil Collins there's much talk of the singer Phil Collins and of TV shows like Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. The mic'd amateurs recognize that the Tate viewing room looks like a cinema, but find the work on display more boring than any film they've seen.



It occurred to me that these people were by no means cultureless; they were simply filtering one culture (the culture where Phil Collins is a video artist born in 1970) through another (the culture where Phil Collins is the bald drummer fellow out of Genesis, born 1951). I think Phil Collins (the video artist) wanted them to do this, but what interests me is the way that these two worlds, even when they use the same medium (a TV set), are essentially distinguished by different positionings of edits, or rather a different conception of what constitutes boringness.

Let's say there are two types of people in the world:

1. Those who are willing to put up with familiarity as long as it moves fast enough.
2. Those who are willing to put up with boredom as long as it adds up to something strange.

I'm definitely the second type, and I'd defend the boringness of much contemporary art -- you can quantify it in the lack of edits in its video, compared with the high edit rate of the average TV show -- as a positive value, because in a certain kind of boringness lies liberation from the oppressively, tediously overly-familiar.

If you're a number two type of person, it's easy to make an inversion of commonsense and say that:

Interesting things are boring, boring things are interesting.

But then of course you betray yourself, because if you find boring things interesting then you don't find them boring in the first place.



So I was watching the beautiful 1991 film by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Antigone. It was filmed in the Teatro de Segesta, a 4th century BC amphitheatre in Sicily. It's the Straubs' version of Brecht's version of Holderlin's version of Sophocles' play. It's boring in the best possible way; it allows you to soak up its atmosphere, yet pursue your own thoughts and associations.

I started thinking about enjoyable, useful, beautiful, otherworldly, Apollonian boringness. I watched the film twice in a row, the second time playing Alejandra and Aeron's Boushka Blue Blazes instead of the original soundtrack. That's the record where they mic up their granny while she hums and sings around the house. It fitted the Straubs' images very well. It was equally sensual, equally unhurried.

"Hardly anybody in today's international independent film scene is so intransigent and retroverse as the longtime filmmaker couple Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub," wrote Margret Eifler in The German Quarterly. "Due to their relentlessly difficult film style, which demands a deciphering intellect and does not supply thrill-oriented gratification, public reception of them is almost nonexistent. Even among cineasts their films have a rather mixed resonance. They are viewed as either stiff, deadly boring, and amateurish or as ingenious and totally misunderstood."

"Their work is formally austere and demands attentive, intellectual participation from audiences," says M.B. White of the Straubs at filmreference.com. "However, it must be acknowledged that many people find their films nearly impenetrable and absolutely boring. This is explained in part by the fact that the films do not rely on standard narrative construction or conventional characters. While the films of Straub and Huillet are by no means "abstract" it is nearly impossible to (re)construct a unified, imaginary, referential "world" through them."



But I find precisely the opposite: the unusual editing, the static, frigid friezes of these films, are interesting because they're so alien and strange to us. And this strangeness instantly conjures other worlds in our imagination. As they play, leaving me somewhat to my own devices, I imagine odd scenarios:

a. BBC 2 showing this Straub film unsubtitled and people really loving it, saying to each other "You know, BBC 2 gets more Apollonian each year, doesn't it, dear?"

b. An austere private party in which I invite friends round to watch a Straub film on condition that nobody is allowed to talk at all. We share a monklike stillness as we arrive, as we watch, and as we depart. Soon people start to talk about these events. The boringness is inherently interesting.

"In a sense," continues White, "their work might be explained in terms of strategies of displeasure, a wilful refusal to captivate audiences with a coherent fictional world. Instead they promote a distanced, intellectual interaction between viewer and film. Because of this insistence on critical distance, audiences must work with the film in a dialectical process of meaning construction. (In fact, Straub is notoriously critical of "lazy" viewers who are unwilling to engage in this activity.)"

But, again, this "displeasure" can quickly be turned into a different and rich form of pleasure, just as conventional "pleasures" can, with excessive repetition and heavyhanded emphasis, become tedious, boring, intrusive and annoying.



There are compensations for the loss of "the interesting". One might be freshness, one might be nature, and looking at nature.

"At the centre of [the Straubs' Antigone] there is first a tree that we sense had a hard time surviving the winter," says Cedric Anger in Cinemythology. "The moss is dry and the leaves yellowed by the sun. The mushroom sprouting at the roots indicates the age of the tree. It is, in other words, a tree that Straub went to the trouble of observing and then filming. This is something few directors do anymore as most of them operate more and more like parachutists, filming without taking the trouble to look."

The Straubs also listen: they use only direct sound, and when the wind flares on the mic they leave it in. It's a way for us to listen to the wind. "Actual sound" says a Swiss Straub commentator "had now clearly become the basic principle of their cinema, the determining element of what they call 'the respect for reality'. In other words, each shot is thought of as an uncuttable image-sound block."



In their introduction to an adaptation of Corneille's Othon, Straub and Huillet made clear how they want all the elements in their films to be equally interesting (which means equally boring): "The spoken text or words are no more important here than the very different rhythms and tempos of the actors and their accents… no more important than their particular voices, captured in the very moment, which struggle against the noise, the air, the space, the sun and the wind, no more important than the sighs they involuntarily heave, or the all the other of life’s little surprises recorded at the same time, like particular sounds that suddenly make sense; no more important than the effort actors make, the work they do and the risk they run, like tightrope or sleep walkers, from one end to the other of long fragments from a difficult text; no more important than the frame, which the actors are enclosed in; than their movements or positions inside that frame, than the background against which they stand; than the changes and leaps of light and color; no more important in any case than the cuts, the changes of images and shots."

And there it is. In a boring film where nothing really matters to you, suddenly you realize that -- if only we removed what we boringly think is interesting -- everything might matter. It's our fear of the boring which is boring us to death.