Sabato’s Reviews > Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub > Status Update
Sabato
is on page 66 of 324
- The historical memory evoked in the audience by a film about a major cultural figure is juxtaposed in the fiction with the private memory of his wife. This memory, in turn, resonates with the tension and use of memory involved in any performance. The musicians and actors are also acting out a memory, both in performing a past composition in the present and in reciting a memorized text. -
— Feb 20, 2026 09:04AM
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Sabato’s Previous Updates
Sabato
is on page 138 of 324
Films will not materially contribute to social change by describing capitalism as the enemy or by teaching that it functions according to the demands of economic or social and political forces. Social change can only come about if someone makes use of this knowledge, and the work of art cannot presume to prescribe how this is to come about. -
— Apr 19, 2026 11:45AM
Sabato
is on page 137 of 324
The significance of form in History Lessons implies that it is an oversimplification to see the film (or Brecht's novel) either as a demystification of Caesar or as a demystification of (film or novelistic) form. The formal discussion of the novel indicates that the form itself challenges the dominant view of history. -
— Apr 19, 2026 11:36AM
Sabato
is on page 124 of 324
This is the modern artist's intolerable situation, which became most extreme under fascism but which persists as long as consciousness is under occupation by the culture industry. The artist must be hopeful that society will survive and that social change will restore a sense of the values preserved in art. And this hope must also compel the artist to push artistic tradition forward, -
— Apr 19, 2026 10:05AM
Sabato
is on page 119 of 324
Clearly, the novel was written for an audience—German workers conscious of their own interests—that did not exist or could not be reached. Only after Books I through III of the novel had been shown to some German workers was Brecht encouraged enough to go on. "They understood everything, even the details." The audience easiest to reach was not sympathetic. -
— Apr 19, 2026 08:14AM
Sabato
is on page 66 of 324
- Suspense is generated because something could go wrong, be lost or forgotten. The fictional confrontation with documentary reality traces the border between present and past, between life and living memory and death.
— Feb 20, 2026 09:04AM
Sabato
is on page 66 of 324
The "fiction" of the Bach film is carefully defined as that aspect of the film that arises almost in a shock effect by the confrontation between documentary and fiction. The music and the manuscripts presented to the camera and the documentation of the present performance confront the fiction of Anna Magdalena Bach's remembering these images as her husband. -
— Feb 20, 2026 09:03AM
