Journal Article

Unmaking Meaning: Motivation and Materiality in Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Too Early/Too Late and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud

Sooriyakumaran, Michael

2023

Overview

[...]by severely limiting the number of objects on the screen and prolonging the duration that any given element is before the spectator, the closed style of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964) sensitizes us to the visual and aural presence of the people and things in the film over and above their narrative utility. [...]both open and closed films have the potential to “roughen” form, inducing spectators to “concentrate on the processes of perception in and of themselves, rather than for some practical end” (Thompson 1988: 36). [...]with both the classical Hollywood cinema and the expository mode of documentary filmmaking (see Nichols 2010: 167-171), where a story or rhetorical argument is “the dominant around which other filmic resources are moulded,” in the work of Huillet and Straub, “a tenuous or gapped narrative or argumentation fails to fully unify a film; the representation of time and space is not solely committed to a content to be transmitted, and sounds and images engage our attention as materials in their own right” (Bösser 2005: 24-25). Furthermore, the voice-overs’ identification of some, but not all, of these places is a stylistic parameter whose variation over the course of the film disturbs the unity of text and image by highlighting its own arbitrariness. 4 Early in the film, over a shot panning rightward across a rural landscape to reveal a winding road (shot 4), Huillet says, “In Bretagne, in three villages in the district of Carhaix, it looked like this. [...]near the end of the shot, a white hatchback drives up the road towards the camera, exiting on the left side of the screen, and in the next shot, an identical hatchback enters on the left, passing a sign reading “Tréogan” as it speeds away from the camera, casting doubt on the unity of text and image:

• Publisher: Donald Totaro
• Subject: Argumentation / Cameras / Documentary films / Dreyer, Carl Theodor (1889-1968) / Motion pictures / Narratives / Street signs / Voice-overs