Antigone

As in so many of Straub-Huillet's classical adaptations, Antigone offers multiple layers of history, time, and art: this 1991 film, shot in Sicily’s ancient Teatro di Segesta, stages Bertolt Brecht’s post-World War II adaptation of an eighteenth-century German translation (by the poet Hölderlin) of Sophocles’s ancient Greek drama Antigone, itself based on an earlier legend. Here, the film/play/tragedy’s themes of rebellion, sacrifice, and genocide echo across the timeless Teatro’s rocks, under Sicily’s eternal skies, while actors struggle against the elements to be heard. For Straub-Huillet, the ancient is always alive, whether in the winds, or the words.