Featured at the Venice, Cannes and Edinburgh Film Festivals in 1979,
“Straub's and Huillet's From the Cloud to the Resistance is one of their most original films, being an adaptation of two works by Cesare Pavese: ‘Dialogues with Leuco' and ‘The Moon and the Bonfire.' ‘From the cloud... that is, since the appearance of the gods, or more precisely since their invention by man, until the resistance - almost immediate - of the latter against the former, as much as until the Resistance against fascism.' The dialogues (six of which are used) are between mythological figures, but they have been chosen to shed an oblique light on the novel ‘The Moon and the Bonfire,' which deals with the partisan movement in the Piedmont as seen through the eyes of a man who has returned from America to find out just what happened. Infinitely more accessible than the Straubs' last film, Fortini/Cani, From the Cloud to the Resistance is at times extremely elliptical; at others it fascinatingly explores ‘real time,' as in the unforgettable sequence of a farm wagon bearing Oedipus along the dusty roads of Piedmont. Someone complained that the Straubs have painted themselves into a corner, and maybe this is true. But what a pleasure to watch two people doing their thing, unaffected and uninterested in the ebb and flow of film fashion.”