From the Cloud to the Resistance

Two key texts by the great Italian poet/novelist Cesare Pavese form the backdrop of Straub and Huillet’s 1979 interrogation of the two sides of art (and life), that of the yearning for the gods in the clouds above, and the (almost immediate) resistance to that very thought. In one section, various gods fallen to this dusty earth debate humankind’s foibles; in another, survivors of the bloody antifascist partisan movement recall their sacrifice. For Straub-Huillet, actors, setting, and texts are of similar importance, to “show the relationship of texts to areas and landscapes, and to the people who live there.”