"A moral da percepção"

é o título de um ensaio de Serge Daney sobre Straub-Huillet. Aqui fica um excerto dedicado à(s) forma(s) de olhar: "There are tricks the Straubs never use – and even seem to be the negation of their cinema – such as superimposition or cross-fading. Every time an image overlays another (unless one image contains the other), every time an image prefigures another (unless one image is already the other’s memory). The time of superimposition is that of the active work of forgetting: a voice tells us: “you will forget, you have already forgotten”. This infringement of an image on another is one of the two limits of the Straubian shot. The other is the black (or empty) screen. In Moses und Aron there was the bedazzlement of an empty shot, of a non-image. In Dalla nube, there’s something else, there is a disclaimer: whatever you are looking at, a cultivated field, a hill, an animal, don’t forget that what you see is always human. If seeing a film, in the Godard-Miéville version, is about equating dad with the factory and mom with a landscape, in the Straub-Huillet version it’s about equating the factory and – more and more – the landscape with mom and dad. Humanism then, in the sense of a prevalency, of a pregnancy of the human image in all things. It is in this sense that these films “are watching us”: someone is watching us in the depth of each image, in an impossible superimposition. Cinema is what permits to suspend the enchantment which makes us think that we see all around us other than human things, while they are only cultivated fields, cut down trees, unknown cemeteries, animals-who-might-be-human (thus forbidding to kill them). Old Marxist humanism as well, in the sense that Brecht said that a picture of the Krupp factories taught us nothing about the Krupp factories. What is missing? The work of men and men at work. And what is there to learn? Always the same thing: men create gods (or the workers create chiefs, actors create spectators) and in return those gods bereave them of their world, turn them into strangers, alienate them. Because it’s clearly about alienation and re-appropriation, experience and bad experience, an entire existentialist problematic to which Straub’s cinema clings to. All of the sudden we understand their horror for the already-made esthetic categories: finding a shot of a landscape “beautiful” is bordering on blasphemy, because a shot, a landscape, is, in the end, someone. There is no beauty if not moral. It’s not about anthropomorphism. There is pregnancy of the human figure in all things, but not the other way around. If we consider a filmmaker important in so far as one studies, from film to film, a certain state of the human body, then the Straub’s films are but documentaries about two or three body positions: sitting, bending over to read, walking. It’s already a lot."