Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hölderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vitorrini. The impact of their work comes in part from a search for radical objectivity, a theme present in certain underground currents of modernist art and theory in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno and in a long-forgotten movement of American modernist poetry, "Objectivism," whose members included Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff, with connections to William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Through a detailed analysis of the films of Straub and Huillet, the works they adapted, and Objectivist poems and essays, Benoît Turquety locates common practices and explores a singular aesthetic approach where a work of art is conceived as an object, the artist an anonymous artisan, and where the force of politics and formal research attempt to reconcile with one another.

[Benoît Turquety](https://www.unil.ch/cin/fr/home/menuinst/collaborateurstrices/ancienn/turquety-benoit.html) is a professor in the film department at the University of Lausanne and director of the SNF research project on Bolex and amateur cinema. He is a founding member of the Material Archival Studies Network, and a member of the Dispositives research group, of the Network for Experimental Media Archaeology, and the Technology and the Humanities project.

INTRODUCTION PART ONE: FOUNDATIONSI. EROTIC BARBARITY: OTHON1. A Play, A Film2. Principles3. Tradition and OpacityII. OBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITIES1. Huillet and Straub-style 'Objectivity'2. Objectivities3. The Objectivists: A History4. Objectivist Poetic TheoryPART TWO: LANGUAGE/AUTHORITYIII. THE POWER OF SPEECH (OR THE VOICE), OF SEEING AND THE PATH: MOSES AND AARON1. Moses, Aaron, Schoenberg, Huillet & Straub2. The Cinematic Form of (the Absence of) God: 'The Calling of Moses'3. Language Remains4. Birth of a Nation: Act II and End5. Objective on Objective: Huillet and Straub's PositionIV. SPEECH AGAINST POWER, OR POETRY, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION: 'A'-91. A Poem, History2. The Form of 'A'-93. Value and Meaning: Capitalism and Abstraction4. Love as a Poetic/Revolutionary TechniquePART THREE: INTERRUPTIONSV. CINEMA, POETRY, HISTORY: IMMOBILIZATIONS1. Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's 'Musical Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene': Motion and Pause, Cinema as History2. From Ideogram to Fugue: Poetry/Cinema3. Interruptions4. Continuities5. History Without a Name6. Braiding, CuttingPART FOUR: TRIALS, SERIESVI. INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION FOR THE LAST TIME: CLASS RELATIONS1. Trials2. On SpaceVII. ON DISSOLUTION1. Speech Without Authority: The Death of Empedocles2. On Dismantling: Testimony and Workers, PeasantsCONCLUSIONINDEX