»Preserving is no small thing in this sense; it’s creating, creating what is always a supplementary thing (whether in order to embellish Nature, or to spiritualise it, or to be its rival). It is a property of the supplementary thing that it can only be created, and it is the aesthetic or conceptual function, itself a supplementary thing.« (Gilles Deleuze, letter to Serge Daney)

Straub-Huillet.Net is devoted to the idea of a »Historical Critical Internet-Edition«. We work on it as a research project with support of hfbk (Hochschule der bildenden Künste Hamburg) and in close collaboration with imaginary property, a research projekt at jve (Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht).

1
Why Straub-Huillet?

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet have worked together very closely over 40 years until Danièle Huillet's death in October 2006. Though they have been awarded with prestigious awards (Cannes) and their work became inspirational for scores of flmmakers, nevertheless their work seems to be unknown to many. From the early 1960ies till to date their radical modernist approach towards filmmaking allowed them to create almost 30, very diverse films of political sharpness; they treated and transformed literature by Kafka, Pavese and Hölderlin, as well as the paintings of Cezanne, cantatas by Bach and operas by Schönberg while they kept developing a distinct visual language and the belief in the autonomy of the image.

Born in Lorraine, living in Germany, Italy and France and making films in French, German and Italian, the filmmakers themselves represent an important thread of European film history. Due to their insistance on the highest possible technical quality, they brought together the best technicians, cinematographers and sound-editors, who made possible, for instance, the live recording of an orchestra while shooting a scene and their accuracy in respect to almost every uttered syllable. This way they were able to match aesthetic vision and excellent technical quality, one of the main characteristics of their work.

This seems to imply that Straub-Huillets entire work and attitude could not be more contradictory to the digital world and mode of production. Instead, we understand the background as an extreme pole of analog filmmaking which -- besides the technical questions and challenges -- provokes a permanent rethinking of the potentialities and limitations of the digital itself. As the filmmakers constantly questioned the possible transformation from one medium to the other, such as literature, painting, music towards film, as a process of re-reading, re-inventing or readjusting of meaning.

2
European Film Heritage to be actualized

For a long time films by Straub-Huillet have only been available as 35mm or 16mm film copies. Nowadays there are a few DVD editions in progress, compiled by Edition Montparnasse in Paris, subtitled in French, by Kinokuniay in Japan, as well as a couple of selected films by the edition of the Cinemathèque in Munich and Vienna. We would like to find out whether the internet might serve as the most adequate form of distribution as it allows to continue and actualize the rich oeuvre collaboratively and on a meta level.

From the very beginning in the early 1960ies each film by Straub-Huillet was extensively commented on by critics as well as by the filmmakers themselves. There is a huge amount of additional material at various locations all across the globe like scripts, interviews and intermediatory films by renowned artists, such as the German filmmaker Harun Farocki or the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa.

The Cinematèque in Bologna has been collecting lots of secondary material, the "Studio des Art Contemporains" in Le Fresnoy and the "Ecole de Beaux Arts de Mans" have invited the filmmakers several times and published a series of books about their work; which is the base of an ongoing debate in academic filmstudies in the United States. There are various interests by young filmmakers and art students in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Norway and elsewhere to study and explore the films by Straub-Huillet. All these different angles and approaches could certainly overlap and be enriched on a collaboratively organised internet platform -- not to mention the opportunity to collaboratively translate subtitles and to make them accessible.

3
What does best possible quality mean?

How can the ambitious technical standard of the fims by Straub-Huillet, their insistance on the best possible projection be transformed and transcoded to a digital, compressed format which is available for download?

The question of compression is crucial. Compression means an unlimited amount of storable information through encoding and decoding. The aim is to reduce the redundancy of image data in order to store or transmit data in the most efficient way. Compression means to control the decision-making process about which information has to be replaced, as the content of an image is constantly changing but can only partial be renewed.

Efficiency and the control of the decision-making process are the most relevant components when it comes to the development of a codec, i. e. the mode or program that digitally encodes and decodes data or signals. Most recently open source alternatives have been developped that have the potential to outrun proprietary audio and video container formats such as the lsub-par MPEG-2 standard, mainly known through DVDs.

The Ogg Theora project has matured as the most advanced open source video encoding project. The open format for video compression is highly competitive to MPEG-4/DiVX, formats with a very high compression rate at the best possible quality, to allow a rather fast up- and download.

To work with an open-source codec would be an appropriate way to adopt Straub-Huillet's ethics of production in a contemporary model of digital distribution. It would also be a groundbreaking experiment in an open archiving process that is based on a certain independency from the ups and downs of commercial developments. The goal is a highly sustainable and progressive approach that constantly follows the technical progress while having a guarantee for backward compatibility.