I first saw Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s film “Sicilia!” at the New York Film Festival, in 1999. On my way out of the screening, I ran into my former professor, Gilberto Perez, in whose class I’d first seen Straub and Huillet’s earlier films, in the nineteen-seventies. Perez and I agreed that, compared to the duo’s other works—aesthetically spare, intellectually complex, often dramatically oblique—this one, with its with intense emotional confrontations, sharp intimate revelations, and relatively straightforward action, seemed like their version of a Hollywood movie. Even art-house filmmakers have styles and habits that can serve as self-imposed conventions; in “Sicilia!,” which is currently streaming on Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema, Straub and Huillet challenge their usual practices by confronting new subjects and new material, and, in so doing, expand their artistry.
Straub (who did most of the directing and is still making films), and Huillet (who did most of the producing and editing; she died in 2006), have always had a special cinematic relationship with the classic arts. Their first feature, “Not Reconciled,” from 1965, is an adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine”; their second film, “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach,” is a bio-pic of Johann Sebastian Bach and is filled with extended on-camera performances of his works. The pair have adapted Kafka and Brecht, Corneille and Marguerite Duras; they’ve made films about Cézanne, and, above all, they’ve made two of the greatest films of operas—of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aaron” and “From Today Until Tomorrow.” In “Sicilia!,” an adaptation of the novel “Conversations in Sicily,” by Elio Vittorini, first published in serial form in 1938 and 1939—and set in Sicily around that time, under the Fascist regime—Straub and Huillet achieved another great multimedia work of pure cinema, one that is, in its own way, operatic.
“Sicilia!” is the story of Silvestro (Gianni Buscarino), a thirtysomething man born and raised in Sicily who, after emigrating to New York, returns home for the first time in fifteen years. Soon after disembarking at a dock, he talks with a local man (Carmelo Maddio) of about the same age, and they compare their economic miseries—for the New Yorker, it’s unemployment; for the Sicilian, it’s the inability to sell his orange crop. (They also discuss food, both in relation to poverty and subsistence and in the light of culinary tradition.) Silvestro boards a train, where a pair of plainclothes secret-police officers flaunt their repressive political views. In a scene of Silvestro in a compartment with other travellers, one, a local landowner, passes from making insulting remarks behind the officers’ backs to considering the miseries that afflict him and others and cause them to work as the regime’s enforcers.
The train brings Silvestro to the house of his mother (Angela Nugara), and their reunion—more than a half-hour long—is the heart of the film and one of the great dialogue sequences of the modern cinema. The house where she lives isn’t the one that Silvestro was raised in; it’s her late father’s isolated house, which he’d built with his own hands, and to which she returned after her husband, Silvestro’s father, left home to live with another woman. The site inspires his questions about the family’s past and his mother’s earlier years—and the responses that she delivers are profound and revelatory. Their conversations about family history are furiously forged under the pressure of political history, starting with her description of her father, a laborer and a socialist and a local notable who cut a grand figure, and whose principled politics didn’t get in the way of him leading a local religious procession and its flamboyant cavalcade. (In effect, the collective exuberance and unifying power of such homemade public pageantry, despite its religious pretext, comes off as a kind of people’s politics in itself.)
Silvestro asks questions about his childhood, and the conversation inevitably turns to domestic subjects, including the detailed descriptions of foodstuffs and recipes, yet always with an eye toward how they related to the family’s fortunes. Silvestro’s father worked for the railroad, unlike most men in the region, who were farmers and miners. (A shot of Silvestro sniffing a winter melon that his mother brings to the table suffuses the scene with the Proustian power of culinary memory.) Then, the elephant in the room makes some noise: Why did his father, her husband, leave home? The woman’s tales of her life with her husband have an incendiary, purifying power; she dispels Silvestro’s patriarchal illusions regarding his father while opening his eyes about her own life as a wife, a mother, and a woman. She speaks of childbirth and of adultery, of sex and romance. She blasts away at Silvestro’s petit-bourgeois moralism and his naïve, socially inculcated ideas of marriage—and she discloses to him a tale of her own long-ago passion that sets sexual desire, and the nature of love itself, at the crossroads of history and class relations.
The film’s dialogue is less spoken than declaimed; it’s nearly sung, in sharply etched phrases, by its actors—who, amazingly, are nonprofessionals. They maintain frozen poses and lend their long speeches and short interjections precise yet impassioned power. Straub and Huillet film them in images that are themselves sculpturally fixed, and that are edited together to land with the weight of stone. The filmmakers’ conjunction of the arts reaches an apogee here: their images are a sort of visual music that sets the dialogue like a libretto and renders the performances operatic.
When I interviewed Straub, in 2001, in Paris, we discussed filmmakers’ differing methods of evoking of the history of cinema in their work. By way of illustrating his method, he invited me to attend a screening that night of their film “Antigone,” from 1992, and to call him back a couple of days later. After seeing the film, I got the point: their adaptation, based on Brecht’s revisions of Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles—and similarly, amazingly, performed by nonprofessional actors—was, in effect, the Straub and Huillet version of a John Ford film, albeit without any homages or quotes to suggest as much. Similarly, seeing “Sicilia!” now, at two decades’ remove, I consider it not quite an evocation of a Hollywood film. Rather, with its references to the young man’s travels home and into his past, the lusty and carnivalesque stories that arise in conversation, and the politics of memory, “Sicilia!” suggests Straub and Huillet’s version of (and improvement on) a Fellini film. The sense is reinforced by the film’s ending, a nearly antic scene of exuberant public craftsmanship and social principle.
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What to Stream: “Sicilia!” - The New Yorker
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