About this Event
Epiphany from the East: Straub-Huillet’s Ethnographic Surrealism
The first line of Jean-Marie Straub’s ‘Autobiography’ might initially strike readers as eccentric: we learn he was born under the astrological sign of Capricorn, the Sunday after Epiphany, in the birth city of Paul Verlaine. This paper begins by taking this informationseriously, a confession of two underacknowledged currents of Straub-Huillet’s filmmaking practice: surrealism and the theological concept of epiphany. While epiphany has occasionallybeen invoked by scholars to describe revelatory moments in the Straubs’s films, its specific theological-scholastic provenance, and surprising imbrication with French surrealism, have never been broached.
Epipháneia, or ‘manifestation’ in Greek, migrated into Christian thought as theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas associated it with the presentation of the newborn Christ to the three magi. The term was subsequently developed by Islamic philosophers, who associated it with a spiritual illumination coming from the orient. Rather than tracking epiphany’s re-emergence in Anglophone (Joycean) modernism, I follow the French Islamologist Christian Jambet’s suggestion that this ‘oriental’ understanding of epiphany emerges most forcefully in the surrealism of André Breton. Indeed, Breton’s writings on ‘the Orient’ and his surrealist group’s radicalization by the 1925 Rif Mountain uprising prepared the way for Georges Bataille and Maurice Griaule’s anthropological research, as well as the ethnographic filmmaking practices of Luis Buñuel and Jean Rouch, both of whom are cited as influences by Straub himself. In fact, Straub-Huillet describe their early films as ‘completely surrealistic’, and I will argue that we must understand this surrealism according to its ethnographic desire for an epiphanic encounter with the Orient. Focusing on Moses und Aron(1974), the film that first exposed the Straubs to Egypt, I will argue that the film’s formal and material disjunctions represent not a rationalistic distancing, but rather a surrealist-inspired attack on the very coherence of ‘western’ civilization.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Lecture Room (5.65) Richmond Building, 105 Queens Road, Clifton, United Kingdom
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