THE BRIDEGROOM, THE ACTRESS, AND THE PIMP a film by JEAN-MARIE STRAUB & DANILE HUILLET

THE BRIDEGROOM, THE ACTRESS, AND THE PIMP a film by JEAN-MARIE STRAUB & DANIÈLE HUILLET. 1968. West Germany. 23 min. With Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann & Peer Raben. The iconic duo’s playful, gorgeous meditation on relationships and violence. Woe betide the cineaste who‘d approach Straub-Huillet sans knowledge to match the filmmakers’ decades spent atomising foundational, philosophical, radical texts. Or so the story goes: no doubt a Le Cinéma Club regular’s heard those names — particularly Jean-Marie Straub, who passed two weeks ago at 89 — uttered in hushed, fearful tones befitting artists of the most serious stature, that hyphenated name like a two-factor authentication of one’s bona fides. As if watching their films went beyond the strictures of cinema appreciation and into some… well, what? Lecture? Civics lesson? Being cornered at a party by some guy who wants to talk theory? It can’t be — not when so many personal favorites hold them in such esteem. (Jean-Luc Godard envied their courage; Pedro Costa made an entire documentary about their process.) But with this reputation — buttressed when seemingly every Jean-Marie Straub quote throws down a gauntlet — what are we looking at?