Antigone (1992)

Directors: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

Based on the adaptation of the Sophocles play by Bertolt Brecht

Cast: Astrid Ofner as Antigone; Ursula Ofner as Ismene; Werner Rehm as Kreon; Lars Studer as Wächter; Stephan Wolf-Schönburg as Hämon; Albert Hetterle as Tiresias; Mario di Mattia as Knabe; Michael König as Bote;     Libgart Schwarz  as Botin; Hans Diehl, Kurt Radeke, Michael Maassen and Rainer Philippi as Die Alten

Cannon Fodder

Are you posing me riddles you transparent fool?

[Cannon Fodder: Films or productions by individuals already on the Abstract Canon, or figures/genres/movements I hold in high regard, that would never get on the Canon itself.]

Adapted from Sophocles by way of Bertolt Brecht, Antigone follows a side of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's they had been perfecting over the decades beforehand. That for work like this, rather than their documentaries and other experiments, they were recording "performances". Minimal to an extreme and restricted to one or a handful of locations, they eventually had actors mostly standing still and speaking their lines. Nothing could be accused in such films as artifice that distracted from the words and their meaning.

They are difficult films in the directors' career, which is saying something. One for example, The Death of Empedocles (1987), stripped everything away to such an extreme that, far from clearing the words and adding clarity to them, actually made the film (as others) more challenging. Maybe I have finally come to Antigone fully used to the directors' attitude - it is still a production where actors in Ancient Greek costume (speaking in German) act out the work almost entirely stood in place - but there is something special with this particular example. There is something about Antigone arguably more accessible and that, in context of these works in their career and their work in general I have seen, it is also exceptional.

They play follows Creon, an old patriarch and current ruler of Thebes, who has mercilessly had Polynices, a song of Oedipus and brother of Antigone, slain during a conflict with Argos, proclaiming his body will not be buried but instead left for the birds and the beasts to devour. Antigone, a strong willed young woman, refuses this official decree and will try to get the body buried. Even though she is meant to marry Haemon, his youngest son, reacts violently to her transgression, punishing her by being entombed in a cave alive. He will banish said youngest when he challenges him, and he will proclaim victory in conflict and the treasures of Argos, even if the war is actually yet to be won and it is pointed out by blind prophet Tiresias, here an old man, that even if he does not have powers of precognition, he can still proclaim likely disaster is imminent as he still knows that spears are being made and shipped over to Thebes' solders for battle.

In the modern day, it would be understandable that Creon was just a delusional, egotistic patriarch and see his punishment is deserved. For me, this is true but it is also a tragedy whenever any character, patriarch or not, falls and destroys themselves, in this case of deeply ignorant behaviour (greed, wrath), delusion of grandeur and a willingness to lash out at even those tied to him by bloodline that will eventually lead to Thebes' destruction. It is not just politicians we can make comparisons to Creon about, but any man who falls in hubris and is lead to eventually losing it all as a result. An ominous quote also makes this universal as well, from Bertolt Brecht¹, stating of how the wars of the past, over centuries, were merely practice for far worse, all scored to the sound of helicopter blades heard on the soundtrack.

In mind to the creators, you can see this as an adapt conveying the corruptive nature of power too. The strong, legitimately feminist figure of Antigone, played by Astrid Ofner, stands her ground, calling out the war with Argos a disgrace and challenging Creon rightly because her brother deserves a proper burial. Sadly Ofner did not act as much as she should, as in this is her only onscreen work in cinema; Ursula Ofner, playing her sister, in an amusing twist of cinema would have a slightly longer career including Beach Bikini Party (1999), a Canadian-American-German co-production.

Here in this film however, even if he is a villain, Creon deserves a form of empathy from the perspective that his delusion is one all can succumb to, especially as Werner Rehm (who had a longer career in acting) is allowed to play him with incredible dramatic pathos. The reason why I can even connect to his villain is that, unlike some of the others films in this style from Straub-Huillet, these performances are legitimately great here. A Greek tragedy of hubris like this can be seen from all angles as, alongside its text, everyone is allowed to have emotions, and unlike the toned down minimalistic acting of before from the directors, they have let the cast here stand out without it having clearly undermined their philosophical reasons to strip the artifice away. None of the performances are arch or exaggerated, which was probably a concern for the directors as much in their decision to even cast non-actors and have them read out text on paper in some of their productions, and here they instead have the gravitas to engage with whilst being able to convey the meaning of the work.  

Even for this type of minimalism, Straub and Huillet by all accounts were also exceptionally precise. They precisely choose their locations, Antigone all acted in an amphitheatre on a mountain cliff, the lingering remains of the ancient structure marked of the rock foundations still in the ground. Each "act", divided between by the Greek chorus of old wise men following Creon, usually cuts to the ground to switch between them as the chorus monologues for a few minutes each time. This is the most alienating aspect of the film except it leads to an effect in itself, when seeing a newly dead messenger on the ground in the background, or when the camera at the end finally pans out to the horizons beyond the mountain for the final monologue, effecting a viewer with a greater weight of impact to what is being heard through this simple repetitive structure. Likewise, it is a fascinating that, for all their preciseness, the directors still let the unpredictable and natural world have an effect especially in these ultra-minimalist films of their career, as whilst everything acted is heard perfectly, the wind is a strong prescience in scenes (as in other productions) and even they would not attempt to, say, prevent stray butterflies from wandering in shot, in fact feeling like a touch of the actuality films of the beginning of cinema in attitude. These films, where cinema was brand new, could barely muster more than a minute's length of reel and starting in the late 19th century, shot with minimal camera movements and had to take into account they shot what they could see unless it was Georges Méliès. I have found Straub-Huillet in their films, even when they were not making documentaries or didactic work, have let the naturalism of their environments be seen and heard without trying to manipulate and edit it out.

As a result, their extreme minimalism here, unlike before, feels more fluid, as the passions and emotions of the words are heard and sounded, with the added aspect that the subtitles, unlike others put together upon Daniele Huillet's request to not be entirely detailed, are full and efficient here. Any further detail would stepping on the creators' toes, as they have stripped what they have deemed the unnecessary, and the film is the barest of content but to the maximum of its intellectual concerns and emotional demonstration of them. The different is found that, even having become admirers of theirs, times before did show admirable experiments which did however have creative flaws or, if I am to later grow fond of them, were very obtuse to the common viewer, requiring more context or patience to delve into and fully understand.  Here, you could easily introduce Antigone to an outsider to their world, if they were able to engage with the work, winning a new viewer interested in their work as this manages the right balance between their filmmaking ideals and adapting material that is still relevant in its universal nature.

 

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1) The memory of humanity for sufferings borne is astonishingly short. Its gift of imagination for coming sufferings is almost even less. It is this callousness that we must combat. For humanity is threatened by wars compared to which those past are like poor attempts and they will come, without any doubt, if the hands of those who prepare them in all openness are not broken.

—Bertolt Brecht, 1952