In the second session from February 6 to 10 we are going to continue our small series of theory films up there in the Skybar. After "L'intrus (Intruder)" by Claire Denis during the last session we will have the really rare pleasure to see "Antigone" by Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, filmed in 1991 in an old greek theatre in Sicily. The original title, "Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht 1948 (Suhrkamp Verlag)" already refers to a very distinct filmic approach that works with different layers of text and urgency.

We suggest to see the film in relation to both Lacans ethics and the sepcific notion of autonomy as well as the terrific work of two filmmakers whose work may mark the passage from modernism to postmodernism in an extra-ordinary way.

Brecht's Antigone (1948) is a bold adaptation of Holderlin's classic German translation of Sophocles' play. A reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of Nazism, it was a radical new experiment in epic theatre.

"Antigone presents herself as autonomos, the pure and simple relationship of a human being to that which it miraculously finds itself carrying, that is the rupture of signification, that which grants a person the insuperable power of being - in spite of and against everything - what he [sic] is... Antigone all but fulfills what can be called pure desire, the pure and simple desire of death as such [i.e., of that which is beyond the pleasure principle]. She incarnates this desire." (Lacan, Jacques: Le séminaire livre VII: L'éthique de la psychanalyse.: p. 328-29)

"Antigone incorporates in many ways the return to mythic origins suggested by films such as "Moses and Aaron" or "From the Cloud to the Resistance". It returns to the aesthetic origins of contemporary film and theater in its use of the visual simplicity of the silent cinema and the staging of Sophocles' play in a Greek theater of his era. It also returns to the mythic origins of civil society in the death of the heroic individual: Antigone's voluntary self-sacrifice parallels Moses' sojourn in the desert and Empedocles' plunge into volcanic fire. And its visual images, like its language, straining to be both German and Greek, mark the border between Europe and the other continents: the "African sun" shines on Sicily, as Huillet has put it."

http://texts.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft4m3nb2jk&chunk.id=d0e6311

Some more links:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103707

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/39/straub_holderlin_cezanne.ht...

http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/05mtg/abstracts/miller.html