From the Clouds to the Resistance

“Resistance is the point of arrival of a story that begins elsewhere, earlier, with the clouds,” wrote Serge Daney of Straub-Huillet’s 1979 collaboration. “What is this story that spans two millennia, entwines humans and gods, then entwines humans with the most frightening of divinities—history? At what point did we start resisting? And what exactly are we resisting?” This adaptation of two seemingly disparate novels by Cesare Pavese, the towering Italian writer of the mid-20th century, stands as a signal achievement in Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s uncompromising body of work. In combining six dialogues from Dialogues with Leucò, a series of conversations between mythological figures about the relationship between gods and mortals, with The Moon and the Bonfires’s story of the “Bastard” who returns from America to his native village in Piedmont to discover it transformed by the war years, Straub-Huillet yield nothing of their career-long political and artistic intransigence, yet surrender to “the sensuality, the taste for narrative, [and] the joy of language” that Daney was thrilled to discover in From the Clouds to the Resistance.