Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet talk about Ford, Fassbinder and their own films at the Viennale Filmfestival in Vienna, on October 19th, 2004. The conversation with Hartmut Bitomsky, Tag Gallagher, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Hans Hurch is in german, parts in english and french.

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The Viennale has long included the films of Straub/Huillet in its program. This year, together with the Austrian Film Museum, a complete showing of works by the radical European filmmakers will be presented. It encompasses a wide spectrum, and includes earlier works such as Nicht versöhnt (1964–65), the Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), the ‘Roman’ films Othon (1969) and Geschichtsunterricht (1972) as well as films about Schönberg, Pavese, Kafka, Hölderlin and Cézanne.
This showing is expanded with a large selection of films from the classic American director John Ford – for Vienna a particularly rare occurrence.
Straub/Huillet are interested in the Brechtian and educational aspects of Ford’s work and also how he deals with history; the extremely exciting relationship between the narrative and the documentary that runs through his films as well as the exact description of social relationships, practical gestures and human behavior. And also the wonderful unsentimental and moving moments of community and Utopia, the way it has rarely been told with such simplicity and beauty in cinema.
Danièle Huillet’s and Jean-Marie Straub’s film work has woven a thread through the history of cinema for more than four decades. Their work, as it is portrayed today, is an always new, exciting, unprecedented consequence of work on and with history, painting, nature, music, language, bodies, rhythms and forms.
The selection of Ford’s films collects a number of less well-known silent films from the ’20s, as well as earlier movies with sound, and a series of classics like The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long Voyage Home (1940) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Long Gray Line (1955), and later works such as Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and 7 Women (1965).