Popular reviews

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  Review by Avalyn Wu ★★★★★ 3

  Opens with one of those classic Straub-Huillet panning shots, by now a clear indication that something is to be conjured from and confronted with in the empty landscape, a preview for what the words and actors will make explicit. And they bring a similar shot back at the very end, turning bookend into reminder, telling us that it is impossible to think of these desolate hills as separate from people, separate from history.

  Everything in between unfolds as a double progression, both of the drama at hand and the cinematic methods used to articulate it. The camera pans between different groups of actors, before deciding to simply cut between the two. There are sometimes wides and sometimes close-ups, the framing…

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  Review by tarrdigrade ★★★★★

  Had to catch this as part of the ongoing Straub-Huillet retrospective on mubi. I tend to forget the experience of seeing a film by the duo, so each time I return I am overwhelmed by their work and by how efficient it is, it's really quite unlike watching films made by anyone else. There is, of course, the specific film and what it contains within itself. But more than that, it's the continuation of the highly distinctive style, perhaps the most distinctive style in cinema, that also serves to deepen one's understanding of the enigmatic (when seen from the perspective of traditional cinema) theatrics utilized by Straub-Huillet and why they're so effective. And it is certain that their work is…

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½

  Composed like a cut up chorus,
  a vibrant piece of visual music;
  sonic stimuli for the human eye.

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  Review by Jarrod White ★★½ 5

  This film made me feel so utterly stupid, and fucking useless as a person, and I was so overwhelmed by that I almost cried. I'm tired after working all day. I don't speak this language, I can't even read the subtitles fast enough. I keep getting distracted by the timbre and musicality of the reading of the old woman's voice. Oh, I missed another huge chunk of text. What's going on? What's being said? I'm so fucking stupid. I start looking at the trees in the background, but I have to keep looking down at the subtitles to try to fruitlessly piece together what I'm supposed to be gathering. Is this a filmmaking pragmatic, just some relaying of information? I…

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  Review by Ben Nash ★★★★★

  The struggles of the proletariat as a Greek chorus. Masterpiece.

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  Review by Jerry ★★★★ 1

  I found the script-reading unnecessarily distracting, but not enough to ruin a great yarn.

  Tag Gallagher:

  This is a wonderful story of a group of outcasts who rebuild an abandoned village and their own lives just after ww2. It's also a super Rashomon, in that typically an event is described by one person, followed by a different account of the incident by a second person, then a third person giving yet another account.

  It's a great example of "realism" in cinema: even though the players dress and talk like people today, and are in a woods rather than the village they claim around them, and even are reading their words, we nonetheless believe in them the way we did when, as children, mother read to us.

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★ 7

  a dialectical approach to worker's dillemas in a newly born community. straub & huillet managed to master even natural light.

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  Review by Adriana Scarpin ★★★★

  Operários, Camponeses estreava há 20 anos no Festival de Cannes.
  Mais uma vez Straub/Huillet adentram o universo de Elio Vittorini com seus elementos de encenação bretchiana e marxista para nos entregar um exemplo prático de dialética no cinema.
  Plus: Recomendo muitíssimo para aqueles que querem exercitar a escuta da língua italiana, com a pronúncia límpida e jorrante é um afago na alma entender tudo que os atores dizem, acho que coeficiente literário da coisa ajuda muito.
  WEBRip no MakingOff.

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  Review by Harrison Wade ★★★★★

  The story is simple: in a small village in Italy, a conflict arises in the winter when the peasants stop working the land because it's frozen over. It's the only season they don't work, a natural break, but the workers see it as laziness. The latter group begins to fight with the peasants over supplies, over work, and some people leave the village. Some freeze in the snow. The elite, the mayor, the doctor, work for or against the peasants, fight amongst themselves about love and responsibility as spring arrives, then summer.

  The story is difficult in its abstraction, in the way Straub & Huillet present Vittorini's text with nearly still performers in a lush forest. Each actor speaks in turn,…

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  Review by Julius B ★★★★

  A film somewhat defined by its inconsistencies. A love triangle interrupts the workaday dialectics of a Socialist commune on the outskirts of the mainstream town, and the lives of its inhabitants, absconding and returning back at equal frequency. Modern working-class people play the roles, representing their characters with inconsistent reliableness - the supposedly dashing young doctor is played by a middle-aged man in a suit - and consistent sense of humility. The players go from reading off a script in their hands, to off-book, and sometimes back again, or vice versa. What they know and what they don't know, and what they are presumably instructed to memorize, is a friction we pay attention to as it is on the very…

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  Review by Matt Thomas ★½ 2

  This Mubi retrospective can't end soon enough. Yet another tepid borefest that stretches your capacity to not smash your head against a wall. Some of the 'monologues' aren't even framed in shot correctly. Tedious torture.

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  Review by Amani Marshall 1

  Words from Rancière's talk on Politics and Aesthetics in Workers, Peasants:

  "The construction of Workers, Peasants is remarkable from this point of view. Groups oppose one another: workers and peasants, leaders and masses, men and women... Each speaks in turn, lays out his or her problem. Each is in his own shot—it is very rare in the Straubs’ films that partners in an exchange are in the same shot; when they are, it’s generally from behind. Each one reads his text or looks at it or looks in front of him in an undetermined direction. None of the characters look at those that they are talking to. It’s like a kind of absolutizing of words, it’s as if everything was…