oscarwp’s review published on Letterboxd:
Barton Byg, 2023.
Balthazar: shorturl.at/eklJT
Objects in Time: The Tree and the Autostrada
The full title alone reveals that this is a film about time. And there has never been a time to be unconcerned with state power, human love and honor, and the devastation of war.
Much of the film is from the past: the stones from Sophocles’ time, the words from the times of Hölderlin and Brecht. But the voices, the bodies, the light, the air, and especially the tree are from the now of the film.
And how does the film take us into the future? Creon’s defeat is ominously contradicted by the expanse behind him, a 20th-century empire revealing the viaduct of the Autostrada A29 leading toward the sea. Straub hated the idea of film imitating painting, but I can’t help but see Cézanne here – as in so many Straub/Huillet portraits of figures, rocks, earth, and trees.
Brecht’s words of warning onscreen at the film’s end remain prescient, with the Carabinieri’s helicopter thundering in our ears. War has been uninterrupted since this film was made.
But there is also the tree, Antigone’s tree, the tree that “was also Antigone,” as Huillet put it. A humble nettle tree stands by as witness to the comings and goings and protestations of Haemon, Ismene, Tiresias, and Antigone. Danièle Huillet had worried that the tree would not survive the 1980s, and without the tree, they would not have made the film. Since the film was made, a number of those involved have died, including Albert Heterle, Louis Hochet, William Lubtchansky, Danièle Huillet, and Jean-Marie Straub. Like the Autostrada, Google Street View is part of the violent technology that links the film to our own future. But using Street View I can also see that today the nettle tree is flourishing.
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