The German release of Class Relations has a 65 minute version of this entitled Arbeiten zu »Klassenverhältnisse« von Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub, and it's an interesting document of their working practice. Pedro Costa made a documentary almost 20 years later about the couple, but that was very much more about the editing. Here we see them exhaustively rehearse and then film the actors, only a handful of scenes to get a sense of it. And of course there's no detail Straub overlooks as we come to understand that maybe all those moments when laughter seems the only response to the programmatic actions and blankness of the characters were all carefully orchestrated and that, indeed, sometimes humour was the intention.…

Farocki breaks down the structural components of acting, using Straub and a young actor to break down the process of filming simple lines — forcing take after take to repeat simple lines that will ultimately comprise a second of screen time in the finished project. In this sense it’s almost like an anti-Behind the Scenes doc, de-romanticizing the filmmaking process. Think about the legends around Stanley Kubrick forcing actors to repeat simple lines or certain movements dozens of not hundreds of times, and how those mechanical elements of filmmaking have been spun into the myths of a genius. Straub-Huillet are of course antithetical to Kubrickian excess, their films didactic and let’s be honest boring. But Farocki’s examination reveals the care…

First we become aware of the construction of the image. Much like Ein Bild, how it is performed again and again until it satisfies the vision of one or pair of people. But then, we start to focus on the repetition of the word itself. How so much can be expressed in the tonality, speed, voice, of a single vocalisation, and in a single minute gesture, and whether that is visible to the audience at all. Or if it somehow enters the subconscious.

We start to think about rehearsal as a disciplinary act, where bodies, both actor and director, are shaped by the repetition of movement, action, speech. What are we doing when the object of construction is not a…

Farocki breaks down the structural components of acting, using Straub and a young actor to break down the process of filming simple lines — forcing take after take to repeat simple lines that will ultimately comprise a second of screen time in the finished project. In this sense it’s almost like an anti-Behind the Scenes doc, de-romanticizing the filmmaking process. Think about the legends around Stanley Kubrick forcing actors to repeat simple lines or certain movements dozens of not hundreds of times, and how those mechanical elements of filmmaking have been spun into the myths of a genius. Straub-Huillet are of course antithetical to Kubrickian excess, their films didactic and let’s be honest boring. But Farocki’s examination reveals the care…

The German release of Class Relations has a 65 minute version of this entitled Arbeiten zu »Klassenverhältnisse« von Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub, and it's an interesting document of their working practice. Pedro Costa made a documentary almost 20 years later about the couple, but that was very much more about the editing. Here we see them exhaustively rehearse and then film the actors, only a handful of scenes to get a sense of it. And of course there's no detail Straub overlooks as we come to understand that maybe all those moments when laughter seems the only response to the programmatic actions and blankness of the characters were all carefully orchestrated and that, indeed, sometimes humour was the intention.…