From the Cloud to the Resistance

Straub and Huillet expand their concerns with dazzling scope and beauty: the struggle between gods and men, the eruption of the past into the present. From the first shots of a goddess seated in a tree, through a long debate between mythological characters, to the exploration of a village's fascist past, the film constantly startles by its imaginative and historical leaps. Operatic and documentary in approach, the film carefully juxtaposes two texts by Cesare Pavese, one a series of dialogues on fate and destiny, the other an elliptical narrative about the search for memories in an Italian village after the Liberation. A work of provocation which strips ornament and leaves essences, and whose integrity gives it a distinct sense of the sublime. DMacp.