ABSTRACT
Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet represent one of the theoretically most refined and practically most radical experiences within the awareness of the dialectic nature of the visual. Straub–Huillet are neither crude materialists nor minimalists, and all of their solutions are always accompanied in a Brechtian fashion with a movement of distanciation and internal separation. The recognition of the dialectical nature of the visual is gravid with consequences for any cinematographic practice. Straub and Daniele Huillet entertain an exercise in dialectics and self-distanciation: the continuity of time is constantly split between a re-affirmation and a withdrawal. The structural asymmetry of the dialectic of the visual either becomes a nihilistic power of the negative or a minimal act of self-separation. Dialectical cinema proved to be the privileged door in order to think and to eventually set in motion a possible formalisation of the visual.
