“Dalla Nube is composed of two separate parts, one mythological, the other modern, without any apparent relation. The Nube part is six of the twenty-seven Dialogues with Leuco (Dialoghi con Leucò), written by Cesare Pavese in 1947. The Resistenza part is extracts from another book by Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires (La luna e i falo), published in 1950, a few months before his suicide. This latter part is not a surprise: every Straub film is an examination – archaeological, geological, ethnographic, military as well – of a situation in which men have resisted. To Nietzsche’s claim that ‘The only being known to us is being that represents itself,’ the Straubs would respond that only those who resist exist for sure: resist nature, language, time, texts, gods, God, chiefs, Nazis. Mother and father. This is how the shot, the basic atom of Straubian cinema, is the product, the reste (remainder), or rather the restance (remaining) of a triple resistance: texts resisting bodies, places resisting texts, bodies resisting places. One has to add a fourth: the public resisting shots “designed” this way, stubborn resistance of cinema’s audience to something intractable, something which renounces it as a public”. (Serge Daney)
