Humiliated: That Nothing Produced or Touched by Them, Coming From their Hands, Proves Free from the Claim of Some Stranger
Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, 2003, FR, GE, IT, video, 34'
A continuation and the ending of Operai, contadini (Workers, Peasants), based on Elio Vittorini’s Le donne di Messina (Women of Messina, 1949 – 64), recounting the attempts of a metaphorically ‘shipwrecked’ group of men and women to construct a new life among the rubble of post-war Italy. In Umiliati Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub isolate the chapters in which the members of the new-born community are brutally confronted with the outside’s economic and political laws and find themselves being submitted to a tribunal that has no other purpose than their humiliation.
* Umiliati: che niente di fatto o toccato da loro, di uscito dalle mani loro, risultasse esente dal diritto di qualche estraneo
