Les Passeurs: Inscriptions of war and exile in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Machorka-Muff (1962)

ABSTRACTThis article challenges the widely held claim that Straub and Huillet's early work deals primarily with discourses prevalent in German history and culture. While focusing on the film-makers' first short film Machorka-Muff (1962), the author argues that, aside from dealing explicitly with the politics of German rearmament in the 1950s, the film is similarly inscribed by the contemporary politics in France, namely the Algerian War. Moreover, in German exile, the French emigre film-makers make their films from the position of a borderline, a figure that reappears in the formal structure of their films.