December 10, 2025 at Brooklyn Academy of Music, co-presented with Archipelago Books
A special 35mm presentation of These Encounters of Theirs by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, in celebration of the release of The Leucothea Dialogues by Cesare Pavese, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor and published by Archipelago Books.
The Film
These Encounters of Theirs
Dirs. Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub
2005. 68 min. 35mm.
In Italian with English subtitles.
In their final collaboration before Danièle’s death in 2006, Straub and Huillet continued their work with the non-professionals of the Teatro Comunale di Buti, a working class theatre company in Tuscany, this time to recite the last five dialogues from Pavese’s Leucothea, previously adapted by the duo in From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979). In the forests and hills of Mount Pisano, out in the open air, the peasants-turned-performers (“who lived for a year with their text, learned it by heart; rendered it sensitive and sensual”) declaim the words of mythical figures, ancient gods, and poets, musing on the toils and predicaments of mortals.
From Straub-Huillet’s original press kit:
Twenty-seven years after From the Clouds to the Resistance, with These Encounters of Theirs, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub have again created a work based on Italian author Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues.
Why? Because:
Myth is not something arbitrary, but a breeding-ground of symbols with a particular set of meanings that nothing else can express. When we evoke a proper name, a gesture, or a mythical wonder, we express in a phrase or a few syllables, a compressed and summarized event; it is the marrow of reality that invigorates and nourishes an entire organism with passion, the human condition, and an entire conceptual complex.
And then if this name and this gesture are familiar to us since childhood and school, so much the better. Anxiety is truer and more sharp-edged when it undermines a familiar matter. We know that the surest—and quickest—way to be surprised is to focus one’s attention, immobile, on the same subject. One fine day, this object—miracle—appears brand new to us.
The Book
The Leucothea Dialogues
by Cesare Pavese
Translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor
Published by Archipelago Books
Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a “hothouse of symbols.” His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese’s characters are more than “characters,” they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories. In Minna Zallman Proctor’s radiant translation, The Leucothea Dialoguesis an expression of an exhilarating intelligence. - Archipelago Books
Special thanks to Jillian Kravatz (Archipelago Books), Jesse Trussell (BAM), Katherine Pickard (Sequence Press), Christophe Clavert (Belva Film), and Adam Krasnoff.