THE AQUARIUM AND THE NATION

André Malraux once wrote, “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”

Straub considers this in his latest film, creating a cosmic interplay of Haydn’s symphonic Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross, a fish tank at a Parisian Chinese restaurant, the birth of a nation in Jean Renoir’s 1938 film La Marseillaise, the Jung Institute of Paris, and Malraux’s wartime novel The Walnut Trees of Altenburg.

"From the uprising of an old man, the introduction of an unknown outside, to the emancipation of a prisoner and the resurrection of archival footage, Straub places body and image in a dynamic movement that invokes the promise of meaning and opens his textual and audio-visual materials to their own political and aesthetic dimensions." - Yangqiao Lu