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STRAUB/HUILLET’S LAUNDRY BREAK WHILE AT WORK ON SICILIA! via Pedro Costa’s 6 BAGATELAS & for Daniele Huillet With these fine words, Straub, we shall be off. And your laundry? My laundry stays where it is. Listen: any woman who does laundry leaves them hanging. If it rains, they will dry again. Allez-oop! We’re not going to spend all our time hanging clothes on the line, then taking them back down and hanging them back up. Come on, Melchior. I’m sure the clothes are dry. Are they not dry? They are, well, dry. The sheets are dry. Barry Alpert / Silver Spring MD US / 2-3-11 (9:31 AM) After being interrupted last week by a massive and lengthy loss of electricity while in the process of writing this text, I now realize that it relates to my two earlier works via these filmmakers in a manner comparable to the way in which Pedro Costa's consciously minor but quite finished out-takes (which he appropriately titles SIX BAGATELAS) have to do with his feature documentary on the collaborators in film, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet. Although Straub dominates verbally (both my filmgoing partner and I found him nearly unbearable a large percentage of the time), in this instance only lines 3 and 15-18 exit his mouth. Critical discussion of Straub/Huillet's films often takes up the topic of who is responsible for what aspects. The hanging laundry bears a metaphorical relationship to the hanging film one sees in the ruling visual image of Daniele Huillet at her editing table in Costa's documentary WHERE DOES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE LIE? Daniele Huillet died in 2006, and in memoriam I gravitated intuitively to a scene in which her words prevail.