This article is but a description of a recent viewing of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Sicila! (1999). The film is made up for four dialogs. In the first, an American (Gianni Buscarino) traveling home to Sicily eats breakfast down by a port dock and talks with a local orange seller. The conversation (which can be seen in a clip below) starts casually about the eating habits of Americans but turns grimly to the sad economic realities of the orange farmers who are paid in fruit they cannot sell. The second dialog is aboard a train that the American is taking to his home town, and starts between two plainclothed police officers talking about repressing “starvelings,” and ends with a series of talks between the visiting American and a series of people in his train cabin. A landowner proudly but with melancholy laments the lack of proper duties for him to do in the world, and that he would gladly give up all that he had to undertake these new duties. The train talks conclude with one between a policeman and the visitor, where the former lies about his profession and the latter slyly mocks the man and his deceit over his vocation. These talks are separated by long shots of the Sicilian coast and countryside going by, and these first two dialogs are split from the film’s centerpiece by two repeated camera movements that pan from the hills, across fields, across a town, and rest on a cemetery, only to pan back to the town. The film’s center is a long dialog between the visiting American and his mother (Angela Nugara), separated by pauses and a meal, and range from discussing the proud peasant socialism and local renown of the man’s grandfather to what the mother sees as the cowardice of her husband for weeping during her birth labor and writing poems to other women rather than having affairs. The film ends with a final talk between the visitor and a traveling knife sales man, who laments the lack of proper items to sharpen and joins the American in a joyous, passionate declaration of things life is made up of, only to conclude that there should be more weapons in the world.

The deliberate, unnatural enunciation of Elio Vittorini’s text is probably the most immediately noticeable and astringent stylization in Straub/Huillet's film. Its strange cadences may be significantly more off putting if delivered in one’s own language, but for someone so used to comprehending foreign dialog through subtitles, the filmmakers’ vocal direction gives the foreign words a real, truly felt materiality—they seem to have a life of their own, not just as words but as tactile sounds. In this way even if a viewer is widely ignorant of both the source and context of the filmmaker’s adapted text, this style of diction allows one to move around it, feel it, almost become intimate with it despite the distance in both naturalness and actual familiarity the sound and text initially are placed at. The conversation, unsubtitled but still lovely, between the visitor and the orange seller that opens the film can be viewed below:

While the aural tactility may be the film's most readily apparent stylization, the visual field of the film is another aspect entirely, even if Straub/Huillet use that wonderful meta-realistic technique of recording direct sound so that each cut, even in a back and forth conversation, reveals different sonic distinctions and discreetness for each shot. Separate sound and image as I will in this description, on a very literal level image and sound are married on the same track in Sicilia!.

This visual style is honed to a bare minimum on-screen for a maximum of effect. Like the paradox of Bresson’s models, the actors/characters here are as unnaturalistic as they are human—they stand strong and firm and are declamatory, the camera in close-up letting their poses and stances speak for the assurance of themselves as people, that is, characters with beliefs. Movements are practiced but telling and rich, as if something done unconsciously all the time was forced by Straub/Huillet to be consciously enacted. But the camera is hardly objective with these stoic characters, and while sometimes the style will simply frame an actor, at other times the distance and distorting perspective of the camera will give the mise-en-scene the same feeling as the gestures, as if the real and everyday were deliberately removed from immediate naturalness so as to be underlined but not untrue.

And then there is the text of the film itself, and its slim narrative. It is of proud Sicilians, rich in spirit and passion, full of love for their past and their place, but bitter and disappointed by the current world. From the unsold oranges, the plainclothed cops and wearily idealist landowner, to the mother explaining her contradictory contempt for her separated husband and the knife-sharpener’s oblique call to arms, economic and social hardship have not only infected but indeed may be part of the Sicilian character. The visitor’s surprise at his mother’s corrections to his idealized, misremembered childhood (where the family was rich and envied ten days a month but impoverished for the rest) presumably should be shared with us, admiration of Sicilian life, character, and places (towns, countryside, trains, rooms, steps, streets) jolted by the state of affairs and popular discontent.