Barton Byg is a long-time collaborator of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, author of "Landscapes of Resistance", and founding director of the DEFA film library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The "impossibility of translation" has produced an apparently opposite realization that the translation of a text actually reveals an alienation from its own language that was already there. The gap between what words say and what they mean, between signifier and signified, may be invisible in one's own language, but the inevitable failure of translation brings it to the fore. Straub/Huillet's methods of distancing texts from their performance in film has a similar effect. Particularly in regard to German literary works, the films reveal that these works are not necessarily at home with conventional German diction, nor do they necessarily belong to Germany at all. As Louis Seguin put it, "the film is the exodus of the text."