Jean-Marie Straub

In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet adapted the novel Colette Baudoche – Story of a Young Girl of Metz by Maurice Barrès as a film they titled Lothringren!. In 2010, Jean-Marie Straub returned to the eastern provinces of France, this time to Alsace, to film the second half of a diptych based on Barrès’s work. The text is derived from In the Service of Germany, a book about the mountain of Saint-Odile, which Barrès wrote in 1903. With Joseph Rottner in the principal role, Straub traces the path of a young country doctor as he tours Mont Saint-Odile, following the routes that Barrès himself took to the chateau of Ratsamhausen and around the ruins of the ancient fortification known as the "Pagan Wall,” which are unique in the area. Straub, himself born in Metz, plays the role of a resident of Lorraine whom the young Alsatian engages in conversation.

In the summer of 1986, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub were working in the park of an old Sicilian mansion and in a clearing at the foot of Mount Etna shooting Der Tod des Empedokles. Assistant cameraman Jean-Paul Toraille toyed around, so to speak, with his first video camera, filming the daily work on the set. Now, 24 years later, he was joined by Jean-Marie Straub in editing the material into a film. Anyone who expected the shooting of Les Avatars de la mort d’Empédocle to be an austere affair, an exercise entirely devoid of humour or a Straubian tour de force is proven wrong: so much lightness, joy, concentration, spells of waiting for the sun to come out – and even proper slapstick in between – is hard to find.

Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub's 85th birthday.

Joachim Gatti, is the grand-son of the director and filmmaker Armand Gatti. During a demonstration in Montreuil, he lost an eye, hit by a “flashball” fired from a policegun.

Undaunted by a commission to make a film about his mentors and aesthetic exemplars, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Costa records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the two re-edit their film Sicilia!, discussing and arguing over each cut and its effect. Incorporating comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein, about the ethical and aesthetic implications of film technique and such matters as rhythm, sound mixing, and acting. The film becomes a tour de force, immersing us in the mysteries of cinema as practiced by some of its greatest creators. Costa calls the film both his first comedy and his first love story.

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

About the history of the French region of Lorraine, called Lothringen in German.

Documentary about the shooting of Straub's Antigone.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature.

This is a recording of a movie discussion. This discussion, shown live in German television on November 16th 1978, is framed by two screenings of Huillet/Straub's movie »Toute révolution est un coup de dés«. It's first shown shortly after the discussion's participants have been introduced, a second time after the end of the discussion. After the movie ends the program cuts back to the studio for a short time, showing the guests as well as some technicians talking whilst the credits of the TV-program enroll.

A landmark work of symbolistic imagery. The words that the filmmakers speak offscreen are imaginary conversation with Cézanne quoted from a critique by Joachim Gasquet. An exchange of memories spanning over 250 years interweaves everything from the philosophy of Empedocles to excerpts from the film Madame Bovary, to extant paintings by Cézanne, to the buildings of the artists’ village at Mont Sainte-Victoire. —ntticc.or.jp

Reel 35 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Jean-Marie Straub reacts to an audience during a Straub-Huillet retrospective.

Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday.

Discuss, discuss, but we must not forget the laundry! Snatches of dialogue, of thoughts that mingle happily with the faces that also mingle with each other. From films number 342 and 343 by Gérard Courant: “Jean Marie Straub”, 1984 and “Danièle Huillet”, 1984.

Former Straub/Huillet assistant Jean-Charles Fitoussi films them at work during the shooting of 1999's Sicilia!.

Straub-Huillet’s first color film, adapts a lesser-known Corneille tragedy from 1664, which in turn was based on an episode of imperial court intrigue chronicled in Tacitus’s Histories. The costuming is classical, and the toga-clad, nonprofessional cast performs the drama’s original French text amid the ruins of Rome’s Palatine Hill while the noise of contemporary urban life hums in the background. Their lines are executed with a terrific flatness and frequently through heavy accents; the language in Othon becomes not merely an expression but a thing itself, an element whose plainness here alerts us to qualities of the work that might otherwise be subordinated.

This is a small, intense film based on Schoenberg’s opus of the same name with the subtitle “danger, fear, catastrophe”. It deals with emerging fascism and the persecution of Jews, as well as with their historical continuities.

In his meetings with various different people, Jean-Luc Godard develops his thinking about history, politics, the cinema, images and time, and this will lead to his exhibition as an artist at the Pompidou Centre. Jean-Luc Godard’s conversations with Dominique Païni, Jean Narboni, André S. Labarthe, Jean-Marie Straub, Danielle Huillet and Christophe Kantcheff were filmed at his home in Rolle, in his study, at the Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts (in front of students) and in the exhibition rooms of the Pompidou Centre.

On a sunny afternoon, an old man sits in the shade of the trees in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris, at the edge of the grave of the great actress Falconetti (1892-1946). She achieved unforgettable recognition as Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. She later took her own life in Buenos Aires. Now the old man, Jean-Marie Straub, plays with his cane and keeps her company. Until he is disturbed.

An experimental documentary film about Friedrich Hölderlin. In the middle of the film, there is a short excerpt from a Nazi propaganda film: O. E. Hasse reads "Der Tod fürs Vaterland" (Death for the Fatherland), the poem that was given to German soldiers on the front lines during World War II. This is contrasted with texts from Hölderlin's late work, which have only recently been edited. This creates a completely different picture of Hölderlin's poetry.

In parallel with Now Tell Me Something, his second book about the cinema of Straub-Huillet, Philippe Lafosse follows the meetings in 2007 and 2008 between Jean-Marie Straub, from this point onwards without Danièle Huillet, and the public. This film thus allows us to hear with pleasure words that break with cultural gossip, that question and throw light – a verb, a man that resist here and now. We learn a great deal from it, whether or not we are familiar with Straub-Huillet’s work. Tell Me Something tells us a story, or stories. Stories about cinema, stories about faithfulness and honesty. The story, also, of the setting up of a people rising against ruling state of things. The story, moreover, of an irreparable absence – that of Danièle Huillet. In short, the story of a filmmaker in winter, and of an international community that is enlightened in the darkness.

Alix is a woman of 27 looking for the only thing she is incapable of: love.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Inspired by a Cesar Pavese’s short story, this film has as its main question the relationship with the mother. After killing someone, Meleagros is killed by his own mother, from whom he had never disconnected.

Inspired by a Cesar Pavese’s short story, this film has as its main question the relationship with the mother. After killing someone, Meleagros is killed by his own mother, from whom he had never disconnected.

With L’inconsolable, Jean-Marie Straub continues the mise en scène of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò, initiated in 1978 with Dalla nube alla resistenza and followed up in 2006, 2007 and 2008 with Quei loro incontri, Artemis’s Knee and Le streghe – femmes entre elles. L’inconsolable is a reflection on the myth of Orpheus.

With L’inconsolable, Jean-Marie Straub continues the mise en scène of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò, initiated in 1978 with Dalla nube alla resistenza and followed up in 2006, 2007 and 2008 with Quei loro incontri, Artemis’s Knee and Le streghe – femmes entre elles. L’inconsolable is a reflection on the myth of Orpheus.

The glory and collapse of the grand Republic of Venice: the reasons are numerous, complex, human and all too human. Are these the same ingredients, the mélange that might determine whether the current Europe will survive? And if so, under what conditions? Jean-Marie Straub poses the question in this film, more austere and concentrated than ever.

The glory and collapse of the grand Republic of Venice: the reasons are numerous, complex, human and all too human. Are these the same ingredients, the mélange that might determine whether the current Europe will survive? And if so, under what conditions? Jean-Marie Straub poses the question in this film, more austere and concentrated than ever.

In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet adapted the novel Colette Baudoche – Story of a Young Girl of Metz by Maurice Barrès as a film they titled Lothringren!. In 2010, Jean-Marie Straub returned to the eastern provinces of France, this time to Alsace, to film the second half of a diptych based on Barrès’s work. The text is derived from In the Service of Germany, a book about the mountain of Saint-Odile, which Barrès wrote in 1903. With Joseph Rottner in the principal role, Straub traces the path of a young country doctor as he tours Mont Saint-Odile, following the routes that Barrès himself took to the chateau of Ratsamhausen and around the ruins of the ancient fortification known as the "Pagan Wall,” which are unique in the area. Straub, himself born in Metz, plays the role of a resident of Lorraine whom the young Alsatian engages in conversation.

In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet adapted the novel Colette Baudoche – Story of a Young Girl of Metz by Maurice Barrès as a film they titled Lothringren!. In 2010, Jean-Marie Straub returned to the eastern provinces of France, this time to Alsace, to film the second half of a diptych based on Barrès’s work. The text is derived from In the Service of Germany, a book about the mountain of Saint-Odile, which Barrès wrote in 1903. With Joseph Rottner in the principal role, Straub traces the path of a young country doctor as he tours Mont Saint-Odile, following the routes that Barrès himself took to the chateau of Ratsamhausen and around the ruins of the ancient fortification known as the "Pagan Wall,” which are unique in the area. Straub, himself born in Metz, plays the role of a resident of Lorraine whom the young Alsatian engages in conversation.

A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.

A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.

A companion piece to the earlier film ‘The Death of Empedocles’, 'Black Sin' is an adaptation of the third version of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play ‘Der Tod des Empedokles’.

A companion piece to the earlier film ‘The Death of Empedocles’, 'Black Sin' is an adaptation of the third version of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play ‘Der Tod des Empedokles’.

A companion piece to the earlier film ‘The Death of Empedocles’, 'Black Sin' is an adaptation of the third version of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play ‘Der Tod des Empedokles’.

Joachim Gatti, is the grand-son of the director and filmmaker Armand Gatti. During a demonstration in Montreuil, he lost an eye, hit by a “flashball” fired from a policegun.

Joachim Gatti, is the grand-son of the director and filmmaker Armand Gatti. During a demonstration in Montreuil, he lost an eye, hit by a “flashball” fired from a policegun.

A satirical attack on West Germany's re-armament and revival of militaristic tradition in the Adenauer era.

A satirical attack on West Germany's re-armament and revival of militaristic tradition in the Adenauer era.

A satirical attack on West Germany's re-armament and revival of militaristic tradition in the Adenauer era.

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

About the history of the French region of Lorraine, called Lothringen in German.

About the history of the French region of Lorraine, called Lothringen in German.

About the history of the French region of Lorraine, called Lothringen in German.