Jean-Marie Straub

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.

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

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

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

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An initiative from Pompidou Center, filmed by Jean Marie Straub.

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"Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet" is the overlay of two Cinematons by Gérard Courant with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: "Jean-Marie Straub, Cinématon number 342" and "Danièle Huillet, Cinematon number 343," filmed on May 27, 1984.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Kafka dialogue is read by actors in Straub's own apartment in Paris.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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A hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), and to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work, including passages from Italian poet Cesare Pavese.

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A film by Laura Vitali about the last work of the couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in Buti (Italy) in May 2005, namely the staging of the last five "Dialogues with Leucò" by Cesare Pavese. In this sense, it is a moving testimony. Vitali alternates rehearsal sessions and interviews - by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet and actors such as Giovanna Daddi, Angela Nugara and Andrea Bacci - who illuminate from the inside the methods of the two filmmakers and their relation to the work of Cesare Pavese, while situating the very special place that makes this work possible - the small town of Buti which warmly welcomed Straub and Huillet for a decade - and by bringing out the political dimension of their thought.

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

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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.

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Six unused scenes from Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? One of the more priceless of the “bagatelles” in this collection features a lounging Jean-Marie Straub who gives a non-stop disquisition on liberty and filmmaking while Danièle Huillet busies herself with laundry, and their dog Melchior frisks in and out of frame. —Cinematheque Ontario

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The original television version of 'Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?'

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

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

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Blank's TV documentary on Straub-Huillet.

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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.

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Documentary about the shooting of Straub's Antigone.

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Documentary about Huillet/Straub's Empedocles.

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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

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

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From Gérard Courant’s Cinématon series.

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Filmmaker Manfred Blank (director of the excellent Pharos of Chaos) interviews Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub at some length about their then-current production, Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations), in which he, himself, performed as an actor.

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This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.

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A behind the scenes film of Class Relations.

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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.

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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.

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"The word 'revolution' to us Frenchmen is not a vague term. We know that Revolution is a rupture, that Revolution is an Absolute. There is no such thing as a moderate revolution, there is no such thing as a planned revolution—as one speaks of a planned economy. The revolution we are announcing will overturn the entire existing order or it will not take place at all..."

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More than a land, it is from the lake that this son comes. Raised by a father fisherman, he learned his noises and currents, maybe also its hardness at the same time as that of adults. Lake is also a border, but in the water his drawing is lost: in the fishery, "profession of free men", Savoyards and Vaudois find themselves in confreres, and if out loud we only talk about nets and fish, in silence we sometimes enter the Resistance. During the war, Switzerland was sent to refugees, without always understanding what is happening, or why they have this look. After the war, the son will contribute to another history: elected municipal, he participates in the emergence, in Lausanne or to Thonon, of a new left. According to the novel Gens du Lac de Janine Massard, published by Bernard Campiche

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A film in three parts: An aquarium, a man sitting at a table reading various text passages, and a sequence from Jean Renoir’s film LA MARSEILLAISE. This is all from a film by Jean-Marie Straub – about fate, the soul and the cosmos, about the evident nature in which man lives, just like in the aquarium surrounding him. And finally, there’s the nation as a symbol for the community of free people. A Straub film represents a gift that isn’t based on exchange, but rather the opposite of communication. And what could be more beautiful and liberating in life?

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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.

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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.

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Jean-Marie Straub’s new film closes the circle. The years 1954–2013 are displayed as representing a film produced in collaboration with Danièle Huillet. The two had met in Paris in 1954, around the year they came across the text by Georges Bernanos, to whom Straub has now dedicated a half-hour film. A man and a woman engaged in a dialogue, talking about their love, as if talking across an abyss. Then, in the last take, the two of them close together, motionless for a long time

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Master filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub continues his exploration of classic texts with this "collaboration" with the great 16th-century writer of the Essais.

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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.

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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.

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A Kafka dialogue is read by actors in Straub's own apartment in Paris.

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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.

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In darkness, we hear a recording of the scandalous 1954 debut performance of Edgar Varèse’s revolutionary Déserts at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Then, in a different sort of Elysian Field, we hear a recitation of Canto XXXIII from The Inferno, a final vision of the Divine Light, in which Dante apprehends the will and desire of man in perfect harmony with the love of God.

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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.

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Co-director Cornelia Geiser sits by a window on an easy chair reading aloud a few verses by Corneille, then a somewhat longer excerpt from Brecht - each writer referencing Rome but really condemning injustice in his own era.

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Another adaptation from Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò (following "From the Clouds to the Resistance", "These Encounters of Theirs" and "Artemis' Knee".

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Mourning the death of his partner and collaborator Danièle Huillet, Straub finds tender mercy in music and nature. Out of the abyss, Kathleen Ferrier sings “The Farewell” from Gustav Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth”, (which the composer wrote in 1909 after the death of his daughter) and Heinrich Schütz’s Lament on the Death of His Wife. The landscape also provides solace: the mountain grove where Endymion pines for his beloved Artemis, “a wild thing, untouchable, mortal,” appears to embody the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ — a wistful acceptance of the fleeting beauty of things.

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The film is a commemoration of the lost livelihood of the earth, the lost lives of the War and to the work of two of the cinema’s greatest artists.

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Inspired by Rossellini's Europa '51 Straub-Huillet made a film consisting of two pans of a street corner in Paris.

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These Encounters Of Theirs divides 10 non-professional actors into couples, then has them take turns in declaiming the Dialogues With Leuco, Cesare Pavese's abstract, philosophical work.

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

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In Italy, immediately subsequent to the war, a group of people who lost all they possessed during the conflict, settle in a village in ruins. They intend to restore the city from the rubble and re-start life, in imitation of the women of Messina who rebuilt their city, destroyed as it was by an earthquake. Oscillating between respect and suspicion, co-existence between group members is tense. Things become complicated when an envoy from the government arrives to say that nothing there belongs to them. The film is a free adaptation of fragments of the novella ‘The Women of Messina’, by Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini.

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Excerpts from the novel Donna di Messina (1949 and 1964, 1967) by Elio Vittorini (1908-1966).

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Recently discovered and shown only twice before, Incantati is an alternate ending to Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s 2003 film Umiliati — fragment as mini-manifesto.

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"At the end of filming Umiliati, Straub and Huillet gave thanks to the cast and crew in a graceful way: by inviting Dolando Bernardini to sing several stanzas from Torquato Tasso’s 16th-century epic poem Jerusalem Delivered." - MoMA

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An alternate look at a part of Sicilia, perhaps left out for its more straightforward didactic quality. Interesting to again see the long gaps. Also note the extra use of close-up (for them) on the old woman.

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A group of men and women have been brought together after World War II, when Italy regained its national and territorial unity. They make up a primitive community which seeks to erase not only the distress created by the war but also the hardships of life, and look to protect themselves from violence, misery and fear. Amid the ruins of this post-war period, these men and women build a new rapport between themselves, between sexes, between generations, between social and geographical origins, between political camps.

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A man returns to visit his native Sicily after living in New York for a long time. He learns about the Sicilian way of life from stylized conversations with an orange picker, his fellow train passengers, his mother, and a knife-sharpener.

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Based on a rarely performed Schoenberg opera from 1929, From Today Until Tomorrow explores one night in a marriage. A husband and wife return from a party where she has flirted with another man while he has cast an appraising eye toward one of her acquaintances. Each dreams, briefly, of leaving the marriage for the excitement and mystery of a new lover.

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

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A fearless Antigone, refusing to allow the dishonored body of her murdered brother Polynices to be devoured by vultures and dogs, defies the Thebian tyrant Creon by burying him.

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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

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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’.

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Forgotten Straub-Huillet film that shows outtakes from "Der Tod des Empedokles".

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Film adaptation by Straub and Huillet of Hölderlin’s 1798 tragedy on the symbolic death of Empedocles, the legislator in Ancient Greece.

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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.

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The child Ernesto doesn't want to go to school any more because, as he says, all he is taught there is things he doesn't know.

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