Movies: Jean-Marie Straub

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....

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...

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, ...

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

A tribute to Mallarmé that not only asserts the continuing relevance of his work but also confronts its literary ambiguities with political and cinematic ambiguities of its own. In outline, the film could not be more straightforward: it offers a reci...

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

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 ...

Peter Nestler's poetic documentary Verteidigung der Zeit is not only an hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), but also to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler of...

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 p...

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....

"D. W. Griffith’s 1909 short film A Corner in Wheat, a Biblical tale of avarice, divine retribution, and the prolonged suffering of the masses, is the prelude to this political film essay. Straub-Huillet offer a dialectical montage of cause (capitali...

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 stregh...

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

Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Str...

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....

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 ...

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 acto...

"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...

A group of men, women and Kristl with his camera debate how to resist authority in all its forms. All cinematic professionalism is avoided as Kristl explores how to live and make films politically....

Documentary about the shooting of Straub's Antigone....