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....

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 ...

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 short TV documentary about the making of Straub-Huillet's 'Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach'...

The life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach as presented by his wife, Anna....

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....

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 t...

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

Set in contemporary Rome, the film shows through a series of encounters with “ancient” Romans, how the economic and political manipulation by ancient Roman society led to Caesar’s dictatorship. - British Film Institute...

'Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regard...

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...

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 ...

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

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....

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’....

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 ac...

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....

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...

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

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