Movies: Jean-Marie Straub

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....

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...

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....

A familiar Biblical tale transformed into a cinematic opera of seemingly endless possibility. In expressive, melodic tones, the fraternal pair debate God’s true message and intent for His creations, a conflict that leads their followers towards chaos...

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

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant stru...

The panorama of human affairs encounters the “man with a movie camera”. His playground has no boundaries, his curiosity no limits. Characters, situations and places pitch camp in the life of a humanity that is at once the viewer and the thing viewed....

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...

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 c...

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 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...

A story about the continuity and collapse of history, the power of suppression, and the terror of reconciliation; loyalty, treason and revenge. In a brave cinematic game, Heinrich Böll’s story Billiards at Half-Past Nine is split up into cracks, bloc...

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

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 h...

The film is a sort of presentation of Franco Fortini's book 'I Cani del Sinai'. Fortini, an Italian Jew, reads excerpts from the book about his alienation from Judaism and from the social relations around him, the rise of Fascism in Italy, the anti-A...

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...

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

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....

'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...

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...