Jean-Marie Strauband Danièle Huillet have used a minimalist style to condense the passion of literary works into cinematicform. In films from The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967) to Class Relations (1983, based onKafka's Amerika), they have sought works of great personal and political intensity, to which they lend arevived urgency. The Death of Empedocles is a verse play, by the German poet Holderlin, about the fifthcentury Greek poet/politician/philosopher, Empedocles, who killed himself by jumping into the crater of theEtna volcano. In a Sicilian woods, Empedocles discusses with his disciples the value of life, death, and theexercise of free will, and passes the torch to them before his suicide. Empedocles' despair was over thegrowing menace to the earth from politician-priests whose barbarism runs counter to natural grace.Holderlin, in the last years of the eighteenth century, had his reasons for turning to Empedocles; Straub andHuillet, in the mid-1980s, have theirs.