The duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet created one of the most uncompromising, yet eternally surprising, filmmaking aesthetics in postwar European cinema. Discover the films that inspired Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa, John Gianvito, and others.
Read full descriptionLoosely based on correspondence between Johann Sebastian Bach and his second wife, Chronicle is not a film about music, it is a film of music. With short.
Straub-Huillet take dynamite to the fabric of postwar Germany in this powerful adaptation of a Heinrich Böll story about a German family before, during, and after the Nazi era. With shorts.
Scenes from the French countryside and urban Egypt bookend this “politicized landscape” film, based on letters by Friedrich Engels and two militant Egyptian Marxists.
Straub-Huillet showcase two key texts by the great Italian poet/novelist Cesare Pavese, one on the mythological gods above, the other on a real-life anti-fascist massacre. With short En rachâchant.
A young immigrant finds America as confusing (and class-ridden) as the old world in Straub-Huillet’s claustrophobic adaptation of a Kafka story. With Harun Farocki’s Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a Film Based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika.
Straub-Huillet bring multiple layers of history to life in their dramatic vision of Bertolt Brecht’s version of the poet Hölderlin’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone, here restaged in Sicily’s ancient and atmospheric Teatro di Segesta.
“The best opera film ever made” (P. Adams Sitney), Moses and Aaron presents Schoenberg’s great opera in the Roman Alba Fucense amphitheater. “A film in which every cut, every camera movement counts for so much” (New Yorker Films). With short.
Sentences become arias as one man’s return to Sicily inspires recollections of corruption, treachery, and political and personal woe in this “masterpiece” (Artforum). With companion piece Return of the Prodigal Son / Humiliated.
Greek philosopher Empedocles finds himself both a hero of the people and an enemy of the state in this staging of a Hölderlin play on spectacular Mount Etna. Its style “reveals a utopian present” (Artforum).
Contemporary Rome is never far away in Straub-Huillet’s self-aware adaptation of a Corneille play about the Roman Empire. With short Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice.
Pedro Costa witnesses Straub and Huillet at work in the editing room in this “revelatory study of the moviemaking process” (The New Yorker).
This notorious adaptation of Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar envisions the leader through his business underlings, and the Roman Empire through contemporary Roman traffic. With short Concerning Venice.
Straub and Huillet pay tribute to one of their artistic heroes. With the companion film A Visit to the Louvre, featuring Cezanne's uncompromising examination of paintings by Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Tintoretto, and others.
A roster of nonprofessional actors from Pisa bring to life a famed Marxist novella, Women of Messina, in Straub-Huillet’s stunning treatise on community and opposition. With short Incantati.
Straub-Huillet’s aesthetic of spoken word plus projected image, history plus landscape, was boiled to its essence in this cine-essay featuring legendary Italian New Left figure Franco Fortini. With Lothringen!, based on novels byMaurice Barrès.
History doubles back on itself like a noose in Straub-Huillet’s second version of The Death of Empedocles, as the Greek philosopher advocates for democracy for his people, with tragic results. With Itinerary of Jean Bricard.
The musings of the gods are brought to the earthly realms of contemporary rural Italy in Straub and Huillet’s re-creation of Cesare Pavese’s 1947 book Dialogues with Leucò. With Proposition in Four Parts.
This digital meditation on struggle and resistance “is the closest Straub has come to an autobiographical film” (Artforum). With shorts The Algerian War! and The Aquarium and the Nation.
An opera film with all attention on the performances and the music, and a thing of beauty. A husband and wife return from a party and begin to speak and sing of romantic rivals and possibilities. With shorts The Inconsolable One and Dialogue with Shadows.