Jean-Marie Straub

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 (imdb)

The movie is based on a novel by Heinrich Boll which tells the story of a german family from 1900 to 1950, from the beginning of the XXth century to the rising of nazism and the postwar years. (imdb comments)

Shot in the summer of 1980, this film from longtime directorial partners Straub and Huillet investigates the changing relationship between people, the land, and society in France and Egypt. The formal and structural basis for the film consists of two texts: a letter sent by Friedrich Engels to his disciple Karl Kautsky, and Egyptian intellectual Mahmoud Hussein's Class Struggles in Egypt... (All Movie Guide)

A chronicle of Johann Sebastian Bach's life, eschewing drama to focus almost entirely on his music. Narrated by his wife Anna in voiceover, it consists largely of static scenes of Bach conducting and/or playing his brilliant compositions. (imdb)

Focused on the triumphs and failures of a group of laborers and farm hands who pooled their resources to operate an alternative collective farm after the end of World War II, Operai, Contadini features a cast of 12 actors who read aloud from Vittorini's book for the duration of the film... (All Movie Guide)

The child Ernesto doesn't want to go to school any more because, as he says, all he is taught there is things he doesn't know. (imdb)

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 Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith's subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (imdb)

An unsigned 12-minute short by Jean-Marie Straub and the late Danielle Huillet. (mcnblogs.com)

Sent to America by his parents to avoid a family scandal, Karl Rossmann (Christian Heinisch) - already a victim of the authority of his parents and their notions of social propriety - finds himself in this new land forced into a number of awkward, embarrassing and confusing situations that seem to increasingly extend beyond his control into nightmarish proportions. (dvdtimes.co.uk)

It is one of three films based on Schoenberg works Straub and Huillet directed, the other two being a short film made directly before Moses und Aron, and, over two decades later, an adaptation of the one-act comic opera From Today to Tomorrow. The film retains the unfinished nature of the original opera, with the third act consisting of a single shot (with no music) as Moses delivers a monologue based on Schoenberg's notes. (Wikipedia)

The argument takes place in a modern living room/bedroom. The husband and wife have returned from an evening abroad, recalling the earlier flirtations of the night.

Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese's "Dialoghi con Leucò", taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese's novel "La luna e i falò": after WWII the emigrant 'The Bastard' comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find that everyone he knew has died and the war has deeply changed relationships between people. (imdb)

A short version of The Death of Empedocles.

Documentary about Cézanne.

Nine people sitting in a semi-circle on the grass recite the words of Stéphane Mallarmé's poem Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard. Each person was given their lines according to the different type-faces used in the original publication of the poem.

A man tells a young woman about a German siege of Metz.

A teenaged girl is executed for going against a king's wishes and honoring her brother's death. (imdb)

Straub-Huillet's adaptation of Heinrich Böll's biting satire Bonn Diary presents the reflections of a reactivated officer who is summoned to the West German capital by the Ministry of Defense to establish an Academy for Military Memories. Straub considered his film to be an intervention against German rearmament in the Adenauer era: "Machorka-Muff is the story of a rape, the rape of a country on which an army has been imposed, a country which would have been happier without one." (KG)

This movie is the sequel of Straub and Huillet's Dalla nube alla resistenza and like its prequel is inspired by Cesare Pavese's book Dialoghi con Leucò. (imdb)

Based on Bertolt Brecht's unfinished novel, the film reimagines the narrator as a modern protagonist. A young man from the present interviews four contemporaries of Caesar, all in costumes of antiquity: a banker, a jurist, a poet, and a peasant legionnaire. These interviews are separated by three long shots of the young man driving through modern Rome, with the camera in a fixed position directed over his shoulder from the back seat of a small car. (Surreal Moviez)

Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (imdb)

"O how all speech is feeble and falls short"--especially so when faced with Straub's latest, derived from The Divine Comedy, specifically the epic poem's concluding canto. The recipe: take Dante's instinctive acceptance of God's love. Stir in a few bars of Varese; slightly unreal sunlight-flooded landscapes (HD can do that); a chair sitting beside a plow; and a man (Giorgio Passerone) reciting Dante's lines with curious fury. What do you get? A sense of grace, of paradise glimpsed. (Olaf Moller)

Straub's brilliant condensation of one of Franz Kafka's more mysterious short stories: an acerbic look at the relationship of Western and Arab worlds. (Ferroni Brigade)

Une Visite au Louvre is a companion film to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Cézanne from a decade earlier. The opening title of that later work indicates that it was inspired in 1990 by Dominique Païni, then film programmer at the Louvre. Like Cézanne, Une Visite au Louvre is also based on Joachim Gasquet's book, Cézanne, specifically on the chapter entitled "Le Louvre," which recounts Cézanne's visit to the Louvre, accompanied by the young Gasquet. (Film Affinity)

The final Straub-Huillet film, L'Itinéraire de Jean Bricard is a stunning adaptation of Jean-Yves Petiteau's book about a French resistance fighter. The film begins with a long take of an island in La Loire, where Bricard lived during the Occupation. Sudden intrusions of Bricard's narration break through the natural surface, taking us through the region's fishing and agricultural past in the 1930s, through the heinous trespasses of the Occupation and the brave, covert actions of the Resistance.

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-Arab attitude of European culture. The images, mostly a series of Italian landscape shots, provide a backdrop that highlights the meaning of the text. (imdb)

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's diptych Le Retour du fils prodigue and Humiliés / Umiliati is based on Elio Vittorini's novel Le donne di Messina, story of a short-lived community founded at the end of the second world war in Italy by people stemming from different regions

A Cesare Pavese dialogue about Circe and her thoughts regarding Ulysses.

Based on Friedrich Hölderlin's play about the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (c. 490 BC - 430 BC), who lived in the Greek colony of Agrigentum in Sicily. (sensesofcinema.com)

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 streghe - femmes entre elles. L'inconsolable is a reflection on the myth of Orpheus. (Letterboxd)

The film can be mesmeric or irritating: irritating if one tries to force it into fulfilling preconceived notions of plot and character, mesmeric if one trusts the film-maker to lead one into fresh areas of perception. (Time Out)

Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time ... , blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature. (worldscinema.org)

Two men in a forest discuss life and death.

Recitations from Pierre Corneille and Bertolt Brecht trace continuities between the tyrannical rulers of ancient Rome, the kings of 17th-century France, the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and, by implication, those in power today who continue to inflict suffering on those without power. (tiff.net)

Based on both a tale by the Alsatian Maurice Barrès and Straub's own memories of growing up in Metz, An Heir depicts two men strolling on a forest path, the younger one an Alsatian doctor who recounts how he had to make the choice between "the French soul and the German deed." (tiff.net)

A meditation on love and death, via Pavese's texts on mythology, that proceeds from Mahler's Ruckert-Lieder: "I am lost to the world." (tiff.net)

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

Straub's testament of love was made seven years after the death of Danièle Huillet, and nearly 60 years after they met in Paris and planned to adapt this short story by Georges Bernanos. (tiff.net)

The title may unintentionally invoke Jean Vigo, but the Alsatian writer Maurice Barrès is the guiding spirit of Straub's meditation on the history of the Most Serene Republic. (tiff.net)

Opening with D. W. Griffith's 1909 short A Corner in Wheat and employing excerpts from three of their previous films, Straub-Huillet fashion a caustic critique of capitalism. (tiff.net)

In GENS DU LAC Jean-Marie Straub traces the journey of two fishermen on Lake Geneva, as described by Swiss writer Janine Massard. In her eponymous novel, she retells how a young fisherman, Paulus, aided the Résistance, helping fighters and refugees, and later engaged in forming a Swiss new left. As the boat moves slowly across the landscape, the speaker reads fragments of Massard's novel. His voice impassive as the landscape itself, his words nevertheless convey passionate political commitmen

In a single static shot a man is threatened with death at another's gunpoint.

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. (Letterboxd)

Jean-Marie Straub films his cats.

Fragment of last reel from "History Lessons" presented in an installation as a special event for the Venice Biennale Arte. (imdb)

The essay "La France contre les robots", written by Georges Bernanos in 1944, is read by Christophe Clavert.

In his one-minute film, Jean-Marie Straub presents a photograph of a young man - before a violent incident, unharmed - and accompanies it with the narration of a text by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (imdb)

This short movie came out of the alternative takes of a scene of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's previous film, Sicily! (1999). (imdb)

This short movie came out of the alternative takes of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's previous film, Sicilia! (1999).