Jean-Marie Straub

L’Inconsolable (The Inconsolable One).1st version. 2010. France. Written and directed by Jean-Marie Straub. Based on Dialogues with Leucò, by Cesare Pavese. With Andrea Bacci, Giovanna Daddi. In Italian. 14 min.

Returning from the forest of shades, a quietly defiant Orpheus tells a Bacchante it was free will, not destiny, which compelled him to cast the fatal gaze on his wife Eurydice, recognizing their love as a thing of the past and his own proper place in the world of living souls. A masterful series of camera shots reveals the Bacchante looking away in incredulity, horror, and betrayal. (Joshua Siegel – MoMA)Read More »

It is the discovery of a document recognising the services rendered by two fishermen from Lake Geneva during the Occupation that triggered the investigation undertaken by Swiss author Janine Massard in her novel Gens du lac, published in 2013. Jean-Marie Straub retraces the itinerary of the son, Paulus – just as he and Danièle Huillet had followed that of Jean Bricard just over ten years ago in the last film they made together. Gens du lac does not depart from the rule that sets each Straubfilm as an account of a historical situation in which men have resisted (Daney). Shot aboard a boat and hardly ever leaving the lake’s waters, the film depicts the life of this only son who has found brothers over the course of his fishing – be it his first steps in the trade, the help given to fugitives and deliveries of provisions to the Resistance, or his contribution to the emergence of a new Left in post-war Francophone Switzerland. Read More »

The tragedy of the death of Empedocles, philosopher in Ancient Greece. Hölderlin’s work adapted to cinema by Straub and Huillet.Read More »

It is about a text pulled from the book In service to Germany, written by Barrès in 1903 on the mount Saint-Odile. With as main actor Joseph Rottner, the director will follow the tracks of the young country doctor in walk in the mount Saint-Odile, through the roads which knew Barrès, up to the forest house of Ratsamhausen and around the famous heathen, unique wall in the region. Jean-Marie Straub will play himself the role of the inhabitant of Lorraine to which the young Alsatian speaks.Read More »

The censured novel Conversazione in Sicilia, by Elio Vittorini, published in four episodes in 1918/1939, is the basis for this account of a man returning to Sicily for a visit to his mother. This is a journey of initiation, “a voyage in fourth dimension through his infancy”, he says. Not only to re-live words, people, places, sounds, sensation, and odor of his seven years, but mainly to understand himself. He re-encounters his mother whom he has not seen for 15 years, ever since she left for the North of Italy. Through her, he attempts to glean answers to questions and facts that still trouble his memories, such as the image of his dead father. In this return, he also comes face to face with reality, corruption, and treachery, that differ from his memories as a child with a mother, lost between abstract fury and an awareness of his incapacity to comprehend the human condition.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
In leaps of physical color and sound, Cornelia Geiser recites verses from two of Pierre Corneille’s Roman plays, Horace and Othon (“As for the school of dialectics, well Corneille is nevertheless the greatest…” said Straub), followed by a reading of Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 radio play The Trial of Lucullus, a powerful recitative on war-crimes in fourteen short pieces (never broadcast; later turned into an opera by Brecht and Paul Dessau in East Germany).Read More »

Synopsis
Featuring a justly infamous, even startling opening sequence with a tilted camera pointed out the window of a moving car that keeps driving and driving around a famous traffic circle (forget the name) in Paris for 10 odd minute – a continual 360 that never catches a glimpse of its axis, too perfect – TOO EARLY, TOO LATE is a singular meditation and extended visual metaphor on the theme of revolution (get it??) shot in a variety of locations and cities with a Marxist voice-over reading from famous selections on the subject. Quite unlike anything else you’ll see and while obviously not what you’d call entertainment, some of the shooting once you get outside the city is breathtakingly beautiful. Are they trying to implicate us in this collective indifference to social ills by growing absorbed in the natural beauty of the surroundings? I’m not sure, but certainly Straub/Huillet’s subtle avant-garde combo filmwork is among the most underappreciated in German and, indeed, international cinema.Read More »

Quote:
With Where Are You, Jean-Marie Straub?, the director offers a short and personal response to a commission of the Centre Pompidou in Paris on the occasion of the 2016 retrospective dedicated to himself and Danièle Huillet.Read More »

Quote:
Presented at the 2015 Venice Biennale, this short film by Jean-Marie Straub is a fragment of the last reel of his film History Lessons, based on Bertolt Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar and dedicated to the memory and materiality of cinema.Read More »