The Straub-Huillet Collection
First meeting as cinephile students in 1954 Paris, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet became husband-and-wife filmmaking collaborators, generating a politically and aesthetically provocative body of work made largely outside of official funding bodies, and suggesting a desire to reinvent the art of motion pictures from scratch. With Straub’s death in 2022, there would be no new films in the inimitable style he helped create, but those left behind remain monuments of European cinema, simultaneously severe, gorgeous, and finally, totally not reconciled to the dictates of commercial cinema. Survey the entire scope of an inimitable filmography that constitutes one of the glories of European cinema.
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The Witches, Women Among Themselves
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An Heir
Directed by Jean-Marie Straub | 21 mins | 2011
Drawing again on a 1903 work by right-wing nationalist author Maurice Barrès—and on his own memories of growing up in the contested city of Metz—Straub’s discourse-based film concerns a French Alsatian country doctor whose soul is torn between French... -
Corneille-Brecht
Directed by Jean-Marie Straub | 27 mins | 2009
Verses from Pierre Corneille’s Horace and Othon and from Bertholt Brecht’s 1939 radio play The Trial of Lucullus are given melodic recitation by Cornelia Geiser in Straub’s film, creating a network of connections between the despots of ancient Rome, ... -
Jackals and Arabs
Directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet | 11 mins | 2011
Kafka’s 1917 short story of the same name, written on the eve of the British Government’s Balfour Declaration, which announced support for the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, is the source of Stra... -
The Inconsolable One
Directed by Jean-Marie Straub | 15 mins | 2011
Orpheus, returned from the underworld, explains to Bacchante that the gaze he cast upon wife Eurydice, condemning her to Hades, was an act of free will, not fate, in Straub’s agonized declamatory study of bereavement, based on a dialogue by Cesare Pa... -
These Encounters of Theirs
