Background
Jean-Marie Straub was born on January 8, 1933 in Metzeral, Alsace, France.
(From their first film in 1963, Jean-Marie Straub and Dani...)
From their first film in 1963, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet distinguished themselves as two of Europe's most inventive, generous, and uncompromising filmmakers. From Machorka-Muff (1963) through These Encounters of Theirs (2006), and in the subsequent solo work of Jean-Marie Straub, they developed groundbreaking and unique approaches to film adaptation, performance, sound recording, cinematography, and translation in films made across Germany, Italy, and France – including such modern classics as The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), Moses and Aaron (1974), Class Relations (1983), and Sicilia! (1999). On the occasion of the first complete North American retrospective of their films in more than two decades, this volume traces the history of Straub's and Huillet's work, placing their films in the specific cultural, linguistic, and critical contexts in which they were produced and providing an account of their distribution and reception in the English-speaking world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3901644644/?tag=2022091-20
(Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Stra...)
Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huilletwho have lived and worked together for almost forty yearsmay well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School. Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Holderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture. Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huilletwho have lived and worked together for almost forty yearsmay well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School. Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Holderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520089103/?tag=2022091-20
(In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from ...)
In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage--a principal source of artistic estrangement (Verfremdung) in earlier Brechtian films--has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1438463634/?tag=2022091-20
Jean-Marie Straub was born on January 8, 1933 in Metzeral, Alsace, France.
Jean-Marie Straub was educated locally.
Straub ran a local cineclub in his birthplace of Metz, and later worked in various assistant capacities for such directors as Jean Renoir, Abel Gance and Robert Bresson, all of whom had an enormous influence on his work. He and Huillet met in 1954 in Paris and immediately became artistic partners. In 1958 Straub, fleeing conscription into the French armed forces, moved to Munich, Germany, with Huillet, and they soon became involved with radical theater groups in that city. Among Straub's early collaborators was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who appears as an actor in Straub's short film, "The Bridegroom the Comedienne and the Pimp" (1968), which combines the story of the murder of a pimp (Fassbinder) with a drastically condensed theatrical piece and a lengthy tracking shot from an automobile of prostitutes plying their trade on an ill-lit German thoroughfare.
Perhaps the couple's most famous early film is "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach" (1968), which the director shot on the actual locations of Joahnn Sebastian Bach's life, featuring Gustav Maria Leonhardt, the renowned harpsichordist, as Bach, and instruments borrowed from various museums for a more accurate sound. The film almost collapsed before production: Straub insisted on recording all the sync-sound on location, eschewing the use of any post-dubbing, to get the most natural and authentic performances from the ensemble of excellent musicians he had assembled. This horrified the original backers, who withdrew their funding at the last moment. Jean-Luc Godard came through with emergency funding, but the film had to be shot in black-and-white rather than in color, which Straub would have preferred. Nevertheless, it was a surprise hit at the 1968 New York Film Festival and remains a stunning artistic achievement.
In "Chronicle", as in all his works, Straub insisted upon lengthy takes, which were used virtually without editing in the final film; some shots of nearly ten minutes duration appear in "Chronicle". Coupled with the use of natural lighted austere sets and subdued performances, this minimalist shooting technique results in a an extraordinary sense of "place," as if one is watching the incidents of Bach's life as they occur, rather than a re-creation of them.
Other early successes include an adaptation of Heinrich Boll's "Billiards at Half Past Nine", which became the astoundingly rich and perverse film, "Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules" (1965). By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Straub preferred to function more as a producer than a director; often working in 16mm film, Huillet and Straub created such films as "Othon" (1971), "History Lessons" (1972), "Moses and Aaron" (1975), and most recently "Class Relations" (1984), based on Franz Kafka's "Amerika".
In all these films, Huillet and Straub demand a great deal from the viewer, refusing to create films of easy visual reconstruction. Given the proper attention, however, Straub-Huillet films remain among the most haunting and visually resonant of the German filmmaking renaissance. Certainly the two are worthy of wider appreciation, particularly in light of recent attention paid to the works of Fassbinder and Wim Wenders.
(Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Stra...)
(In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from ...)
(From their first film in 1963, Jean-Marie Straub and Dani...)
(Jean-Marie Straub: 2 (Cinema one) [Richard Roud] on Amazo...)
His movies are noted for their rigorous, intellectually stimulating style and radical politics.
Straub is an extreme, austere exponent of minimalist cinema. His work is an attempt to clarify the nature of his medium, and no task is as likely to unsettle or offend people who consider themselves familiar with the medium. Cinema has always adhered to its own reputation as a form of popular narrative entertainment for general audiences. But within that approach there have often been apparent inconsistencies: for instance, audiences actually respond as much to particular, recurring photographs of, say, Garbo, Gable, darkness, and skin, as to the stories in which they figured. What we think of as the story is invariably the effect of a chosen way of filming. The medium is intensely decision based, and thus there has always been an abiding formal element to it.