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Jean-Marie Straub

Jean-Marie Straub

Directing
1933-01-08
Metz, Moselle, Lorraine, France

Biography

Jean-Marie Straub (8 January 1933, Metz – 20 November 2022) and Danièle Huillet (1 May 1936, Paris – 9 October 2006, Cholet) were a duo of filmmakers who made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006. Their films are noted for their rigorous, intellectually stimulating style and radical, communist politics. Though both were French, they worked mostly in Germany and Italy. From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) and Sicilia! (1999) are among the duo’s best regarded works. Description above from the Wikipedia article Straub–Huillet, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For & Full Filmography32 Titles

#1Bambi

Drama Series - 1948, 16 episodes as Self

9.0 / 10
Reality

The Bambi, often called the Bambi Award and stylised as BAMBI, is a German award presented annually by Hubert Burda Media to recognize excellence in international media and television to personalities in the media, arts, culture, sports, and other fields "with vision and creativity who affected and inspired the German public that year", both domestic and foreign. First held in 1948, it is the oldest media award in Germany. The trophy is named after Felix Salten's book Bambi, A Life in the Woods and its statuettes are in the shape of the novel's titular fawn character. They were originally made of porcelain until 1958, when the organizers switched to using gold, with the casting done by the art casting workshop of Ernst Strassacker in Süßen.

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#2Un héritier

Movie - 2012, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

5.0 / 10

In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet adapted the novel Colette Baudoche – Story of a Young Girl of Metz by Maurice Barrès as a film they titled Lothringren!. In 2010, Jean-Marie Straub returned to the eastern provinces of France, this time to Alsace, to film the second half of a diptych based on Barrès’s work. The text is derived from In the Service of Germany, a book about the mountain of Saint-Odile, which Barrès wrote in 1903. With Joseph Rottner in the principal role, Straub traces the path of a young country doctor as he tours Mont Saint-Odile, following the routes that Barrès himself took to the chateau of Ratsamhausen and around the ruins of the ancient fortification known as the "Pagan Wall,” which are unique in the area. Straub, himself born in Metz, plays the role of a resident of Lorraine whom the young Alsatian engages in conversation.

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#3Lothringen!

Movie - 1994, 2h 15m as Narrator (voice) (uncredited)

6.5 / 10
Drama

About the history of the French region of Lorraine, called Lothringen in German.

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#4A Visit to the Louvre

Movie - 2004, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

6.3 / 10
Documentary

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

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#5Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?

Movie - 2003, 2h 15m as Himself

7.4 / 10
Documentary

Undaunted by a commission to make a film about his mentors and aesthetic exemplars, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Costa records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the two re-edit their film Sicilia!, discussing and arguing over each cut and its effect. Incorporating comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein, about the ethical and aesthetic implications of film technique and such matters as rhythm, sound mixing, and acting. The film becomes a tour de force, immersing us in the mysteries of cinema as practiced by some of its greatest creators. Costa calls the film both his first comedy and his first love story.

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#6Où en êtes-vous, Jean-Marie Straub ?

Movie - 2016, 2h 15m as Self

8.8 / 10
Documentary

An initiative from Pompidou Center, filmed by Jean Marie Straub.

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#7Cinématon

Movie - 1978, 2h 15m as N°342

4.9 / 10
Documentary

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

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#8Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

Movie - 2015, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

6.5 / 10
Documentary

"Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet" is the overlay of two Cinematons by Gérard Courant with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: "Jean-Marie Straub, Cinématon number 342" and "Danièle Huillet, Cinematon number 343," filmed on May 27, 1984.

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#9Nos yeux se sont ouverts

Movie - 2010, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10

Jean-Marie Straub reacts to an audience during a Straub-Huillet retrospective.

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#10Une Vie Risquée

Movie - 2018, 2h 15m as Himself

8.8 / 10
Documentary

Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday.

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#11Hommage à Jean-Marie Straub - 08.01.2018 - réalisation: Jean-Charles Fitoussi

Movie - 2018, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10
Drama

Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday. Directed by Jean-Charles Fitoussi.

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#12Cézanne: Conversation with Joachim Gasquet

Movie - 1990, 2h 15m as Joachim Gasquet (voice) [uncredited]

6.5 / 10
Documentary

A landmark work of symbolistic imagery. The words that the filmmakers speak offscreen are imaginary conversation with Cézanne quoted from a critique by Joachim Gasquet. An exchange of memories spanning over 250 years interweaves everything from the philosophy of Empedocles to excerpts from the film Madame Bovary, to extant paintings by Cézanne, to the buildings of the artists’ village at Mont Sainte-Victoire. —ntticc.or.jp

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#13Fragments of Conversations with Jean-Luc Godard

Movie - 2009, 2h 15m as Self

7.5 / 10
Documentary

In his meetings with various different people, Jean-Luc Godard develops his thinking about history, politics, the cinema, images and time, and this will lead to his exhibition as an artist at the Pompidou Centre. Jean-Luc Godard’s conversations with Dominique Païni, Jean Narboni, André S. Labarthe, Jean-Marie Straub, Danielle Huillet and Christophe Kantcheff were filmed at his home in Rolle, in his study, at the Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts (in front of students) and in the exhibition rooms of the Pompidou Centre.

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#14S et H

Movie - 2020, 2h 15m as Himself

8.8 / 10
Documentary

Discuss, discuss, but we must not forget the laundry! Snatches of dialogue, of thoughts that mingle happily with the faces that also mingle with each other. From films number 342 and 343 by Gérard Courant: “Jean Marie Straub”, 1984 and “Danièle Huillet”, 1984.

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#15Sicilia! Si gira

Movie - 2001, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

7.0 / 10

Former Straub/Huillet assistant Jean-Charles Fitoussi films them at work during the shooting of 1999's Sicilia!.

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#16Othon

Movie - 1971, 2h 15m as Lucus

5.7 / 10
Drama

Straub-Huillet’s first color film, adapts a lesser-known Corneille tragedy from 1664, which in turn was based on an episode of imperial court intrigue chronicled in Tacitus’s Histories. The costuming is classical, and the toga-clad, nonprofessional cast performs the drama’s original French text amid the ruins of Rome’s Palatine Hill while the noise of contemporary urban life hums in the background. Their lines are executed with a terrific flatness and frequently through heavy accents; the language in Othon becomes not merely an expression but a thing itself, an element whose plainness here alerts us to qualities of the work that might otherwise be subordinated.

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#17How Merrily I Shall Laugh: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub on Their Film Class Relations

Movie - 1984, 2h 15m as Himself

6.5 / 10
Documentary

Filmmaker Manfred Blank (director of the excellent Pharos of Chaos) interviews Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub at some length about their then-current production, Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations), in which he, himself, performed as an actor.

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#18Communists

Movie - 2014, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

4.5 / 10
Drama

Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), 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.

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#19L'après-Midi Près Du Tombeau De Falconetti

Movie - 2012, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10

On a sunny afternoon, an old man sits in the shade of the trees in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris, at the edge of the grave of the great actress Falconetti (1892-1946). She achieved unforgettable recognition as Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. She later took her own life in Buenos Aires. Now the old man, Jean-Marie Straub, plays with his cane and keeps her company. Until he is disturbed.

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#20Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene

Movie - 1973, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

5.7 / 10
Documentary

This is a small, intense film based on Schoenberg’s opus of the same name with the subtitle “danger, fear, catastrophe”. It deals with emerging fascism and the persecution of Jews, as well as with their historical continuities.

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#21Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a Film Based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika

Movie - 1983, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

6.4 / 10
Documentary

This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.

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#22Kino 78 Live – Gesprächsrunde über »Toute révolution est un coup de dés«

Movie - 1978, 2h 15m as Self

8.8 / 10
Documentary

This is a recording of a movie discussion. This discussion, shown live in German television on November 16th 1978, is framed by two screenings of Huillet/Straub's movie »Toute révolution est un coup de dés«. It's first shown shortly after the discussion's participants have been introduced, a second time after the end of the discussion. After the movie ends the program cuts back to the studio for a short time, showing the guests as well as some technicians talking whilst the credits of the TV-program enroll.

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#23Dites-moi quelque chose

Movie - 2010, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10
Documentary

In parallel with Now Tell Me Something, his second book about the cinema of Straub-Huillet, Philippe Lafosse follows the meetings in 2007 and 2008 between Jean-Marie Straub, from this point onwards without Danièle Huillet, and the public. This film thus allows us to hear with pleasure words that break with cultural gossip, that question and throw light – a verb, a man that resist here and now. We learn a great deal from it, whether or not we are familiar with Straub-Huillet’s work. Tell Me Something tells us a story, or stories. Stories about cinema, stories about faithfulness and honesty. The story, also, of the setting up of a people rising against ruling state of things. The story, moreover, of an irreparable absence – that of Danièle Huillet. In short, the story of a filmmaker in winter, and of an international community that is enlightened in the darkness.

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#246 Bagatelas

Movie - 2001, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

6.6 / 10

Six unused scenes from Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? One of the more priceless of the “bagatelles” in this collection features a lounging Jean-Marie Straub who gives a non-stop disquisition on liberty and filmmaking while Danièle Huillet busies herself with laundry, and their dog Melchior frisks in and out of frame. —Cinematheque Ontario

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#25I Did Not Die

Movie - 2008, 2h 15m as Clochard-poète

8.8 / 10
ComedyDramaFantasy

Alix is a woman of 27 looking for the only thing she is incapable of: love.

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#26Straub/Huillet: Work on "Class Relations"

Movie - 1983, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10

A behind the scenes film of Class Relations.

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#27The Film of the Authority

Movie - 1971, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.0 / 10

A group of men, women and Kristl with his camera debate how to resist authority in all its forms. All cinematic professionalism is avoided as Kristl explores how to live and make films politically.

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#28Jackals and Arabs

Movie - 2011, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

5.1 / 10

A Kafka dialogue is read by actors in Straub's own apartment in Paris.

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#29Lyrische Suite. Das untergehende Vaterland

Movie - 1992, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

10.0 / 10
Documentary

An experimental documentary film about Friedrich Hölderlin. In the middle of the film, there is a short excerpt from a Nazi propaganda film: O. E. Hasse reads "Der Tod fürs Vaterland" (Death for the Fatherland), the poem that was given to German soldiers on the front lines during World War II. This is contrasted with texts from Hölderlin's late work, which have only recently been edited. This creates a completely different picture of Hölderlin's poetry.

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#30Cinematon n°342: Jean-Marie Straub

Movie - 1984, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10

From Gérard Courant’s Cinématon series.

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#31Defense of the Time

Movie - 2007, 2h 15m as Himself

8.8 / 10
Documentary

A hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), and to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work, including passages from Italian poet Cesare Pavese.

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#32Signalement van Jean Marie Straub

Movie - 1967, 2h 15m Main Cast Role

8.8 / 10
Documentary

A short TV documentary about the making of Straub-Huillet's 'Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach'

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