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Jean-Marie Straub, the French director who created an influential body of rigorous political films with his late partner Danièle Huillet, died Saturday evening in Rolle, Switzerland. He was 89.

Straub’s death was confirmed by the French publication Le Monde.

In 1954, Straub met Huillet in Paris when she was a member of Cahiers du Cinema alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut. The two emigrated to Germany so Straub could avoid military service during the Algerian War.

The directing duo drew from literature and musical works by figures such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka and Elio Vittorini to hone an uncompromising form across a diverse body of work that committed to exploring historical fragmentation and Marxist analysis of class struggle. The pair formed a sentimental, fiercely creative partnership that has made its mark on global political filmmaking, with directors such as Pedro Costa and Thom Andersen citing the two as major influences.

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's Sicilia! (1999) is showing on Mubi through September 20, 2020.*pour le ouistiti et en souvenir de Barnabé, le chat(for the marmoset and in memory of Barnabé the cat) J.-M.S.— Opening title card of Sicilia! (1999)Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily (1938-39) has, like this companion, become subtly entwined with my life. Seeing it at age 16, understanding nothing, but tasting the films of Danièle Huillet and her husband for the first time; clearly, that first hint of obsession would turn out to be an abiding one. Another time, excitedly showing it to friends at university and getting my first taste of the frequently lonely, loveless existence of a Straubian, something that puts me in mind of the Raúl...

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014) is showing on Mubi from October 8 – November 6, 2019.The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars.Thank God there’s no one left for me to lose–so I am free to cry. This air is madefor the echoing of songs.—Excerpt from Anna Akhmatova's The Return (1944)In the final shot of Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014), Danièle Huillet sits alone on in the dirt, high up on Mount Etna in Sicily and all but static, as Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16—his last major work before his death from alcohol cirrhosis—swells around her. She is strikingly still, staring off ahead as if stupefied by the living world. After a long pause, she says two words: "neue Welt"—new world.This reanimation of Huillet,...

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Straub-Huillet's Workers, Peasants (2001) is showing on Mubi from September 24 – October 23, 2019.Performer: "...and of every thing came the end, and it was a whole that was living."

J.-M.S.: Thanks—I'll stop you there. It's not bad, but some things should be done a little better. Some are tired. Let's start again from the beginning. First of all, fourth line: "...it lingers among the vineyards and on the seashore." You have to stress the Italian tonic accent on "sea," seeeea. But don't omit the rest of the word. After that, you have four bars to breathe, understand? So you can do it.—Extract from "Jean-Marie Straub to Cesare Pavese" (available here)In the last years of the 20th century, after having produced films in a variety...

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Straub-Huillet's From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) is showing on Mubi from July 17 – August 15, 2019.From the cloud, that is from the invention of the gods by man, to the resistance of the latter against the former as much as to the resistance against Fascism.—Jean-Marie StraubBeing blind is a misfortune no greater than being alive.—Dialogue spoken in the filmA friend who works for the Turin Film Festival was recently reminiscing with me about the time Danièle and Jean-Marie arrived in town to present a film in a beat-up minivan full of stray, flea-ridden cats and dogs. He said that then, of course, the question became: where the hell could the festival put Straub-Huillet up for the night with such a wild entourage of feline and canine comrades?...

As Without So WITHINDear Fern,"Risky" festival choices can take all sorts of forms, whether betting on first time filmmakers (Hello Destroyer, which you rightly praised, and Ashley McKenzie's promising, incredibly compassionate debut Werewolf), or hoping that something as potentially goofy as Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids might just be something special. (Judging by both our responses, it very much was—in fact, it's one of the best films of the year.) Still, I encourage you to come to Wavelengths with me—it's bliss!While much of the festival area here in Toronto is fairly condensed, which finds us sprinting across a multiplex with mere minutes between screenings or from one venue to another but a few blocks away—these being press and industry timeslots; the public ones are spread around a bit more—I had the pleasure to discover more of our host city by tracking down several...

Lothringen!One of the more striking shots in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) appears ever so briefly. A row of Italian anti-resistance villagers stand at a bar, peering over their shoulders at their more progressive-minded colleague sitting in a corner off-screen. It’s the first time in the scene that any of the characters are pictured all together within the space, an elegant mahogany interior resembling one of those saloons out of a John Ford western—both good reasons to linger on the shot; the mise en scène virtually demands it. Yet, against custom, Straub-Huillet spend no more than a scant, half-second on it, if that. This much is true, for cinema’s most uncompromising directorial duo, every shot counts. It’s in no small part thanks to their unwavering rebellious stance—from insisting on using direct sound recording to consistently paying...

[...] and also, indeed more, perhaps in those who were in no way exceptional and have left no trace, there was something that went beyond the struggle against Nazism, something – be it only for a moment, the last one – that contributed, whether they knew it or not, to the “dream of a thing” which men have had “for so long,” to the enormous dream of men.These words of Franco Fortini, spoken in Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Fortini/Cani (1978), are a kind of summation of one of the major themes of their work. From one film to the next, they return to this “dream of a thing”: the day Camille dreams of in Eyes Do Not Want to Close At all Times (1969) when “Rome will allow herself to choose in her turn,” human’s desire to commune with the gods in From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979), the “new duties,...

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

Written and directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

Italy/West Germany, 1968

In Nick Pinkerton’s signing off for his review of The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach in Reverse Shot, he wishes “…[it] long may continue to send Matrix-weaned mouth-breathers screaming from film classes, wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into.” It’s the mental image many hardcore cineastes latch onto — of minimalist auteur vision as temporal torture to the modern viewer. The upper echelon is dominated by the sessions of marathoning explorations into time, beginning with many of Warhol’s experiments (Sleep, Empire) and culminating in such recent works as Tarr’s Sátángtangó, Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, and most of Lav Diaz’s oeuvre: films that also serve as medals of experience to the cinephiles who grip their seats tightly enough to earn their bragging rights, if...

Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation about Straub-Huillet after a screening of From the Clouds to the Resistance and Workers, Peasants

Monday, February 16, 2004, Jean Vigo Cinema, Nice, France

Above: From the Clouds to the Resistance.

Philippe Lafosse: It seemed interesting to us, after having seen twelve films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and talked about them together, to ask another viewer, a philosopher and cinephile, to talk to us about these filmmakers. Jacques Rancière is with us this evening to tackle a subject that we’ve entitled “Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs’ Films,” knowing that we could then look into other points.

Jacques Ranciere: First, a word apropos the “and” of “Politics and Aesthetics”: this doesn’t mean that there’s art on the one hand and politics on the other, or that there would be a formal procedure on the one hand and political messages on the other.