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 Not Reconciled, Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (1965) is showing on Mubi from May 8 – June 6, 2019.Critics have often noted Straub/Huillet's preference for diagonals, for instance, but have underestimated the aesthetic and thematic significance of the contrast with more symmetrical composition. Scenes in Not Reconciled involving the characters' inability to reconcile past and present are most often shot in diagonals. In addition to making a simple set “vibrate with life,” Straub/Huillet's diagonal shots keep the viewer from relaxing at the point of a perspective triangle in relation to the screen. In this way they are able to vary the sense of narrative space inherent in all three-dimensional pictorial representations. Not only is the viewer not at rest as the subject for whom the composition...
- 5/9/2019
- MUBI
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.
The Best of Blaxploitation
Funk. Soul. Ultra-hip. This month, FilmStruck is highlighting Blaxploitation cinema, a group of films made specifically for African American audiences in the 1970s just as black filmmakers were finally allowed to make Hollywood features. This collection features pivotal Black icons from unforgettable films such as Shaft, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Cleopatra Jones and Super Fly, presented alongside a discussion of the history of the genre with Malcolm Mays,...
The Best of Blaxploitation
Funk. Soul. Ultra-hip. This month, FilmStruck is highlighting Blaxploitation cinema, a group of films made specifically for African American audiences in the 1970s just as black filmmakers were finally allowed to make Hollywood features. This collection features pivotal Black icons from unforgettable films such as Shaft, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Cleopatra Jones and Super Fly, presented alongside a discussion of the history of the genre with Malcolm Mays,...
- 6/15/2018
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
French auteur premiered his most recent feature, Kommunisten, at the festival in 2014.
French director Jean-Marie Straub will be presented with the Leopard of Honor at the 70th Locarno Film Festival (August 2-12).
Born in France but having worked primarily in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, his filmmaking career has spanned more than sixty years.
Straub, who regularly collaborated with his partner Danielle Huillet (who died in 2006), was known for radical and political films, including From The Clouds To The Resistance in 1968 and Sicilia! in 1999, both of which premiered in the Un Certain Regard strand at the Cannes Film Festival.
His full...
French director Jean-Marie Straub will be presented with the Leopard of Honor at the 70th Locarno Film Festival (August 2-12).
Born in France but having worked primarily in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, his filmmaking career has spanned more than sixty years.
Straub, who regularly collaborated with his partner Danielle Huillet (who died in 2006), was known for radical and political films, including From The Clouds To The Resistance in 1968 and Sicilia! in 1999, both of which premiered in the Un Certain Regard strand at the Cannes Film Festival.
His full...
- 6/22/2017
- ScreenDaily
In our recent appreciation of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet‘s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, the author was forced to lament “the general unavailability” of a decades-spanning oeuvre that had thus far only received a single Region 1 home-video release, an unfortunate state that’s helped create a particular mystique around the husband-wife duo. That aura is, fortunately, about to be broken: Grasshopper Film has acquired U.S. rights to the complete Straub-Huillet catalog, and will distribute the works “on home video and VOD platforms, as well as [make] available for public screenings, beginning this summer as part of a multi-year project.”
The announcement is bound to cause waves among devoted cineastes first and just about anyone else a decent second, but that shouldn’t be the case. The attention demanded by their films is rewarded with formal, aesthetic, and sensory pleasures — to say nothing of the fact that...
The announcement is bound to cause waves among devoted cineastes first and just about anyone else a decent second, but that shouldn’t be the case. The attention demanded by their films is rewarded with formal, aesthetic, and sensory pleasures — to say nothing of the fact that...
- 4/19/2017
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
“1st film watched in 1st freshman film class was ’72’s History Lessons. It was a great ‘Welcome to boot camp, motherfuckers’ moment.” – Nick Pinkerton
Parsing the embarrassment of riches amongst ’60s French cinema, the annals of Official Film History tends to split us into the New Wave (Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, etc.), the left-bank (Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda), and the successive “ Second New Wave” (Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, Luc Moullet). Bouncing between realism and the avant-garde, these filmmakers, to varying degrees of mainstream acceptance, left an undeniable mark on post-war art cinema. Yet provided you’re hip enough to know, there’s two particular names that seem to instantly dwarf the aforementioned, at least in the terms of uncompromised Film Art: the husband-wife duo of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet — or, if you prefer, the synthesized, punchier Straub/Huillet.
The mystique that has emerged around this duo is not...
Parsing the embarrassment of riches amongst ’60s French cinema, the annals of Official Film History tends to split us into the New Wave (Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, etc.), the left-bank (Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda), and the successive “ Second New Wave” (Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, Luc Moullet). Bouncing between realism and the avant-garde, these filmmakers, to varying degrees of mainstream acceptance, left an undeniable mark on post-war art cinema. Yet provided you’re hip enough to know, there’s two particular names that seem to instantly dwarf the aforementioned, at least in the terms of uncompromised Film Art: the husband-wife duo of Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet — or, if you prefer, the synthesized, punchier Straub/Huillet.
The mystique that has emerged around this duo is not...
- 3/3/2017
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
I'm drawn to Straub-Huillet’s usage of direct quotations rather than adapting or interpreting original material for a film. To me this is, among other things, a very straightforward and concrete way of highlighting that people are much less original than they are often assumed to be. (I think that Danièle Huillet once said this, but she was certainly not the first one.) It might be worth being reminded of this, especially today, in a time where we see and seek constant innovation and renewal everywhere while nothing really changes at the core. But for Straub-Huillet, quotation is also about something else. Every film of theirs is a documentation of their loving relationship to a preexisting text, artwork, or artist. The films are more genuinely about the work of the other and less about the couple's so-called vision. Quotation, to Straub-Huillet, is an act of respect, one...
- 2/7/2017
- MUBI
"Jean Marie Straub’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is a hard film to sit through but if you can dig it, it’s like 90 minutes of Tantric exercises with the same cleansing results." It was 1968—very, very 1968—when the young J. Hoberman wrote these words and many, many more, reporting on that year's edition of the New York Film Festival. Also in today's news roundup: J.J. Abrams and Warner Bros are producing a nine-hour adaptation of Stephen King's Kennedy assassination novel, 11/22/63. Photographer Sandro Miller has restaged 35 iconic photographs with John Malkovich as his subject. And Steven Soderbergh has posted a reworked version of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, concentrating on the "staging." » - David Hudson...
- 9/23/2014
- Keyframe
"Jean Marie Straub’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is a hard film to sit through but if you can dig it, it’s like 90 minutes of Tantric exercises with the same cleansing results." It was 1968—very, very 1968—when the young J. Hoberman wrote these words and many, many more, reporting on that year's edition of the New York Film Festival. Also in today's news roundup: J.J. Abrams and Warner Bros are producing a nine-hour adaptation of Stephen King's Kennedy assassination novel, 11/22/63. Photographer Sandro Miller has restaged 35 iconic photographs with John Malkovich as his subject. And Steven Soderbergh has posted a reworked version of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, concentrating on the "staging." » - David Hudson...
- 9/23/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
The Moon, the opposite of the sun, hovers over us by night, the opposite of day.
In F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), Reri, the sacred maiden of the small island of Bora Bora, writes this to her lover Matahi:
And indeed, when Matahi chases after her, the moon spreads its path on the sea.
He runs and swims after her, moving faster than a normal human being, defying the laws of gravity.
Miraculously, he catches up to the boat.
Thus, he must die, sinking back into a void…
…while ghost ships linger on in the distance…
…carrying another hopeless romantic, and a moving corpse—A second Nosferatu.
The moon is absent in Murnau’s earlier film, made nearly ten years before Tabu, but it is in the one he made nearly five years after Nosferatu, when George O’Brien leaves his wife for a midnight rendezvous with another woman.
And indeed,...
In F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931), Reri, the sacred maiden of the small island of Bora Bora, writes this to her lover Matahi:
And indeed, when Matahi chases after her, the moon spreads its path on the sea.
He runs and swims after her, moving faster than a normal human being, defying the laws of gravity.
Miraculously, he catches up to the boat.
Thus, he must die, sinking back into a void…
…while ghost ships linger on in the distance…
…carrying another hopeless romantic, and a moving corpse—A second Nosferatu.
The moon is absent in Murnau’s earlier film, made nearly ten years before Tabu, but it is in the one he made nearly five years after Nosferatu, when George O’Brien leaves his wife for a midnight rendezvous with another woman.
And indeed,...
- 3/17/2014
- by Neil Bahadur
- MUBI
Without Theatres: ‘The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach’ may be critical to the ‘slow cinema’ debate
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...
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...
- 11/22/2013
- by Zach Lewis
- SoundOnSight
Jazz musician Hazel Scott unexpectedly appears in Vincente Minnelli's second film, I Dood It (1943)—which showed up for an extremely rare screening on celluloid at BAMcinématek's retrospective on the filmmaker, which ends tonight—and in one astounding camera dolly and crane, beginning a three-shot performance, plays an astounding cover of Takin' a Chance and injects the film with much of the warmth, character, play and sexiness missing from the movie's central romcom between Red Skelton and Eleanor Powell. A friend compared this scene's cinema to that of Straub-Huillet's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.
***
Special thanks to Jake Perlin for making this screening possible.
***
Special thanks to Jake Perlin for making this screening possible.
- 11/3/2011
- MUBI
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