JEAN-MARIE STRAUB
(8 January 1933 - 20 November 2022)
Jean-Marie Straub was a French filmmaker who made many shorts and features between 1963 and 2006. He always worked with his wife, Danièle Huillet (1936-2006), and they trod their own path through cinema, producing works that were often politically rigorous, introspectively radical, philosophically mystical and totally personal to themselves. Their work is an eclectic body of films and one that was not entirely appreciated by either audiences or critics, who sometimes found the films incomprehensible. However, in spite of that, they did win several international awards.
Jean-Marie Straub, who has died aged 89, came from Metz in north-east France where he ran the local film society. He studied at the Universities in Strasbourg and Nancy where he met Danièle, his future wife, and in 1954 they moved to Paris and were married five years later. In Paris he met the likes of François Truffaut and others involved in cinema and he wrote articles for Truffaut's magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, although Truffaut did not always agree with Straub's views and at times would not publish his contributions. That is probably why Straub and Huillet were never part of the 1960s Nouvelle Vague movement.
Straub gained experience in filmmaking by working as an assistant to directors such as Jacques Rivette, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Alexandre Astruc. Moving to Germany where Straub could avoid doing military service in Algeria, the couple began studying the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, with a view to making a film about the composer. At the time they were part of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s, alongside the likes of Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In 1963 they made the first of many short films, Machorka-Muff, based on a story by Heinrich Boll, which was followed by a longer adaptation of Not Reconciled, based on Boll’s 1969 novel Billiards at Half-past Nine. Their first feature was The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach in 1968. It reveals Bach’s life and the music of the composer as seen through the eyes of his wife Anna. It is the film for which most filmgoers would know the work of Straub and Huillet. Music, books and the arts in general were abiding interests for Straub and he filmed artistic subjects such as Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, Pierre Corneille’s play Othon, a visit to the Louvre museum, a story by Franz Kafka, the Divine Comedy of Dante, the work of Bertolt Brecht and the Italian novels of Elio Vittorini, including an adaptation of Vittorini’s anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily which Straub filmed as Sicilia!, about a man returning to the island again after a long stay in New York.
The last film that Straub and Huillet made together was Quei loro incontri (These Encounters of Theirs) in 2006, for which, at the Venice Film Festival, they won a special prize for inventing their own cinematic language. After Huillet’s death, Straub continued to make films until 2020, and he notched up over fifty shorts and features in his time. Straub and Huillet always worked with the same colleagues such as the cinematographers William Lubtchansky and Renato Berta, and sound engineer Louis Hochet.
Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet won a Bafta and a Cahiers du Cinéma award for The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, which was also nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival. They won nine other awards and were nominated many times at the festivals in Cannes, Faro Island, Istanbul, Locarno, Sao Paulo, Venice and by the German Film Critics’ Association.
MICHAEL DARVELL