Filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet 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. Straub and Huillet were inseparable partners from 1954 until Huillet’s death, working intimately on every aspect of film production.
Straub-Huillet created highly personal film interpretations of profoundly ambitious art: stories by Böll, Kafka, Duras, and Pavese; poems by Dante, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin; a film by D. W. Griffith, a painting by Cézanne, an unfinished opera by Schöenberg; and the biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. They sought to make “an abstract-pictorial dream” while remaining rigorously sensitive to the letter and spirit of the text, and to the relationship between sound and image. From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) and Sicilia! (1999) are among their best-regarded works.
