French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub is dead

French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub died on Sunday (November 20) at the age of 89 in his adopted home on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The news was confirmed by the national Swiss film archive Cinémathèque suisse.

From Metz via Paris to Munich-Schwabing

Straub was born on January 8, 1933 in Metz. After the Wehrmacht marched in, he spent part of his childhood under German occupation. At that time he was forced to learn German at school. As a young man, he worked in a film club after the war, before finally moving to Paris in 1954. There he not only met his partner Danièle Huillet, but also several Nouvelle Vague directors – including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. He did not stay in his capital for long: in 1958 he moved to Germany to avoid military service in the Algerian war. Four years later, together with his partner Danièle Huillet, he shot his first short film “Machorka-Muff”. From then on, the two worked together for more than thirty years.

Nonconformist to the core

The mostly left-critical films can be characterized by minimalism and sparseness – critics dubbed them as emotionless. Straub and Huillet rejected the conventions of mass cinema, and as a result they mostly dispensed with professional actors. Instead of bowing to commerce, they translated literary models by writers such as Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll and Friedrich Hölderlin onto the big screen. Her probably best-known film “Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” traces important stations in the biography of Johann Sebastian Bach in the form of diary reports. In the 1960s, the director duo and lovers lived in Munich-Schwabing – and laid the foundations for the new German film there.

On the left extreme

The self-confessed Marxists have repeatedly caused controversy. The opening credits to “Moses and Aron” from 1974 contained a dedication to the cameraman and RAF terrorist Holger Meins. In September 2006 there was another uproar at the Venice Film Festival: Straub and Huillet were awarded a special prize for the “invention of cinematic language in their entire work” for their film “Quei loro incontri”. On behalf of the absent couple, one of the actors read a message written by Straub. As long as American imperialist capitalism exists, there can never be enough terrorists in the world, it said. After more than 30 films made together, Jean-Marie Straub continued the work after Danièle Huillet’s death. This resulted in almost 20 other films, all in collaboration with Barbara Ulrich.

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