The author, with his partner Danièle Huillet, disappeared in 2006, of a demanding and intensely poetic work, wrote one of the most important pages of cinematographic modernity. He died on the night of November 19 to 20, at the age of 89.
by Mathieu Macheret
Marxist filmmaker, rebellious, uncompromising, protest, rebellious, stormy and fiery, Jean-Marie Straub died on the night of November 19 to 20 in Rolle in Switzerland at the age of 89. With his partner Danièle Huillet, disappeared on October 9, 2006, they wrote on the sidelines of the system one of the most important pages of cinematographic modernity, during an unparalleled human and artistic adventure.
The “straub”, as they were called, are parents of one of the most beautiful and demanding work in the history of cinema, characterized by the images and sounds of literary or musical texts, those of Authors “friends” like Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Hölderlin, Jean-Sébastien Bach, Arnold Schönberg, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Pierre Corneille or Franz Kafka. Work carried all long by an irreducible craftsmanship, firmly attached to an ethical principle as aesthetic, that of the reduction of the means of staging in their strict necessity.
Their films, reputed to be difficult to access but celebrated around the world, deliver intense poetry, that of a world returned as a block, according to its deep lines of fragmentation (class struggle, political conflicts, historical fractures).
Jean-Marie Straub, born January 8, 1933 in Metz, is interested in the cinema after the war, first marked by the lyric and feverish films by Jean Grémillon, as trailers (1941), summer light ( 1942) or the sky is to you (1943), works that are both popular and steeped in formal audacity, which he discovers presented by the influential critic Henri Agel at the Ciné-Club “La Chambre Noire” de Metz. He also saw the countryside (1946), by Jean Renoir, and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), by Robert Bresson, with such a craze that the programming and animation of the Ciné-Club echoes him. The young Straub then plans to write about the cinema, without still thinking of shooting films. He pursues studies of letters (hypokhâgne) at the Lycée Fustel-de-Coulanges in Strasbourg, then passed his license at the University of Nancy.
The new wave
He moved to Paris in November 1954, when the Algerian insurrection exploded. It was at Lycée Voltaire, in preparatory class at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies (the old name of the Fémis), which will be sent back after three weeks, that he meets Danièle Huillet. He then frequented the band of “young Turks” of the Cadés du Cinéma, including Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, future filmmakers of the New Wave. Straub receives some of them, like Truffaut or the critic André Bazin (co-founder of the notebooks), in his film club, in Metz, to present the American films of Fritz Lang or those of Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Roberto Rossellini , Kenji Mizoguchi-filmmakers whom he ardently defends, often against the current of the Federation of Ciné-Clubs.
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