This interview conducted by the late Hans Hurch, former artistic director of the Viennale, was originally published in the book, “Vom Widerschein des Kinos. Hans Hurch Texte aus dem Falter von 1978 – 1991.” Falter Verlag, Vienna 2017. By Claus Philip, Christian Reder, Armin Thurnher (Hg.) Straub-Huillet's Class Relations (1984) is showing on Mubi from August 20 – September 18, 2019 as part of a Mubi retrospective devoted to the filmmakers.Danièle Huillet and Jean Marie-Straub’s film Class Relations (1984) is based on the novel “Amerika” by Franz Kafka. Class Relations is a film in black and white, shot in the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, with the participation of 31 actresses and actors, among them: Christian Heinish, Mario Adorf, Alfred Edel, Libgart Schwarz, Klaus Traube, and Laura Betti. The following text is an excerpt from a conversation conducted by Hans Hurch with Danièle Huillet and Jean Marie-Straub on 12 February 1984, after the film’s premiere at the Metropolis theater in Hamburg.
- 8/1/2019
- MUBI
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
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
Lothringen!One of the more striking shots in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) appears ever so briefly. A row of Italian anti-resistance villagers stand at a bar, peering over their shoulders at their more progressive-minded colleague sitting in a corner off-screen. It’s the first time in the scene that any of the characters are pictured all together within the space, an elegant mahogany interior resembling one of those saloons out of a John Ford western—both good reasons to linger on the shot; the mise en scène virtually demands it. Yet, against custom, Straub-Huillet spend no more than a scant, half-second on it, if that. This much is true, for cinema’s most uncompromising directorial duo, every shot counts. It’s in no small part thanks to their unwavering rebellious stance—from insisting on using direct sound recording to consistently paying...
- 5/11/2016
- MUBI
"Glory, something some men chase and others find themselves stumbling upon, not expecting to find them. Either way it is a noble gesture that one finds bestowed upon them. My question is when does glory fade away and become a wrongful crusade, or an unjustified means by which consumes one completely?"Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is a movie about men who salute the country that betrayed and mutilated them.Like in Manoel de Oliveria’s No, or the Vain Glory of Command, where men, their arms cut off, struggle to hold uphold the flag of their country. As Mr. Lewis says:“We live in a democracy, gentlemen! And in a democracy, it’s every mans right to be killed fighting for his country!” Some men can be changed. It is possible to find a new consciousness:“Those machine guns are in position. It would mean needless slaughter to oppose us now!
- 7/14/2015
- by Neil Bahadur
- MUBI
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
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