The persistent, enduring vision of Jean-Marie Straub

Jean-Marie Straub, one of the great directors of the French New Wave and one of the most secretly powerful influences in contemporary cinema, died on Sunday at the age of eighty-nine in Rolle, Switzerland. (Rols is the same small town where Jean-Luc Godard, who died in September, had lived since 1970.) Straub’s work and his life illuminate the very idea of ​​what it means to be part of the French New Wave, even at some geographical distance; he creates and personifies an impassioned, radical critique of the film world and the world in general. He is one of the least known of the great directors – he never had a hit, nor did he look for one. Yet he was one of the most original filmmakers of his time, a kind of Marxist Eric Rohmer, a words-focused director whose style is instantly recognizable and whose methods are as distinctive as his films. His influence on contemporary art cinema is as subtle as it is profound and widespread.

Straub was born in Metz in 1933—which is to say in Lorraine as well as in Alsace-Lorraine, a part of France that had long been a hotbed of war between France and Germany. Germany re-annexed and re-occupied Alsace-Lorraine in 1940 until it returned to France after World War II. Straub grew up there during the war and remained in his early twenties. As a director he was an internationalist: he also lived and made films in Germany, Italy and Switzerland and conceptualized a cinema that transcended national boundaries through intellectual ideals, political resistance and the development of cinematic forms and practices that embodied these ideals. Relatively few of Straub’s films were made in France, and few of them were in French. Yet his life’s work is inseparable from the personal connections and shared ambitions of his French contemporaries and peers—and, for that matter, their French elders, predecessors, and cinematic heroes.

A precocious film buff and aspiring critic, Straub frequented Paris in the early fifties and met Godard, Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut at the Cinématheque. During this same period he ran a film club in Metz, attracting young people Notebooks the critic Truffaut and the magazine’s co-founder Andre Bazin to introduce films. Straub moved to Paris in 1954, where he met a fellow film buff, Daniel Huye, and they quickly became a couple. She was rejected from film school; he got in but was kicked out after three weeks. Straub worked as an assistant on other people’s films, including Rivet’s short film and, crucially, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped from 1956. Straub and Huye wrote a screenplay for a film about Johann Sebastian Bach; he suggested it to Bresson, who suggested the pair do it themselves. In 1958 Straub, refusing to serve in the French army during the Algerian war, went into exile in Germany; Huillet followed, got married, and tried but failed to raise the money to make the Bach film. While in Germany, they met the writer Heinrich Böhl and adapted his short story The Bonn Diary for their first short film, Muff Cat, as well as his great novel, Billiards at Half-past Nine, for their first feature film. Not Reconciled” in 1965 – one of the most original and daring of all the first films.

In Not Reconciled, Huillet and Straub reduce the weighty, multigenerational novel to a compressed and fragmented fifty-five minute film. With sudden juxtapositions replacing guiding flashbacks, the film chronicles one family’s private experience of German history from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, with a special focus on the local, personal brutality of the Nazis during Hitler’s regime and how easily many of them were rehabilitated and even honored in the post-war years. The film’s subtitle, Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns, reflects the details of Böhl’s narrative, as well as the way the filmmakers shift the focus of the story, transforming its literary allusion into a sudden, declarative materialism—albeit illuminated by images of lasting symbolic power. (Richard Rudd—one of the founders of the New York Film Festival, where The Unreconciled was screened in 1965—attended the premiere of the film at the Berlin Film Festival; in his 1972 book Straub, he described Berlin as “incredibly the audience’s “hostile reaction” to the film.)

The crucial connection between Straub and the core of the young Notebooks critics-turned-directors of the French New Wave is historicism: the influence of classic films on their work and the adaptation of classic film styles for their own films, however modernist or sophisticated they may be. There is a vital tradition of literature-based, language-oriented French cinema, seen in the work of Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras, Bresson, and Rohmer—directors who created images based on literary sources and steeped in literary language. Straub was the youngest master of this line.

In particular, Straub’s cinema builds on Bresson’s in ways that reflect an ingenious reinterpretation of his work. The first, most obvious connection is the stark rigor of the images. Like Bresson, Straub understands ideas physically, and the intense restraint and sparing of images distills ideas to physical facts. This concept is intrinsically ideological. For Bresson, whose films were inspired by his Catholic faith, it was a way to capture the incarnation of divinity in human life, the Word made flesh. For Straub, the austerity of his imagery is a means of presenting the abstractions of class conflict and political power in direct dramatic terms, of the physical expression and manifestation of complex historical realities—the flesh made of the word. Straub and Huillet’s methods emphasize the bodily presence of their speaking subjects and reconceptualize that presence in terms of the history and intellectual forces that shaped them. (The pair’s fanatical reliance on direct sound, on what was recorded during filming, is a key element in their cinematic materialism.)

The second connection to Bresson is that Straub and Huye based most of their films on existing literary or historical texts. Moreover, they often construct their own relationship to these texts – the purely practical fact of adaptation and the connection of the texts to the historical moment of filming – in their films. Third, they rethought and modified the notion of cinematic performance. Like Bresson, Straub and Yuye worked primarily with non-professional actors. Bresson devised a distinctive method of directing them, shooting dozens of takes to strip them of dramatic expression; Straub is not inclined to dramatic expression per se, but only to its conventional forms and uses. He often rehearses extensively with his non-professionals, achieving results that are as theatrically precise as they are sharply, fiercely expressive.

Straub and Willett finally managed to shoot their Bach film, The Chronicles of Anna Magdalena Bach, in Germany in 1967, during politically turbulent times—and even though the film is a high culture, historical costume drama, it seethes by the challenging zeitgeist. Anna Magdalena Bach was played by Christian Lang, a singer Straub had seen in Paris. Johann Sebastian Bach is played by the eminent harpsichordist and organist Gustav Leonhardt, other musicians in Bach’s circle are played by other real musicians (such as Nicolaus Arnoncourt and August Wenzinger), and their performances of Bach’s music are filmed in continuous long takes that . effectively turned a fictional biography of Bach and his family life into a documentary about a historically informed performance of Bach’s music. Yet the filmmakers’ vision of Bach’s life, centered on the institutional hostility he faced from hardline religious and civil authorities, is an exemplary account of aesthetic idealism as an enduring form of political resistance. The film is a work of art archaeology, recovering Bach’s radical intransigence from the refined luxury of the culture industry.

Classical music and classical culture in general were at the center of Straub and Huillet’s films – and were put to similar confrontational uses throughout their careers. They made a film of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera Moses and Aaron in 1975, shooting on location in Italy. The story’s conflict between the language prophet and his demagogic brother served as an allegory for Straub and Yuye’s highly oppositional cinema against the golden delusions of commercial cinema. Two decades later, they made a closed, studio-bound version of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone comic opera Von Heute auf Morgen, which they turned into a denial of contemporary urban bourgeois immorality. In 1969 they filmed Corneille’s 1664 play Otho, starring the film critic Adriano Appra (Straub also played a role), doing so in a way that even more radically linked dramatic fiction to non-fiction filmmaking, setting a historical tragedy of ancient Rome on location in the modern city. The film’s elaborate title, “Eyes Don’t Always Want to Close, or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow It to Take Its Turn,” suggests the absurdity of court intrigue as a substitute for democratic rule—and that such absurdity did indeed take place in modern Italy under cover of bourgeois democracy.