Jean-Marie Straub was a purist and in a certain sense was also considered the father of the new German film. The French director has died at the age of 89.
Commercial cinema, stars and scenery magic were a red rag to him. His principles: non-conformism, minimalism and austerity. Now the French director Jean-Marie Straub, whose films were often controversial, died at the age of 89 on Sunday in his Swiss adopted home of Rolle. This was confirmed by Christophe Bolli, head of communications at Cinémathèque suisse, the national Swiss film archive, and the German press agency in Geneva.
With the exception of a few films, including “Communists”, Straub shot all works together with his partner Danièle Huillet, who died in 2006. The predominantly left-critical political works are characterized by an unmistakable approach: the renunciation of the illusionistic and emotional potential of cinema.
With their films they rejected commerce and conventions and resisted mainstream cinema, Hollywood and the star system. They acknowledged Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect, which interrupts the plot with exaggerated language, songs and comments. The couple preferably implemented literary models by Kafka, Böll, Malraux and Hölderlin.
The two Böll adaptations “Machorka-Muff” (1962) and “Not reconciled or It only helps violence where violence reigns” (1965) – based on the novel “Billard at half past nine” – made him a kind of father figure of the new German film become, a film style of the 1960s and 1970s that criticized society and politics and differentiated itself from entertainment films.
Straub and Huillet dispensed with professional actors, perfect role identification and the great gestural play of the actors. Instead, they preferred the freshness of the amateur actors. As a result, the films often seemed bulky and cumbersome, which earned them the accusation of amateurishness and lack of emotion.
Straub was born on January 8, 1933 in Metz, where he worked in a film club. He later went to Paris, where he met several of the Nouvelle Vague directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. In 1958 he moved to Germany to avoid military service in the Algerian war.
More than 50 works
The couple left over 50 works to posterity. Many were as controversial as they were intellectually sophisticated. Straub’s first feature film “Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach” (1967), which he shot together with Huillet, was also one of his greatest successes. But the story about the most important stations in the life of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach already irritated audiences and critics, because he renounced all clichés of the baroque music master. The first major controversy came in 1974 with “Moses and Aron” based on the opera by Arnold Schönberg, because the opening credits contain a dedication to the cameraman and German terrorist Holger Meins.
Straub and Huillet caused a stir again at the 63rd Venice Film Festival in September 2006. At the presentation of the special prize for “Invention of cinematic language in their work as a whole”, which the two received for “Quei loro incontri”, one of the actors read as a substitute the absent couple a message written by Straub, which shocked. As long as American imperialist capitalism exists, there can never be enough terrorists in the world, it said. (dpa)