Jean-Marie Straub
Birthday: 1933-01-08 Place of Birth: Metz, Moselle, Lorraine, France
Synopsis
Jean-Marie Straub (born 8 January 1933, Metz, France) and Danièle Huillet (1 May 1936, Paris – 9 October 2006, Cholet) were a duo of filmmakers who made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006. Their films are noted for their rigorous, intellectually stimulating style and radical, communist politics. Though both were French, they worked mostly in Germany and Italy. From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) and Sicilia! (1999) are among the duo's best regarded works. Description above from the Wikipedia article Straub–Huillet, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Acting
Othon
Straub-Huillet’s first color film, adapts a lesser-known Corneille tragedy from 1664, which in turn was based on an episode of imperial court intrigue chronicled in Tacitus’s Histories. The costuming is classical, and the toga-clad, nonprofessional cast performs the drama’s original French text amid the ruins of Rome’s Palatine Hill while the noise of contemporary urban life hums in the background. Their lines are executed with a terrific flatness and frequently through heavy accents; the language in Othon becomes not merely an expression but a thing itself, an element whose plainness here alerts us to qualities of the work that might otherwise be subordinated.
