The panorama of human affairs encounters the “man with a movie camera”. His playground has no boundaries, his curiosity no limits. Characters, situations and places pitch camp in the life of a humanity that is at once the viewer and the thing viewed. But what are the last days of this humanity? Have they already passed? Are they now or still to come?
Discuss, discuss, but we must not forget the laundry! Snatches of dialogue, of thoughts that mingle happily with the faces that also mingle with each other. From films number 342 and 343 by Gérard Courant: “Jean Marie Straub”, 1984 and “Danièle Huillet”, 1984.
Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday.
Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub's 85th birthday.
"Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet" is the overlay of two Cinematons by Gérard Courant with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: "Jean-Marie Straub, Cinématon number 342" and "Danièle Huillet, Cinematon number 343," filmed on May 27, 1984.
Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature. (Arnaud Dommerc)
In the summer of 1986, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub were working in the park of an old Sicilian mansion and in a clearing at the foot of Mount Etna shooting Der Tod des Empedokles. Assistant cameraman Jean-Paul Toraille toyed around, so to speak, with his first video camera, filming the daily work on the set. Now, 24 years later, he was joined by Jean-Marie Straub in editing the material into a film. Anyone who expected the shooting of Les Avatars de la mort d’Empédocle to be an austere affair, an exercise entirely devoid of humour or a Straubian tour de force is proven wrong: so much lightness, joy, concentration, spells of waiting for the sun to come out – and even proper slapstick in between – is hard to find.
Peter Nestler's poetic documentary Verteidigung der Zeit is not only an hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), but also to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work, including passages from Italian poet Cesare Pavese.
Danièle Huillet was born on May 1, 1936 in Paris, France. She was a director and editor, known for Sicily! (1999), Class Relations (1984) and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). She was married to Jean-Marie Straub. She died on October 9, 2006 in Cholet, Maine-et-Loire, France.
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