The Days When I Don’t Exist

In 1630, a plague epidemic ravages the city of Milan. In a climate of suspicion and terror, two men are accused of spreading the disease in the city. Interrogated and tortured, they are forced to expose the story of an imaginary crime. Then, before dying, they invent the story of the Sowers of Plague.

Laurent comes to visit his father not far from Bethune. But his father, who lives a hermit's life deep in the woods, has only one thing on his mind : to do away with his six children in order to relieve them of the miseries of life. Welcomed at the Caboche farm where his brother Frederic works (Frederic advises him not to try to see their father), Laurent is delighted to see hardy 81 year old Alfred again. The gods are not far off, and, despite all, the pleasures of existence too.

Former Straub/Huillet assistant Jean-Charles Fitoussi films them at work during the shooting of 1999's Sicilia!.

A man returns to visit his native Sicily after living in New York for a long time. He learns about the Sicilian way of life from stylized conversations with an orange picker, his fellow train passengers, his mother, and a knife-sharpener.

The film is a love story which tells the impossible tale of two youths who have never before met. The action unrolls in Paris between 1979 and 1980.

A child is confronted with the (ever young) old age of the world, its hazards, its cinema and music, shot in seven days in Rome, Fiumicino, Ciampino and Cineccità. What will happen on July 12, 1995, in Rome ? What will become of July 12, 1995, in Rome ?

An elderly German composer is invited to Roma by the King to compose eight Notturni. But the memories of tragic events he experienced in the very place to which he is returning, leave him unable to compose.

Mourning the death of his partner and collaborator Danièle Huillet, Straub finds tender mercy in music and nature. Out of the abyss, Kathleen Ferrier sings “The Farewell” from Gustav Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth”, (which the composer wrote in 1909 after the death of his daughter) and Heinrich Schütz’s Lament on the Death of His Wife. The landscape also provides solace: the mountain grove where Endymion pines for his beloved Artemis, “a wild thing, untouchable, mortal,” appears to embody the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’ — a wistful acceptance of the fleeting beauty of things.

Determined to change his life, the Count of Servadac donated his castle and each of the bodies of the family members to the avant-garde medicine of William Stein (great-grandson of Victor Frankenstein), duly poisoned for this purpose. . Opportunity for Stein to carry out the first transplant of memory neurons on human corpses.

Excerpts from the novel Donna di Messina (1949 and 1964, 1967) by Elio Vittorini (1908-1966).

A “minute-film” directed as little scenes in Japan, according to Fitoussi’s own words that is never shown in the same editing, hence, if you see the film several times, you litteraly won’t see the film, there is as many versions as there are projections.

Alix is a woman of 27 looking for the only thing she is incapable of: love.

Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday. Directed by Jean-Charles Fitoussi.