La Madre

A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Engels as well as the pioneering nonfiction film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).

Claire is a chic young Parisian woman married to a somewhat older husband, Jean. Claire meets her lover, Claude, at his apartment, where he gifts her a fur coat. Now Claire needs to figure out how to return home with this expensive gift without the affair being found out.

These Encounters Of Theirs divides 10 non-professional actors into couples, then has them take turns in declaiming the Dialogues With Leuco, Cesare Pavese's abstract, philosophical work.

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.

The life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach as presented by his wife, Anna.

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

Set in contemporary Rome, the film shows through a series of encounters with “ancient” Romans, how the economic and political manipulation by ancient Roman society led to Caesar’s dictatorship. - British Film Institute

In Italy, immediately subsequent to the war, a group of people who lost all they possessed during the conflict, settle in a village in ruins. They intend to restore the city from the rubble and re-start life, in imitation of the women of Messina who rebuilt their city, destroyed as it was by an earthquake. Oscillating between respect and suspicion, co-existence between group members is tense. Things become complicated when an envoy from the government arrives to say that nothing there belongs to them. The film is a free adaptation of fragments of the novella ‘The Women of Messina’, by Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini.

A familiar Biblical tale transformed into a cinematic opera of seemingly endless possibility. In expressive, melodic tones, the fraternal pair debate God’s true message and intent for His creations, a conflict that leads their followers towards chaos and sin. Set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force.

The film is a sort of presentation of Franco Fortini's book 'I Cani del Sinai'. Fortini, an Italian Jew, reads excerpts from the book about his alienation from Judaism and from the social relations around him, the rise of Fascism in Italy, the anti-Arab attitude of European culture. The images, mostly a series of Italian landscape shots, provide a backdrop that highlights the meaning of the text. - Fabrizio Sabidussi

This is a small, intense film based on Schoenberg’s opus of the same name with the subtitle “danger, fear, catastrophe”. It deals with emerging fascism and the persecution of Jews, as well as with their historical continuities.

Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese’s «Dialoghi con Leucò», taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese’s novel «La luna e i falò»: after World War II the emigrant «The Bastard» comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find out that everyone he knew has died, and that the war has deeply changed relationships between people.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet adapted the novel Colette Baudoche – Story of a Young Girl of Metz by Maurice Barrès as a film they titled Lothringren!. In 2010, Jean-Marie Straub returned to the eastern provinces of France, this time to Alsace, to film the second half of a diptych based on Barrès’s work. The text is derived from In the Service of Germany, a book about the mountain of Saint-Odile, which Barrès wrote in 1903. With Joseph Rottner in the principal role, Straub traces the path of a young country doctor as he tours Mont Saint-Odile, following the routes that Barrès himself took to the chateau of Ratsamhausen and around the ruins of the ancient fortification known as the "Pagan Wall,” which are unique in the area. Straub, himself born in Metz, plays the role of a resident of Lorraine whom the young Alsatian engages in conversation.

With L’inconsolable, Jean-Marie Straub continues the mise en scène of Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò, initiated in 1978 with Dalla nube alla resistenza and followed up in 2006, 2007 and 2008 with Quei loro incontri, Artemis’s Knee and Le streghe – femmes entre elles. L’inconsolable is a reflection on the myth of Orpheus.