Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

MoMA presents the first complete North American retrospective of the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who together formed one of the most intense, challenging, and controversial collaborations in the history of cinema. Straub (French, b. 1933) and Huillet (French, 1936–2006) were inseparable partners from 1963 until Huillet’s death in 2006, working intimately on every aspect of film production, from script writing to direction to editing. There are only a handful of similar moviemaking partnerships, notably Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, and Gene Gauntier and Sidney Olcott.

Straub-Huillet created highly personal film interpretations of profoundly ambitious art: stories by Böll, Kafka, Duras, and Pavese; poems by Dante, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin; a long-forgotten Corneille play, an essay by Montaigne, a film by D. W. Griffith, a painting by Cézanne, an unfinished opera by Schöenberg; and the biography of Johann Sebastian Bach as told through the letters of his wife Anna Magdalena. They sought to make what Straub called “an abstract-pictorial dream” while remaining rigorously sensitive to the letter and spirit of the text and to the relationship between sound and image. At the same time, all of Straub-Huillet’s films are political, whether obliquely, in reflecting on the lessons of history and advancing a Marxist analysis of capitalism and class struggle; or overtly, in considering ancient and contemporary forms of imperialism, militarism, and resistance, from Ancient Rome to colonial Egypt to wartime Germany. They aspire to nothing short of a revolution in political consciousness, especially among workers and peasants, the colonized and the exploited.

Early on, their films were attacked on all sides. The left found them too esoteric and alienating, the right found them subversive and threatening, and many in the avant-garde thought they were impenetrable and boring. But Straub-Huillet’s films were not ignored, and in a short time they had gained important champions like the influential German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, and the filmmakers Thom Andersen, Pedro Costa, Harun Farocki, and Wim Wenders.

At 83, Straub continues to make films that never waver from his commitment to the subversion of all forms of cinematic convention, whether through the use of direct sound, disjunctive editing, amateur actors, and a foregrounding of the natural landscape; fragmentary and elliptical narratives spoken in various languages; Brechtian estrangement; on-location shooting of ancient texts in contemporary, anachronistic settings (for example, on the ground where the Circus Maximus once stood); and a privileging of musical and poetic rhythms and structures over the decorative, the spectacular, the psychological, and the satirical. Dialogue is shorn of emotion, and images are deliberately unflashy. “The work we have to do,” Straub insists, “is to make films which radically eliminate art, so that there is no equivocation.”

Introductions by noted Straub-Huillet collaborators take place during the retrospective’s opening weekend.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. Special thanks to Barbara Ulrich, Ted Fendt, Miguel Abreu, and Katherine Pickard.