The French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub is dead. He died on Sunday at the age of 89 in Rolle in his adopted country of Switzerland, as did Christophe Bolli, the head of communications for Cinémathèque suisse, the Swiss national film archive, the German Press Agency in Geneva said on Sunday. He had previously spoken to Straub’s widow.
Straub made numerous films with his partner Danièle Huillet, who died in 2006. The predominantly left-critical political works are characterized by an unmistakable approach: the renunciation of the illusionistic and emotional potential of cinema. With their emotionless style, Straub, born in Metz in 1933, and Huillet, born in Paris in 1936, preferably implemented literary models by Kafka, Böll, Malraux and Hölderlin. They rejected commerce and convention, resisted mainstream cinema, Hollywood and the star system. With the “Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach” (1968), which Straub already shot together with Huillet, he achieved one of his greatest successes.
