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Straub!
NEW WORKS BY JEAN-MARIE STRAUB
While Europe falls apart, Jean-Marie Straub becomes the last European filmmaker. Or do you know anyone else, who, within a year, has made three films in three different languages? French, Italian and German are the languages in and beyond which these films were conceived, based on texts by Maurice Barrès, Cesare Pavese and Franz Kafka: in the woods of the Vosges Mountains, near the Tuscan city of Buti, and in an apartment in Paris. Lightness and depth, eloquence and silence, the wood, the music, the sun, the language - in the works of no other filmmaker does the mystical and the materialistic merge together in such a grand manner as in the films of the old Straub. Perhaps he isn't even a filmmaker any longer, but rather a wood spirit, a fox, a voice. The earlier films he made together with Danièle Huillet were simultaneously operas, oratorios and Singspiele (literally "song-plays"); his new works are small folk songs, bagatelles and dances. And the word became flesh and dwelt between trees at a sunny rock near a stream. |