Jean-Marie Straub

Metz (France), 1933 - Rolle (Switzerland), 2022

He was a director and editor, known for Sicilia! (1999), Class Relations (1984) and Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). He always worked in collaboration with his wife, Danièle Huillet, and they created some of the most challenging and intensely debated motion pictures of the modernist era. As filmmakers, Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet belonged to the generation that produced the "French New Wave", although their work took a radically different direction. Their aesthetic, grounded in the philosophical materialism of Marx and Engels, was one of extreme realism that resisted superfluous embellishments and editing effects.