Sunday, March 5 at 7:30 PM 

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet 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 1954 until Huillet’s death, working intimately on every aspect of film production, from scriptwriting to direction to editing.  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 (fictionalized) letters of his wife Anna Magdalena.  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.  Tonight we present three recent short films made by Jean-Marie Straub, A Tale of Michel de Montaigne  (2012); Concerning Venice (2013), and Dialogue of Shadows (2012). Special guest Thomas Beard of Light Industry in person!

Tickets: $10 general admission; $6 students (with ID)/seniors; free for Filmforum members.  Tickets available at http://bpt.me/2882097 or at the door.  For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238

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