Curated by Joshua Siegel
Few filmmakers in cinema history adhered to so rigorous an aesthetic as husband-and-wife team Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. From 1963 until Huillet’s death in 2006, they turned literary, operatic, and political works into idiosyncratic filmic texts—in French, German, or Italian—prioritizing the distinct properties of image and sound over such conventions as professional acting and psychological realism. Attuned equally to the emanations of the natural world and the nuances of language, they fused leftist ideology with unorthodox form in a manner unparalleled since the Soviet silent cinema. Half of the nearly fifty works in MoMA’s retrospective are either digital transfers or videos, but many will be shown in their original 16-mm or 35-mm formats. In addition to Straub’s works made after his wife’s death, familiar titles such as The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967) will be joined by many unseen in decades or never seen in New York. Travels to the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA; TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto; Tate Modern, London; and other venues, dates TBD.
