AS AN ARTIST and a person, Jean-Marie Straub embodied the dialectic.
Rooted but stateless, he was born in re-Frenchified Alsace-Lorraine, grew up under Nazi occupation, fled liberated France to avoid serving in Algeria, touched down in Germany, settled in Italy, and died in Switzerland—a consummate European.
Central yet marginal, Straub came of age with the cineastes of the French New Wave and, with his life partner, Danièle Huillet, made his—or should we say their—earliest films in Munich, adjacent to the German Neue Kino. Their fantastically elliptical first feature, adapted from Billiards at