In Italy, immediately subsequent to the war, a group of people who lost all they possessed during the conflict, settle in a village in ruins. They intend to restore the city from the rubble and re-start life, in imitation of the women of Messina who rebuilt their city, destroyed as it was by an earthquake. Oscillating between respect and suspicion, co-existence between group members is tense. Things become complicated when an envoy from the government arrives to say that nothing there belongs to them. The film is a free adaptation of fragments of the novella ‘The Women of Messina’, by Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini.

1989 film directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

Fragment of last reel from "History Lessons" presented in an installation as a special event for the Venice Biennale Arte.

The Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliated (Il Ritorno del figlio prodigo/Umiliati), Dirs. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Italy, 2001–03, 64 min., Italian with English subtitles
The diptych The Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliated (Il Ritorno del figlio prodigo/Umiliati) (2001–03) is a segue from Workers, Peasants (2001) and Straub and Huillet’s third film based on the writings of Elio Vittorini. The film returns to Vittorini’s Marxist novel The Women of Messina (1973) about a community founded after World War II by workers and peasants from different regions of Italy. In the film, the commune is threatened by the pressures of a restructured post-war world, of its laws and politics, and by the forces of history from which they had hoped to protect themselves.

Dolando (2003), was made as a gesture from the filmmakers to their crew. One of the film’s actors, Dolando Bernardini – who also starred in From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979) – sings a capella three verses from Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581).

The Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliated will be screened in its original 35mm format.

Programme

The Return of the Prodigal Son/Humiliated (Il Ritorno del figlio prodigo/Umiliati), Dirs. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Italy, 2001–03, 64 min., Italian with English subtitles.

Incantati, Dirs. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 2002, Italy/France/Germany, 35mm, 6 min., Italian with English subtitles.

Dolando, Dirs. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 2003, Italy/France/Germany, 7 min., Italian with English subtitles.

A European traveler from the North, accompanied by Arab guides, is camped in the desert. When night falls, and the Arabs are at a distance, the traveler is accosted by talking jackals. The jackals speak of an age-old hatred for Arabs, whom they associate with uncleanliness. They relate a belief passed down from their ancestors, that a man such as the protagonist would be the one to "end the quarrel which divides the world in two". The jackals attempt to enlist the traveler's assistance in destroying them, offering him old rusted scissors with which to slit the throats of the Arabs.

Suisse/1994/22'/35mm
D'après Colette Baudoche de Maurice Barrès.
Avec Emmanuelle Straub.
Evocation du sort de la Lorraine après la défaite de 1870. A partir d'extraits du roman de Maurice Barrès, ce film médite la perte, par les peuples européens, de leur langue et de leur identité

An extended shot from a car coursing through the streets of Rome in 1972—which is to say, the ancient Republic in ruins—sets the stage for Straub-Huillet’s complex interpretation of Brecht’s unfinished experimental novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. The work explores history as it has been written by the victors, with their hero worship of tyrannical leaders (whether Caesar or Hitler), and offers an alternate view of history writing as fractured and potentially revolutionary. Caesar’s former slave and former banker are both featured, providing their own differing perspectives on the Emperor’s career in the political, economic, and military life of ancient Rome.

The film is a commemoration of the lost livelihood of the earth, the lost lives of the War and to the work of two of the cinema's greatest artists.@

D'après les Dialogues avec Leucò de Cesare Pavese.
Avec Giovanna Daddi, Andrea Bacci.
Retour à Buti, en Toscane, où Jean-Marie Straub poursuit la mise en scène des Dialogues avec Leucò de Cesare Pavese. L'Inconsolable offre à nos sens et à notre pensée une version inattendue du mythe d'Orphée.

片中茱莉•柯尔泰的独白来自塞尚与乔亚希姆•加斯奎特的谈话录，镜头下的作品与涉及的画家都有些专业，而中译又不是很好，所以本片可能会让非艺术专业的人感到无所适从。(by -王嵘- )

RFA/1972/15‘/VOSTF/16mm
d'après « I cani del Sinaï » de Franco Fortini.

Based on an unknown Schönberg opera from 1929, From Today Until Tomorrow explores one night in a not-quite loveless marriage. A husband and wife return from a party where she has flirted with another man, while he has cast an appraising eye toward an attractive, fashionably dressed acquaintance of his wife’s. Though each dreams, briefly, of leaving the marriage for the excitement and mystery of a new lover, in the end they decide stability and comfort are more important than the fleeting thrill of new romance. Directors Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who previously collaborated on two other films about music (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968, and Moses and Aaron, 1975), rely on long fixed shots in austere black-and-white so that the focus remains on the musical brilliance of Schönberg’s atonal score, performed here by 70 musicians. That Schönberg would choose such a relatively lighthearted message for his newly discovered musical language remains a mystery, especially since the conclusion reached by the husband and wife—to stick with the tried and true—seems directly at odds with Schönberg’s own philosophy of composing. It is just this juxtaposition, however, coupled with Straub and Huillet’s faithful presentation, that makes the opera a compelling addition to the Schönberg canon—and the film such a challenging and intriguing experience.

A companion piece to the earlier film ‘The Death of Empedocles’, 'Black Sin' is an adaptation of the third version of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play ‘Der Tod Des Empedokles’.

The international premiere of Le Streghe, femmes entre elles (France/Italy), like last year’s heart-rending Le Genou d’Artemide, is based on Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. Nature’s splendour, as Straub has always filmed it, pulses with everlasting energy throughout this delicately profound chimerical intersection of im/mortality.

A fearless Antigone, refusing to allow the dishonored body of her murdered brother Polynices to be devoured by vultures and dogs, defies the Thebian tyrant Creon by burying him.

Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s biting satire Bonn Diary presents the reflections of a reactivated officer who is summon ed to the West German capital by the Ministry of Defense to establish an Academy for Military Memories. Straub considered his film to be an intervention against German rearmament in the Adenauer era: "Machorka-Muff is the story of a rape, the rape of a country on which an army has been imposed, a country which would have been happier without one."
In "Machorka-Muff," Mr. Straub, employing the cold, somewhat expressionistic but always loquacious approach of his other films, comes closest to underlining the almost subliminal irony of his themes. He briefly outlines, through the performance of Colonel Machorka-Muff, a former Nazi who is reinstated in the Adenauer regime, the unchanging thinking of the Nazi and/or the military mind. As the colonel of the title, Dr. Johannes Eckhardt is properly cold and convincing as the believer in the rights of the soldier. Although it is the shortest and earliest of Mr. Straub's films, it is both the most lucid of his works and the most clearly indicative of his potential as an imaginative filmmaker.