GENEVA, Switzerland — Anti-conformist French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub died peacefully at
his home in
Switzerland on Sunday, the Swiss National Film Archive announced.
He was 89.
اضافة اعلان
Straub was a peer
of many greats from the French New Wave art film movement and received the
Locarno Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award.
“I spoke to Mrs
Straub at midday; he died at 6am this morning at his house in Rolle,” on Lake
Geneva in western Switzerland, Cinematheque Suisse spokesman Christophe Bolli
told AFP. “He died peacefully.”
Born in 1933 in
Metz in northeastern France, Straub started out as an assistant to some of the
great French filmmakers of the age, including Jean Renoir, Jacques Rivette, and
Robert Bresson.
He was close to New
Wave standard-bearers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
In the 1960s, he
left France for
Germany, directing films in tandem with his then-wife Daniele
Huillet. The couple challenged traditional narrative and aesthetic patterns.
She died in 2006.
Among their
best-known films are “From the Clouds to the Resistance” (1979) and “Sicilia!”
(1999).
He eventually lived
around the corner from Godard, who died in Rolle in September aged 91.
“We were very, very
close to him. He also donated some of his films to us,” Bolli said of Straub.
“We had done a lot of screenings with him and he came many times between 2018
and 2019. Afterwards, his health deteriorated.”
In 2017, he was
awarded Locarno’s Leopard of Honor, putting him in the company of other
recipients including Rivette, Godard, Ennio Morricone, Bernardo Bertolucci,
Paul Verhoeven, Ken Loach, Terry Gilliam, Werner Herzog, and John Landis.
“Thank you
Jean-Marie for your generosity and your sharp outlook on the world, which is
highly topical. We will watch over your legacy and make it shine,” Cinematheque
Suisse director Frederic Maire said.
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