In July 2009 the young French filmmaker Joachim Gatti was seriously injured by the police during a peaceful demonstration in Montreuil. A flash ball bullet hit him in the face and ruptured one of his eyes.
In his two-minute film, Jean-Marie Straub presents a photograph of the young man – before the incident, unharmed – and accompanies it with the narration of a text by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Formerly, this was called “interventionist cinema”, a lively testimony that has gone out of fashion – just like so many other things. —Viennale
Filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, his wife and co-director, have become leading figures in New German cinema. Their films are not for passive viewers seeking light entertainment; films such as Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (1965) are intellectually demanding, and yet are among the most haunting films of German cinema. Prior to teaming up with Huillet, the French born Straub worked as an assistant to French directors such as Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson. He met and teamed up with Huillet in 1954. To avoid the draft, he fled to Munich, Germany in 1958 where they got involved with radical theater groups. By the early sixties he and his wife had become a prominent directors. They made their debut with the short Machorka-Muff in 1963. In 1968, their long-time friend Fassbinder appeared in The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp. Straub and Huillet’s most famous film is Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). By the late ’60s… read more
"I'm sure the irony is not lost on our readers that this new issue of the journal, substantially devoted to two filmmakers, Eric Rohmer
I. FESTIVALS AND IDEOLOGY "I cannot tell a lie," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the catalogue introduction to the retrospective