Video & On Demand - Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Sicilia!, Une Visite au Louvre

These three films cover some of the wide range of the career of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, with titles from 1967 to 2003, and in three languages - German, Italian and French. Sicilia! and Une Visite au Louvre are available for the first time on DVD with English subtitles, and Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach was available through New Yorker Films but their DVD has been unavailable for some time.

Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, which covers the years of Bach’s life from his marriage to Anna Magdalena to his death in 1748, ‘is at once a love story, a documentary, a socio-political statement, and a film of the music of Bach’ (Richard Roud): ‘The point of departure for our Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach was the idea of a film in which music would be used – not as accompaniment, nor as commentary – but as raw material... We also wanted to film a love story like no other: a woman talking about her husband who she loved unto his death. That’s the story: no biography can be made without an external point of view, and here it is the consciousness of Anna Magdalena Bach’ Jean-Marie Straub

Sicilia! is based on Elio Vittorini’s seminal 1938-1939 anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, banned by the Fascists in 1942, Sicilia! is a four part film which follows Silvestro, an emigrant who is returning home after years spent in America. His conversations, with his mother, on the train, or with a knife-grinder, supply some of the most intense and memorable moments in contemporary cinema.

In Une Visite au Louvre the camera shows us some of the masterpieces held in the Louvre. Julie Koltaï speaks the comments made about the paintings by Cézanne which were put into writing by the poet Joachim Gasquet. Une Visite au Louvre allows us to appreciate, through their regard and understanding of art, the rigorous filmmaking of Straub and Huillet. Read the beginning or the end of the text from Une Visite au Louvre annotated by Danièle Huillet. 


Read an essay by Richard Morris on the films of Straub and Huillet, and a 'Transcript to Straub & Huillet's A Visit to the Louvre' by Sally Shafto in Senses of Cinema

Jean-Marie Straub was born in 1933 in Metz, France and grew up speaking French and German during the German occupation. He studied in Strasbourg and Nancy and worked in Paris with, among others, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Alexandre Astruc and Robert Bresson before meeting and teaming up with his wife Danièle Huillet. In 1958, they moved to Germany where his film Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht, 1965) caused a great scandal at that year's Berlinale. Straub and Huillet since then become prominent directors with such films as Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), Othon (1969), History Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht, 1973),Moses and Aaron (1974), Class Relations(Klassenverhältnisse, 1984), From Today Until Tomorrow (Von heute auf morgen, 1997), and Sicilia! (1999).

Read the beginning or the end of the text from Une Visite au Louvre annotated by Danièle Huillet.

Read the 'Transcript to Straub & Huillet's A Visit to the Louvre' by Sally Shafto in Senses of Cinema, and an essay by Richard Morris on the films of Straub and Huillet