一个耳熟能详的《圣经》故事被改编成了一部电影歌剧，其中似乎蕴含着无尽的可能性。在富有表现力的旋律中，这对兄弟就上帝的真正信息和旨意展开了辩论，这场冲突将他们的追随者引向了混乱和罪恶。影片几乎全部在罗马圆形剧场中进行，剧场的历史赋予了每一个精确的台词和手势，每一个惊人的镜头移动和剪切，都具有一种全面的力量。

影片拍摄于1967年，是至今为止关于伟大的音乐家巴赫最优秀的影片，片名来源于英国作家同名小说，片中引用的对话、信件都取自巴赫生前的真实文件档案。影片几乎汇集了当时音乐演奏界的精英，如哈侬考特、奥古斯特·温钦格等，具有非常高的史料价值。与我们平日看到肖像画上胖而结实的巴赫完全不同，由著名钢琴演奏家和指挥家古斯塔夫·莱昂哈扮演的巴赫显得瘦小文弱。影片问世后得到了当时影评界的激赏。

改编自卡夫卡未完成的长篇小说《美国》，但其关注的并非真实的美国，更像是没有详细年代的关于美国的寓言。卡尔•罗斯曼由于丑闻而接受其舅舅的邀请搬去美国，然而他无法摆脱欧洲大陆旧式习惯，更糟的是，欧洲的阶级结构无法让他通过自己的双手谋生。这一电影版关注资本主义社会创造的残酷而变幻莫测的阶级关系。同时忠于原著而未添加影片的结局。施特劳布夫妇风格的一贯操作与卡夫卡氛围的完美结合：中景固定机位，面无表情的演员，人物肢体和语言刻意僵硬，强调侧面特写，镜头推进及平移刻意突兀。由此我们可以寻求到改编卡夫卡作品的带实验性的可能。

　　一如他曾把卡夫卡小說幾乎「抽象」化，也把巴哈女士日記拍得如此地貼近音樂而非文字，Straub的這種風格，除了執拗地延續像MoulletGarrel這些新浪潮好友的「極簡」手法之外，也算是為自己的「藝術」捍衛的極高體現。 　　看來，我還得回頭去看一下Pedro Costa為「我們時代的電影」系列，為這兩夫妻拍的那一集吧，或許，我才真正能向他們更靠近一些（到底是Costa像他們而找他拍，還是Costa本身確實受到兩夫妻的影響，而得到真髓，所以找來對他們最有研究的創作者來拍呢？這我們就不得而知了）？

　　因为今年是威尼斯电影节70周年华诞，陈可辛与贝托鲁奇、金基德、贾樟柯等全球知名导演，以“重启未来（Future Reload）”为题，拍摄了70部短片，向威尼斯电影节“祝寿”。28日当地时间22时，这70部短片正式播出。

The subject of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles, 1987) is the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (c. 490 BC – 430 BC), who lived in the Greek colony of Agrigentum in Sicily. His theories are mentioned in several of Plato’s dialogues. He maintained that all matter is made up of four irreducible elements: water, earth, air and fire. A mystic and a poet, he is considered to be the founder of classical rhetoric. He is also thought to be the last Greek philosopher to write in verse; two fragments of his works survive: Katharmoi (Purifications) and Peri Phuseôs (On Nature). An advocate of democracy, he came into conflict with his fellow citizens of Agrigentum and, as result, was banished with his young disciple, Pausanius. When he was asked to return, he preferred to commit suicide by throwing himself into the active volcano at Mount Aetna.
The German writer Friedrich Hölderlin wrote two versions of Der Tod des Empedokles in 1798 and 1800, and a final third version in 1820, all three ultimately unfinished. They were conceived as five-act tragedies and all three differ in plot. According to Michael Hamburger, Hölderlin’s English-language translator,
the main reason why Hölderlin finished no version of the play must be that he remained too closely identified with Empedocles, at the very period in his life when his own view of the poet as philosopher, prophet and priest – and as tragic hero – was subject to perpetual crisis and re-examination.
Huillet-Straub’s The Death of Empedocles is based on Hölderlin’s first version (the longest of the three), whereas Black Sin is based on the third version.

The child Ernesto doesn't want to go to school any more because, as he says, all he is taught there is things he doesn't know.

三个序列在通过本斯特劳布短膜连接在一起;第一序列是从汽车妓女做着自己对德国的夜间街道贸易的长期跟踪拍摄;第二个是分阶段的发挥，由斯特劳布削减到10分钟，并在一个单一的取拍摄;最终序列包括詹姆斯和莉莉丝的婚姻，和莉莉丝的后续的执行她的皮条客，由法斯宾德扮演。

"The word 'revolution' to us Frenchmen is not a vague term. We know that Revolution is a rupture, that Revolution is an Absolute. There is no such thing as a moderate revolution, there is no such thing as a planned revolution—as one speaks of a planned economy. The revolution we are announcing will overturn the entire existing order or it will not take place at all. If we believe that the present system is capable of being reformed, that it can, in itself, check the fatal course of its evolution towards Dictatorship—the dictatorship of money, of race, of class, of the Nation—we will certainly refuse to run the risk of an explosion capable of destroying precious things that can only be rebuilt with much time, perseverance, selflessness, and love. But the present system will not change the course of its evolution for the good reason that it is no longer evolving; it is merely reorganizing itself with the view of lasting a little longer, of surviving. Far from professing to resolve its own contradictions, which are, in any case, impossible to resolve, it seems more and more inclined to impose them by force through strict regulation of individual effort that grows more rigid and more particular every day, carried out in the name of a sort of State Socialism, which is the democratic form of Dictatorship. Every day, in fact, brings us another proof that the purely ideological era has long since passed, in New York as well as in Moscow and London. We can see the Imperial English Democracy, the Plutocratic American Democracy and the Marxist Empire of Soviet Dominions walking, if not hand in hand—far from it!—at least pursuing the same goal, that is to say maintaining at all costs and even while appearing to oppose it, the system in which they have acquired wealth and power. For, in the end, Russia has profited no less from the capitalist system than America and England; it has played the role of the Member of Parliament who makes a fortune in Opposition. In short: regimes formerly opposed in ideology are now directly united by Technology. A world dominated by Technology is lost for Liberty."

For Le Genou d'Artemide Jean-Marie Straub once again chose a dialogue by Cesare Pavese. And not just any dialogue, but one that tears open a painful, mystical abyss between love and the one left behind. The film is one single exhilaration and one single rush, a spell and dispersion into nature. It rises from a dark screen and chant to disappear in the woods with the whisper of the wind. It has little to do with what is generally called «cinema». It has one foot in the world beyond.
Nature has ten million times the imagination of the most imaginative of artists. (Jean-Marie Straub)

改编自意大利著名作家诗人凯撒-帕维泽(Cesare Pavese)的神化集《与琉科的对话》，分成五大部分，全部由人与神在山上的对话组成。

一个关于历史的延续与崩溃、压制的力量和和解的恐惧的故事；忠诚、背叛和复仇。在一场勇敢的电影游戏中，海因里希·勃尔的故事《九点半的台球》被分成裂缝、块状、中断和突然转折，推动着一个德国家族的生活故事向前发展，涵盖了许多代人。

从头到尾一群人聊啊聊

Dalla nube alla resistenza》（《从云端到反抗》）（1978 年）改编自切萨雷-帕维斯的两部作品，也属于 "历史课 "和 "太早太晚 "的范畴。它也有两个部分--一个是二十世纪的文本，另一个是关于古代神话的文本，每个部分都有相应的场景。帕维斯的《月亮与篝火》回顾了意大利反法西斯抵抗战士的暴力死亡；《与莱乌斯的对话》是一系列英雄与神灵之间的对话，将神话与历史联系在一起，回到了创造区别的模糊阶段，如动物与人类之间的区别，这是语法和语言本身的基础。这种将政治参与与诸如神话、自然和意义等深邃的思考问题并置的做法，指向荷尔德林电影中的恩培多克勒和安提戈涅的角色。达尼埃尔-惠勒和让-玛丽-斯特劳布的德国电影》，作者 Barton Byg)

France/1976/10'/35mm
Adaptation du poème de Mallarmé « Un coup de dé jamais n'abolira le hasard ».

斯特勞布夫妻將詩人Franco Fortini的長詩《西奈之犬》（Cani del Sinai）透過詩人自己的讀詩與一些空鏡頭結合，希冀將詩意以「不加干涉」的方式呈現，邀觀眾進入詩的空間。
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The film is a sort of presentation of Franco Fortini's book 'I Cani del Sinai'. Fortini, an Italian Jew, reads excerpts from the book about his alienation from Judaism and from the social relations around him, the rise of Fascism in Italy, the anti-Arab attitude of European culture. The images, mostly a series of Italian landscape shots, provide a backdrop that highlights the meaning of the text. （Written by Fabrizio Sabidussi）

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Engels as well as the pioneering nonfiction film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).

"Veteran experimental filmmakers Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub helmed this unusual adaptation of a novel by Elio Vittorini. Focused on the triumphs and failures of a group of laborers and farm hands who pooled their resources to operate an alternative collective farm after the end of World War II, Operai, Contadini features a cast of 12 actors who read aloud from Vittorini's book for the duration of the film, either reciting from memory or using a clearly visible script. Hardly designed to be a crowd pleaser, Operai, Contadini proved to be controversial among the audiences for its showings at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened as part of the Directors' Fortnight series." ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
"The group makes up a primitive community which seeks to erase not only the distress created by the war but also the hardships of life and hunger, and to protect them from violence, misery and fear. Amid the ruins of this post-war period, the characters build and invent a rapport both in their professional and daily lives between themselves, the sexes, generations, diverse social and geographical origins, and antagonistic political camps.
The group maintains a 'register', a kind of diary, as if it were entering the minutes of an inquiry or a trial." -Steve Grayson
"my favorite Straub-Huillet films are Too Early, Too Late and Operai, contadini (2001), both color landscape films with especially acute senses of place as well as of nature in all its harsh beauty." - Jonathan Rosenbaum

It is the discovery of a document recognising the services rendered by two fishermen from Lake Geneva during the Occupation that triggered the investigation undertaken by Swiss author Janine Massard in her novel Gens du lac, published in 2013. Jean-Marie Straub retraces the itinerary of the son, Paulus – just as he and Danièle Huillet had followed that of Jean Bricard just over ten years ago in the last film they made together. Gens du lac does not depart from the rule that sets each Straubfilm as an account of a historical situation in which men have resisted (Daney). Shot aboard a boat and hardly ever leaving the lake’s waters, the film depicts the life of this only son who has found brothers over the course of his fishing – be it his first steps in the trade, the help given to fugitives and deliveries of provisions to the Resistance, or his contribution to the emergence of a new Left in post-war Francophone Switzerland. Finding the seeds of a political act in this unconditional hospitality, Straub gradually dissipates the peaceful impression and conservative spirit of this “friendly, even emollient” landscape, and distinguishes between the silence “recommended during the hostilities” from the silence that subsequently enjoined people not to disturb the political order. While the people of the lake do not guard a frontier, they do, on the other hand, belong to a front. (Antoine Thirion)