An unknown creature has murdered the Creator of Universe and unleashed the ability to produce miracles. This ability is now in the hands of human beings who have driven themselves into destructive envy and the horrible chaos of suddenly becoming Gods themselves.
A Kafka dialogue is read by actors in Straub's own apartment in Paris.
The glory and collapse of the grand Republic of Venice: the reasons are numerous, complex, human and all too human. Are these the same ingredients, the mélange that might determine whether the current Europe will survive? And if so, under what conditions? Jean-Marie Straub poses the question in this film, more austere and concentrated than ever.
In 1994, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet adapted the novel Colette Baudoche – Story of a Young Girl of Metz by Maurice Barrès as a film they titled Lothringren!. In 2010, Jean-Marie Straub returned to the eastern provinces of France, this time to Alsace, to film the second half of a diptych based on Barrès’s work. The text is derived from In the Service of Germany, a book about the mountain of Saint-Odile, which Barrès wrote in 1903. With Joseph Rottner in the principal role, Straub traces the path of a young country doctor as he tours Mont Saint-Odile, following the routes that Barrès himself took to the chateau of Ratsamhausen and around the ruins of the ancient fortification known as the "Pagan Wall,” which are unique in the area. Straub, himself born in Metz, plays the role of a resident of Lorraine whom the young Alsatian engages in conversation.
A young journalist is unhappy with society and contemplates what he can do about it. Symbolizes the political coming of age of the people of Québec.
Master filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub continues his exploration of classic texts with this "collaboration" with the great 16th-century writer of the Essais.
Danny is a young man looking for love, and believes becoming a model is the peak of success. He eventually becomes a stripper and learns how that affects his quest for love.
Brother Marie-Victorin, founder of Montreal’s Botanical Garden, is bored with heaven and decides to return earth to help former agronomist turned beekeeper Albert save Quebec’s flora from a multinational that is poisoning the Earth with chemicals.
Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature.
A fiery and inventive docufiction that portrays two marginal teenagers living in a remote and underserved Canadian village.
A female hustler is chasing after rich men, but becomes repeatedly mixed up with a suave con man and card shark through a series of misadventures before falling in love with him.
After a failed armed attack during which she abandons her companions, Hélène flees into the forest and meets Catherine, a mysterious alter ego, a carnivorous and tempting alter ego. This double will take her to a fantastic valley, where metamorphoses, poisonous powers and great upheavals will soon shake up the order of things. Hélène will have to revisit her choices and the moral, political and human dilemmas that circumscribe them.
