The Goethe-Institut London and its partners are presenting 'The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet' (more details here), the first complete UK retrospective of the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, who have crafted one of the most influential and controversial oeuvres in modern cinema. Running from March until June 2019 across several London venues, the season will include all of Straub and Huillet’s long and short films directed from 1962 until Huillet’s death in 2006 as well as the films Straub has directed since. Additional events and workshops will provide an opportunity for in-depth engagement with the filmmakers’ unique aesthetics and political engagement. Viewers can experience the exquisite craftsmanship and sheer beauty of their work, as all films will be presented in digital restorations and, whenever possible, in their original format, on new 35mm prints. Screenings and events will take place at the ICA, BFI Southbank, King’s College London, Goethe-Institut London, Ciné Lumière, Close-Up, and the Whitechapel Gallery. This is the opening night of the Straub/Huillet season and here is the ICA introduction to the evening's films:
In From
Today until Tomorrow (Von Heute auf Morgen)(1997),
Huillet and Straub offer a political reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s
rarely performed one-act twelve-tone comic opera Von Heute
auf Morgen from 1929, the libretto of which was written by
Schoenberg’s wife Gertrud, under the pseudonym ‘Max Blonda’.
This ‘apocalypse on a domestic scale’, as Hanns Eisler described
it, is a critique of modernity and a commentary on the position of
women in the last days of the Weimar Republic under the guise of an
apparently frivolous comedy of marriage. Set
in a bourgeois family home, the film was shot in a studio in
crepuscular 35mm black and white, a style which references the silent
comedies of Ernst Lubitsch or Carl Theodor Dreyer. Huillet and Straub
recorded the film in absolute synchronicity, in direct sound and
mono, with the music performed live by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony
Orchestra, conducted by Michael Gielen. The
screening opens with an alternative take from Straub and Huillet’s
1992 film Sicilia!, based on Elio Vittorini’s 1930s
allegorical anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily.
From Today
Until Tomorrow (Von Heute auf Morgen) is a UK Premiere and
will be screened in its original 35mm format.
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