Jean-Marie Straub was born in Metz in 1936. He was friends with François Truffaut, worked as an assistant to Jacques Rivette, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson, among others, and contributed to publications of Cahiers du Cinéma. He developed his oeuvre with his partner Danièle Huillet. Their work explores the potential connections between cinema and other artistic practices, questioning the possible links between cinema and other artistic practices, such as literature, painting and music, in a process of re-reading, reinventing and updating the medium of cinema and the meanings it generates. Deeply influenced by Brecht, Cesare Pavese, Heinrich Böll, Friedrich Hölderlin or Franz Kafka, their films are often adaptations of theatrical or literary works, characterized by a minimalist aesthetic that reduces the means of staging to the strictly necessary in order to devote attention to image above all, to text and to sound-- the raw materials which make up their cinema. The combined minimalist aesthetics with the profound ethical sense rooted in Marxist ideology, makes of their cinema a cinema that, according to Jacques Rancière, is a "direct lyrical force of communism", that is, a cinema that lies between "the intensity of the word and the intensity of communist experience".
