I love her work with all my love: she was a tender woman and a strong artist: poor Jean-Marie...
The world, this horrible world, has lost someone who loved its colours, its air, its earth and its sky: someone who filmed the world as a landscape of resistance.
Au revoir, Danièle...
This is Danièle and Jean-Marie last film, it's inspired by the last five Cesare Pavese's "Dialoghi con Leucò": it won the golden lion at Venice 2006: it's in italian without sub, if you don't know the language just pay attention to the rythm of the words, to the light, to the wind, to the colours. A masterpiece!
QUEI LORO INCONTRI (2006) 68'
[DivX ita)QUEI LORO INCONTRI di Jean Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet20060911-005758.mpg 
“A new film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Quei loro incontri [Those Encounters of Theirs], had its world premiere a few days ago in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The movie's dialogue consists of the last five dialogues of Cesare Pavese's Dialoghi con Leucò [Dialogues with Leucò]. And the jury (headed by Catherine Deneuve) had determined to give a special Lion to the Straubs "for invention of cinematic language in the ensemble of their work." The Straubs, however, did not show up for their film or ceremony. Instead they sent a number of their actors who left Pisa at 4 a.m. to be in Venice on time for the film's press conference, where Festival director Marco Müller announced Danièle was ill and that Jean-Marie had sent a statement, which Giovanna Daddi, one of the actors, read:
Three Messages
by Jean-Marie Straub [translation by Tag Gallagher]
First Message:
It's come too soon for our death — too late for our life.
Anyway, I thank Marco Müller for his courage. But what do I expect from it? Nothing. Nothing at all? Yes, a small revenge. A revenge "against the intrigues of the court," as is said in The Golden Coach. Against so many ruffians.
Why Pavese? Because he wrote: "Communist doesn't mean just wanting to be. We're too ignorant in this country. We need communists who aren't ignorant, who don't spoil the name." Or again: "If once it was enough to have a bonfire to make it rain, or to burn a vagabond on one to save a harvest, how many owners' houses need to be burnt down, how many owners killed in the streets and squares, before the world turns just and we have our words to say?"
Pavese has the bastard say: "The other day I passed by the Mora. The pine tree by the gate's not there anymore." Replies Nuto: "The bookkeeper had it cut down — Nicoletto, that ignorant man. He had it cut down because the tramps would stop in its shade and beg, you understand..."
Again Nuto, elsewhere: "Given the life he leads, I can't call him a poor fool, as if it would do any good... First, the government should burn up all the money and the people who defend it."
Best wishes.
Second Message:
I have been:
1. At the Venice Festival (as journalist) in 1954, I chose to write on three films: Sanshô dayû — El Río y la muerte — Rear Window. No prizes!
2. At the Festival (short films) in 1953 with my first film Machorka-Muff ('62): no prize.
3. At the Festival in '66 with Nichtversöhnt (Not Reconciled, 1965). Projection paid for by Godard!
4. At the Festival with Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach!
5. At Venice for retrospective in 1975 (wanted by Gambetti) of all our films up to Moses and Aron (included), 1974.
At the Festival of Cinematographic Art with Quei loro incontri for A Roaring Lion.
Third Message:
Besides I wouldn't be able to be festive in a festival where there are so many public and private police looking for a terrorist — I am the terrorist, and I tell you, paraphrasing Franco Fortini: so long as there's American imperialistic capitalism, there'll never be enough terrorists in the world.
