First meeting as cinephile students in 1954 Paris, Straub and Huillet would go on to work as husband-and-wife filmmaking collaborators until the latter’s death in 2006, generating a politically and aesthetically provocative body of work made largely outside of official funding bodies, based on extant literary sources—Brecht and Kafka, among others—and suggesting a desire to reinvent the art of motion pictures from scratch. With Straub’s death last year, there would be no new films in the inimitable style that he helped to create, but those that he and Huillet left behind remain monuments of European cinema, simultaneously austere, gorgeous, and finally, totally not reconciled to the dictates of commercial cinema.

Presented in new digital restorations overseen by Jean-Marie Straub, Olivier Boischot, and Barbara Ulrich.

The subtitles on these releases were overseen and approved by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. The subtitles follow two unorthodox principles: they are as literal as possible and certain sections are left un-translated. This represents a break within the film with the notion that the meaning of a text is in the words and their interpretation alone. Furthermore, the passages without subtitles allow audiences a chance to hear and see the film without reading.