116: Straub, Sight & Sound (with Ben Nash) (Patreon)

Ben Nash returns to the podcast from Colchester England to say farewell to the influential French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who with his wife Danièle Huillet produced several decades worth of formally controlled yet fiercely radical works.

We offer the listener an introduction to the relatively obscure films of Straub-Huillet by concentrating on three of them: their controversial first film Not Reconciled (1965), perhaps their most widely-seen work, The Chronicle of Anna Magdelena Bach (1968) and 1979’s Italian drama From the Clouds to the Resistance.

Ben and I also discuss the results of this decade’s Sight & Sound list of the Top 100 Films of All Time as voted on by filmmakers and critics; like the works of Straub-Huillet these results raise questions about the overall “accessibility” of anti-commercial arthouse cinema in the modern streaming age, and how 'the canon' reflects the changing tastes of a changing audience.

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Trailer for Mubi’s retrospective of the films of Straub-Huillet, 2019

The Sight & Sound poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, 2022 edition