Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet

Huillet and Straub work as a co-scripting and co-directing team, their equal collaboration so close that it is scarcely meaningful to separate the roles (Huillet has, however, indicated that she tends to be in charge of sound and editing, while Straub does most of the camerawork). Huillet and Straub's work is modernist, oppositional, demanding - and rarely seen outside the film festival circuit. Their films have their roots in European (mostly German) high culture: literature (Brecht, Böll, Kafka) and music (Bach, Schoenberg) and are concerned with an exploration of history. They are politically committed, sometimes explicitly, as in Fortini / Cani (1976), which reworks material about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but more often in the approach to their material. It is a cinema which is, in Maureen Turim's terms, "theoretical, elliptical, innovative, and challenging."