Une Visite au Louvre is a companion film to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Cézanne from a decade earlier. The opening title of that later work indicates that it was inspired in 1990 by Dominique Païni, then film programmer at the Louvre. Like Cézanne, Une Visite au Louvre is also based on Joachim Gasquet’s book, Cézanne, specifically on the chapter entitled “Le Louvre,” which recounts Cézanne’s visit to the Louvre, accompanied by the young Gasquet.
As filmmakers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet enjoy deviating from what are considered traditional film lengths and this film has an unusual length of 47 minutes. They are adamant in their wish not to kowtow to the general conventions of the film industry. In this context, it is worth noting that the filmmakers produced four variations for each of their five films on Empedocles. Inspired by J.S. Bach’s musical example, they shot at least four takes of the same subject but of varying lengths. Then, they edited the four different takes into four different versions of the film. One version of The Death of Empedocles is known as the lizard copy, because a reptile of this sort can be espied wandering in one shot. Similarly, for Une Visite au Louvre they did two takes of each shot; originally they distributed the film in its two versions back-to-back.  » read more

Joel Rogers interviewed Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet on two occasions in the fall of 1975, once during the New York Film Festival where they screened MOSES AND AARON, and again when they Passed through New York on the return leg of their month-long tour of the United States. The interview was published in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 12/13, 1976, pp. 61-64  » read more

by Sally Shafto
for senses of cinema

The work of some filmmakers seems regularly nourished and sustained by painting and art history. In the immediate post–war period, there was a flush of films about artists, including several by the young Alain Resnais, in an attempt, so it is thought, to bolster belief in the eternal value of great works of art. Starting with Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in 1975, a new era in cinema-painting relations began as filmmakers increasingly referred to painting – Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion (1982), Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), and Wim Wenders’ The End of Violence (1997), to name a few. The filmmakers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, although long interested in the painter Cézanne, never cited an overriding interest in the cinema-painting dialogue. In a 1987 interview with Jacques Aumont and Anne-Marie Faux, Jean-Marie Straub commented:

Today you can’t read a shooting script without finding things like: ‘I would like a light like in a Vermeer painting,’ But it’s not possible: no filmmaker can make films under these conditions! […] This perpetual reference to painting is frightening. (2)

The French word Straub used for frightening is effrayant. His long-time collaborator, Danièle Huillet, goes even further, calling cinema’s referencing to painting a sign of film’s decadence. (3) Nor are these filmmakers particularly interested in exhibiting in a museum, as Godard, Agnès Varda and Chris Marker have all done, even though the first of their Cézanne films was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay and the second was inspired by Cézanne’s visit to the Louvre. (4) In fact, Jean-Marie Straub has said that he doesn’t even like museums and that he wants to flee after half an hour in one. (5) What then is the source of their interest in Cézanne?

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In an interview with Robert Schoen that was published in a film magazine in Giessen Jean-Marie Straub is explicitely referring to Gilles Deleuze: "Deleuze knows a lot of films by us but only 15 years later he was speaking at a conference in the film school in Paris, when he said: 'Art is resistance against communication'. And he talked only about our films. I think, this is true -- at least as a provocation, if not more... We knew exactly that our films, each of them, was a little war machine against esperanto."

Comment filmer Cézanne? Ou plutot : comment filmer la peinture de Cézanne? Non seulement filmer certaines de ses toiles, mais filmer Cézanne peintre.  » read more

Straub/Huillet gehen von Positivitäten aus. Sie haben einen Text, den es nicht gibt, und sie haben Bilder, die es so nie geben wird. Damit lässt sich arbeiten.

Ein Text von Rembert Hüser, Filmwärts 1987