Anti-conformist French film-maker Jean-Marie Straub died peacefully at his home in Switzerland on Sunday at the age of 89, reports The Guardian.
Straub was a peer of many greats from the French New Wave and received the Locarno film festival’s lifetime achievement award in 2017.
“I spoke to Mrs Straub at midday; he died at 6am this morning at his house in Rolle,” Cinémathèque Suisse spokesman Christophe Bolli told AFP. “He died peacefully.” Rolle is on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, and was also the home town of film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, who died in September.
Born in 1933 in Metz in northeastern France, Straub started out as an assistant to some of the great French film-makers of the age, including Jean Renoir, Jacques Rivette and Robert Bresson. He was close to New Wave standard-bearers François Truffaut and Godard.
In the 1960s, he left France for Germany to avoid conscription in the Algerian war, directing films in tandem with his wife Danièle Huillet, who died in 2006. The couple challenged traditional narrative and aesthetic patterns. Among their best-known films are The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) and Sicilia! (1999).