Geneva: French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub died peacefully at his home in Switzerland on Sunday, the Swiss National Film Archive announced. He was 89 years old.
Straub was a peer of many greats from the French New Wave art film movement and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Locarno Film Festival.
“I spoke to Mrs Straub in the afternoon; he died at 6:00 this morning at his home in Rolle,” Cinématheque Swiss spokesman Christophe Boley told JEE News.
“He died peacefully.”
Born in Metz in northeastern France in 1933, Straub began working as an assistant to some of the greatest French filmmakers of the era, including Jean Renoir, Jacques Rivette and Robert Bresson.
He was close to the New Wave standards of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
In the 1960s, he left France for Germany, directing films with his then-wife Danielle Hallett.
The couple challenged traditional narrative and aesthetic paradigms. He died in 2006.
Among his most famous films are “From the Clouds to the Resistance” (1979) and “Sicilia!” (1999).
He eventually lived around the corner from Goddard, who died in September at the age of 91 in Rolle.
“We were very close to him. He even donated some of his films to us,” Boley said of Straub.
“We did many screenings with him and he came several times between 2018 and 2019. After that, he became unwell.”
In 2017 he was awarded the Leopard of Honor of Locarno, joining other recipients including Rivette, Godard, Ennio Morricone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Verhoeven, Ken Loach, Terry Gilliam, Werner Herzog and John Landis. are
