LOTHRINGEN!

A film by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
1994, 21 minutes
No. 128
Narrative


LOTHRINGEN!
$75.00
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ONLY FOR 35MM RENTAL.

Description
Straub, who was born in Metz, Lorraine, in 1933, once observed, “I like the Alsatians — they are the only French who have as much irony as Corneille.”

In this film, which conjures “a conspiratorial atmosphere of fear and hatred,” Straub and Huillet draw upon a pair of novels by Maurice Barrès, a celebrated Alsatian author, extreme nationalist, crude anti-Semite, and ardent anti-Dreyfusard, to tell tales of perfidy, humiliation, and resistance during the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine between 1870 and 1918.

Festivals
Official Selection, New York Film Festival

Reviews
"This short film, from 1994, has a vast historical purview and painful personal import. Filming the costumed performer enacting the nineteenth-century story on location in current-day Metz, Straub and Huillet make the modern cityscape and countryside resound silently with the bloody clashes of the past." - Richard Brody, The New Yorker