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