Biography
Danièle Huillet, born May 1, 1936, lived in Paris after finishing school where she prepared for studying at Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC) when she met her later husband Jean-Marie Straub in 1954. This liaison also constituted a close professional connection.
In 1958, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet went to Germany and made their first appearance in 1962 with their joint short film "Machorka-Muff", a rejection of the remilitarisation of West Germany.
Already with this film, they met with lack of comprehension from audiences and critics alike. Furthermore, the film was not accepted by the admission committee of IV. Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Their joint feature film "Nicht versöhnt..." ("Not Reconciled"), filmed in 1964/65 and based on Heinrich Böll’s novel "Billard um halbzehn", provoked a scandal when it premiered at the 1965 Berlinale. The sparse, political films, Huillet and Straub finished during the following years, were also rejected by the broad public. Quarrels with funders and financial backers, subsidy boards, and movie assessment agencies, also occured on a regular basis.
Thus, Straub and Huillet lost the subsidy for their next work, "Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach" ("The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach"). Nevertheless, the pair finished the film in 1967. This film exhibited for the first time the complex dramatic composition of the film"s music that would also distinguish their later films. However, the film again did not catch on with movie goers but won the award of "Best film" at the London international film festival in that year. At the end of the 1960s, the couple moved to Italy where they finished their first color film "Othon" ("Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn", 1969), based on a drama by Corneille.
During the following years, Straub/Huillet time and again dealt further with the screen adaptation of literary sources: In 1972, they finished "Geschichtsunterricht" ("History Lessons") based on a novel fragment by Bertolt Brecht, and in 1983, they made "Klassenverhältnisse" ("Class Relations"), based on Kafka"s "Amerika-Fragment", during a scholarship in Hamburg. In 1993, the couple applied themselves to an opera by Schönberg in "Von heute auf morgen" ("From Today Until Tomorrow").
Until her death on October 9, 2006, in Cholet, France, Danièle Huillet lived with Jean-Marie Straub alternately in Paris, Rome, and Hamburg.