Fearless and defiant, Antigone refuses to let the body of her slain brother Polynices be devoured by wild beasts, and in open defiance of the tyrant Creon’s decree she buries him. As punishment, Creon orders that the rebellious daughter of Oedipus be walled up in a cave and left to starve, so that she cannot stir the people to revolt. Sophocles’ immortal tragedy has passed through many media, from the poet Hölderlin’s German translation of the late eighteenth century to Brecht’s postwar stage adaptation; in 1991, Straub and Huillet filmed Brecht’s version in the ancient open-air theater of Segesta in Sicily.
Jean-Marie Straub (1933–2022) and Danièle Huillet (1936–2006) met in the 1950s. Refusing conscription for the Algerian War, the two moved to Germany, where they made Not Reconciled — adapted from a novel by Heinrich Böll — and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, among other works. After 1969 they settled in Rome and continued to direct films that overturned mainstream modes of cinematic representation, drawing on classic works of art and contemporary texts of resistance by figures such as Franz Kafka, Hölderlin, Corneille, Brecht, and Schoenberg.
