In 1968, they also made a short film starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his theatre troupe called The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp.
Increasingly, they began splitting their time between West Germany and Italy, as well as frequently collaborating with French and British producers.
[6] All of the films of Straub and Huillet are based on other works: novels, operas, plays, and less conventional source materials, such as political writings.
Their sources include writings by Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Elio Vittorini and Bertolt Brecht; two operas by Arnold Schoenberg; letters written by Friedrich Engels, Wassily Kandinsky, and J.S.
Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas wrote about Machorka-Muff: “One should read Böll's book because it has changed through Straub's film.
If the choice of subjects - German post-war themes such as the continuity of fascist-nationalist thought patterns, broken biographies, rearmament - and a certain brittleness in the acting made the first two films typical productions of the time at first glance, the alienating, low-modulation language of the actors, alongside the non-chronological editing technique in Not Reconciled and the unconventional handling of the literary templates by Heinrich Böll, also instilled among colleagues an incomprehension and rejection.
The third film, Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), was made possible by an unprecedented "crowd funding", which was supported by Alexander Kluge, Heinrich Böll, Enno Patalas and the influential magazine Filmkritik.
The style of all Straub and Huillet's films is that they always play with political commitment in different ways ("toute révolution est un coup de dés" - based on Mallarmé's poem about the nature of chance), even in an opera film based on biblical motifs, such as Moses and Aron, whom they dedicated to Holger Meins.
Aesthetically, they were particularly oriented towards the dramaturgical ideas of Bertolt Brecht, for example by saying that the actor should not play his role in an illusionistic way, but that he should identify his activity as what it is: quoting.
But Straub sees himself as a traditionalist and has often expressed his affinity for classic filmmakers such as Kenji Mizoguchi and John Ford.
Due to his more extroverted nature, Jean-Marie Straub served as the public face of the couple: this has contributed to the widespread assumption that Huillet's role in their filmmaking process was secondary.
Huillet and Straub often paid tribute to friends and colleagues, such as the filmmakers Peter Nestler, Frans van de Staak, Holger Meins and Jean-Luc Godard or their long-time cameraman Renato Berta.
Defenders of the Straub-Huillet's cinema point out that Straub's private, polemical statements should not influence the appreciation of the cinematic work.
The retrospectives were preceded by the successful efforts of BELVA-Film (Jean-Marie Straub, Barbara Ulrich) to restore and digitize their entire work.