Rural Sensualist

To say that I knew Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) and Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) equally well is another way of saying I knew them equally poorly. Yet I know that they wound up dying sixty-odd days apart in the same Swiss village (Rolle), close to where Godard spent much of his childhood and later shot some of his best (Nouvelle Vague, King Lear) as well as his worst (For Ever Mozart) work – an area I’ve never visited. Straub was born in Metz, which I don’t know either – a small city that belonged to Germany before World War I and then for a spell during World War II before reverting to France, giving him a sort of divided nationality like Godard – who, although born in Paris, was Swiss-French, straddling another kind of division.