This film portrait presents an extraordinary look into the creative process of filmmaking through a case study of longtime collaborators Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who are carefully observed at work reediting their recent feature Sicilia! as they teach a group of students at the National Studio of Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing. Costa meticulously records the dialectic, argumentative mode the filmmakers use to reach decisions about each cut. In a remarkable sequence, the two filmmakers have a standoff in virtual darkness (Huillet having switched off the Moviola that provides much of the illumination for Costa’s shooting). Equally compelling is the documentation of Straub’s close commentary on techniques from such diverse influences as Chaplin and Eisenstein. This remarkable documentary, an episode from the landmark series “Cinema of our Time,” is a brilliant examination of the art of editing and a meditation on the aesthetic and political implications of film technique.

Hailed by French film critic Serge Daney as “the last great filmmakers of the history of modern cinema,” Straub and Huillet have spent the past four decades creating a unique form of film that has assiduously dispensed with the “dull and boring naturalism” of the commercial medium. Sicilia! finds them in their favorite role as interpreters of a literary work that would never otherwise have reached the screen. In their adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia, a politically charged novel banned by the Fascists in 1942, Straub and Huillet focus on a series of dialogues between Vittorini’s protagonist, an intellectual returning to his native Sicily after an extended absence, and the strangers, fellow train passengers, and former friends and family members he encounters.