Un conte de Michel de Montaigne

Beginning with the legitimacy or otherwise of fearing death, Montaigne shifts to the question of the interpretation of near-death experiences, and from there to the question of the virtue or vanity of taking one's own experience as an object of reflection, and thus to the question of the virtuousness or vanity of speaking about oneself. The filmmaker depicts these questions by means of alternating between images of a statue of Montaigne, of the reader of Montaigne's text, and of a black screen.

On mortality and experience. Straub uses Montaigne's story of his near fatal horseback injury to craft another reflection on impermenance. Although it doesn't scale the heights of Quei loro incontri, it is nonetheless an exceptionally crafted short that deftly cuts between Ulrich and a statue of Montaigne interspersed with moments of total darkness, creating an elegant symmetry out of formal incongruence, resulting in Straub's best film since Huillet's death.