The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 19
The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.
主演:莫里斯·孔特,奥克萨纳·奥兰,Jose Conejo Martin,Ski Carr,蔡斯·科尔曼,Alanna De La Rossa,Maria del Rosario,塞巴斯蒂安·卡瓦哈尔,Juan Camilo Castillo,小戴维·M·桑多瓦尔,Jason Gurvitz,卡洛斯·莫瑞诺,德里克·奥坎波,Marcela Benjumea,Robert Steven Brown,Billy Smith,Allen Quindiagan,Nicolas Troya,罗曼·波利安斯基,马里奥·罗恰