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.
一、简练，却不熟时局，不懂；二、人物交代有些问题。抽象太远了。可作模糊感欣赏倒也不是不可（但我又相信不是本意）；三、人物之疏离有意思，画面的距离。本质上超现实手段。四、却又不是布列松完全不演，是诡异地半演不演，表情有时刻意出戏，有味；五、这手段在求婚杀人等部分极其动人。六、永远不能说什么不好。只能说，这声音，用得不太好（当然，是与之思想美学体系相比；二流仍是一点份也没有）【3/18修正，错了】。七...
德语的合奏让影像碎片结成晶体。言语的回声，新德国电影的幽魂：《玻璃精灵》《德国，苍白的母亲》，法斯宾德的镜面晶体。
.... maddeningly opaque.
+，想起了一些杜拉斯的电影，用诵读台词去填补/延伸空间，同时感谢眠妹的翻译
自译字幕。影片干净利落，空间+结构的变化清爽自如，对白干脆，余味颇多。
