The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence H...
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.
虞祎杰 程启蒙 张小帅
谢芳,康泰,于洋,秦怡,于是之,秦文,葛存壮,赵联,张逸生,赵玉嵘,韩焱,乌晨曦,罗锦鳞,孙凤琴,张亮,曹增银,邵华,林东升,史弘,王人美,李雨农,黄菲,赵子岳,李建国,杜德夫
郑佩佩,何莉莉,岳华,丁红,井淼
上官云珠,蓝马,齐衡,吴茵,沈扬,高正
赵丹,上官云珠,孙道临,李天济,黄宗英,魏鹤龄,吴茵,王蓓,李保罗,奇梦石,王露露,田广才,傅伯棠,葛梅强,程漠,邱奂,张立德,何剑飞,苗祝三,石灵
阮玲玉,郑君里