Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 63: Mon Mar 4

Not Reconciled (Straub, 1965): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm


This screening is part of the Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet season at BFI Southbank (details here) andwill be introduced by academic and filmmaker Laura Mulvey.

New Yorker review:
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 embodied by their aesthetic austerity. The film, set in Cologne, is a fragmentary adaptation of 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 the music by Bartók that adorns the soundtrack. Only the subtlest of indicators alert viewers to the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop about persecutions under the Third Reich; Robert’s elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militaristic passions of the First World War, during which his wife, Johanna, faced legal trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering a career in architecture; meanwhile, the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife returns home only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet bring the layers of history to life in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric evoke a moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.
Richard Brody


Here (and above) is Brody's video essay on the film.

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