简介：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.
简介：Three outcast teenage girls get a new perspective on high-school life when they are mysteriously transformed into boys, in this skillfully crafted tale of sexual confusion with a supernatural twist.
简介：This apocalyptic parable carries within it a clear echo of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. This unforgiving exploration of the Czech mentality tells the tale of a troupe of wandering actors who perform a passion play in some unnamed village. Fear of some unknown danger breaks out in the village, which is cut off from the surrounding world. Stupidity, selfishness and aggressiveness then come to the surface in this society under threat. In the film's key scene, a woman is raped by the self-styled leader. Zdenuk Mahler, who would later work on Forman's examination Mozart Amadeus, worked on the script. The director Evald Schorm (1929-1988) was one of the most original members of the Czech New Wave. During the normalization era, Schorm spent many years unable to direct. His last film, Killing with Kindness (1988) was only made in the twilight years of Communism. During that period when he was unable to direct films, he became an outstanding stage director. He directed groundbreaking productions at the Na zábradlí Theater and Laterna Magika.