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.。当Paul Pena终于见到Kongar-ol Ondar时,距离他在收音机里听到Kongar-ol Ondar歌声那一刻已经过去了11年。他们来自两个截然不同的文化背景——非裔美国人文化和中亚游牧民族文化,这样的两个人,跨越了漫长的文化距离和时空距离,留下Ginghis Blues这段传奇故事。Paul Pena已经在2005年10月2日因胰腺癌去世。Kongar-ol Ondar目前大多数时间在美国生活和演出。。