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.。五個被關在低度戒備拘留所,獲準短暫回家一週的囚犯,影片瞄準他們五人在回家途中的經歷,或因證件問題而被遣返監獄,或因家庭問題而遭射殺,或遇見警方槍殺政治異見份子,或要經過冰天雪地前去看望失節妻子,導演透過這五個短暫獲釋囚犯的不同經歷,反映出在那個年代的土耳其,坐不坐牢,在實質上並沒有多大差別,囚犯出牢,盼望的是過點短暫的自由常人生活,可是監獄外的世界,隨時都有軍警查問,實施宵禁, 還有軍方對付異見份子的殘暴手段,槍聲連連,原來外面的世界比監獄更凌亂。 此片不單批評政府的壓迫,同時也諷刺當地社會的道德矛盾,例如自己的兄弟要處死當妓女的姐妹,認為有辱家門,但對其他人姐妹賣淫,卻可能欣然接受。 此片以公路電影的形式,反映當地政治和社會的種種問題,也讓觀眾見識土耳其民族的多元化特色,榮獲1982年康城電影節金棕櫚最佳電影奬,實至名歸。。