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.

滚滚黑烟突然从德国柏林电视塔冲向蓝天，瞬间电视塔被熊熊烈火包围，坍塌、爆炸随处发生，塔内有近百人受bbb。摩天大厦中燃起熊熊大火，一些人被热浪抛出窗户，被困的人们不堪火烤而跳楼解脱，柏林消防队面对愈演愈烈的大火束手无策。在迅速蔓延的大火面前和救援措施受挫，被困生命面临生死紧急关头，消防队员汤姆决然提出一个大胆的设想：引爆二氧化碳罐，使其充斥整个塔楼以达到灭火的目的。然而，一场突如其来的变故让每个人都面临生死的残忍选择……火场英雄们将如何拯救这一百多位困在大火之中的宾客如何逃出生天呢？