channel one

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.。美丽女孩董小禾即将和未婚夫张烁步入婚礼殿堂，在婚礼彩排当天，张烁突然下落不明，随后小禾收到一段视频，视频中张烁被人五花大绑，一个劲儿地对着镜头求救。身穿婚纱泪流满面的小禾深夜驾驶车汽车，飞奔来到一处车行。车行里有她和张烁相识十多年的好友达子，一年前因为某起事件造成了两个男人间的隔阂。达子虽然表现得漠不关心，可是耐不住这个对他来说最重要的女人的请求，于是两人一同踏上解救张烁的征途。 一路上，绑匪不断变换交纳赎金的地址，甚至将地点定在了三个人曾留下过美好回忆的电影院。这一切都让事态变得复杂起来……。