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Wednesday 29.05.19 8:15 pm A last chanced to see Straub and Huillet's Adaptation of Heinrich Böll's 'Billiards at Half Past Nine'. Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules Not Reconciled is based on a novel by Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half Past Nine, that chronicles three generations of a bourgeois German family of architects from the 1910s through the Nazi era to the economic "miracle" of postwar Germany. The filmmakers treat Böll’s narrative as a document, stripping it of any anecdotal or psychological elements. They accumulate evidence and achieve historical concreteness in order to reveal the continuity of the violence of the past in the present and to provide a cinematographic, moral and political reflection on the last fifty years of German life. Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene" In 1929 Schoenberg wrote the music for an imaginary film, subtitling the composition with the words "threatening danger, fear, catastrophe". Straub and Huillet use this as a starting point for their Marxist and anti-imperialist essay about the "intolerable present", as critic Serge Daney has put it. Archival footage of the war and bombings in Vietnam, images of the dead of the Paris Commune and other documents are combined and edited together with a reading of two historical texts. One is a letter written in 1923 by Schoenberg to Wassily Kandinsky about the painter’s complicity with the anti-Semitic policies of the German government; the second is an extract from Bertolt Brecht’s speech to the International Congress in Defence of Culture in 1935, condemning anti-Semitism and denouncing the inextricable link between fascism and the barbarism of capitalism. Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1965, 52 min German with English subtitles Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene" Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1972, 15 min German with English subtitles https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2019/daniele-huillet-and-jean-marie-straub/not-reconciled/ Part of the touring retrospective The Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub The retrospective is organised by the Goethe-Institut London in collaboration with BELVA Film and in partnership with BFI Southbank, the ICA, the Institut Français, Close-Up Film Centre, King’s College London, the German Screen Studies Network, the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Images (BIMI), and the Whitechapel Gallery. With the kind support from the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Londra, the Instituto Camões, BIRMAC (Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture) and the Department of German, King’s College London. With thanks to Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, for their cooperation in bringing the 35mm prints to London. ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the GERMAN-STUDIES list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=GERMAN-STUDIES&A=1