NOT RECONCILED
A film by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
1964, 55 minutes
1964, 55 minutes
No. 146
Narrative
Narrative
Description
“Long live dynamite!” Straub-Huillet attempt to unmoor their audience by denying them the soothing reassurances of conventional storytelling, spatial continuity, or psychological explanation as they hopscotch across the chronologies of Heinrich Böll’s novel, moving freely between the Kaiser autocracy of the 1910s and the Adenauer economic miracle of the 1950s. In doing so, they chart the origins and legacy of Nazism, and the moral demands of obedience and sacrifice within the German bourgeois family.
Festivals
Official Selection, New York Film Festival
Reviews
"For all its difficulty and complexity as an integral narrative, Not Reconciled registers more simply and conventionally than Straub’s other works within its individual sequences, and is perhaps his only film to which the usual concept of mise en scène can comfortably be applied." - Jonathan Rosenbaum
"Straub and Huillet bring the layers of history to life in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric evoke a moral crisis as well as the response — as much in style as in substance — that it demands." - Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"Straub and Huillet bring the layers of history to life in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric evoke a moral crisis as well as the response — as much in style as in substance — that it demands." - Richard Brody, The New Yorker
