Director: Jean-Marie Straub
Screenplay: Jean-Marie Straub and
Danièle Huillet
Based on a novel by Heinrich Böll
Cast: Heinrich Hargesheimer/ Carlheinz
Hargesheimer as Heinrich Fähmel; Martha
Staendner/ Danièle Huillet as Johanna Fähmell; Ulrich Hopmann / Henning
Harmssen as Robert Fähmel; Joachim Weiler as Joseph Fähme; Eva-Maria Bold as Ruth
Fähmel; Hiltraud Wegener as Marianne; Ernst Kutzinski/Ulrich von Thüna as
Schrella
Not Reconciled is a film of significance in the Straub-Huillet filmography in that, on
the surface, is an incredibly difficult movie. Adapting from Heinrich Böll again, who provided the
source for their first creation, short film Machorka-Muff (1963), Not
Reconciled's narrative could spin out an entire two plus hour feature, three
generations of the Fähmel family told with World War I and World War II as
their backdrop, their lasting effect on Germany depicted through this family. Straub-Huillet, forgoing the ordinary,
crush this into fifty three minutes,
a whole plot but so trimmed down to the point
Not Reconciled (full title Not
Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules) is truly a film you
need to see more than once to appreciate. This is a curious thing as, baring
repeat screenings in repertory cinemas, this concept is an idea made more
easily available decades later in physical media and streaming but a) Not Reconciled (like Straub-Huillet's body of work) was
difficult to see once not long ago and b) it's a habit even I am blameable in
not taking advantage of, the chemical disposition of the brain that demands
"new" viewings and idleness a blight of mine. Thankfully, I watched Not Reconciled more than once.
Here is the paradox with the film
- on a first viewing its abstract in how it completely negates the spare time
usually denoted to make sense of the narrative, yet when you get what's
happening on a repeat viewing, it's not abstract or even remotely avant-garde,
just very modernist and precise filmmaking that was (and still is frankly)
ahead of its time from the duo. Yet, again, that innovation is unique if not also
abstract, so it adds confusion and frustration when most in my spot would say, absolutely,
that it's "abstract".
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The plot, once decoded, is very clear if the dynamic duo refuse to do beyond voice over or dialogue to describe certain events, leaving one to picture them in our minds or to use the images provided to built a greater emotional resonance attached to them. There are three generations - the first, the second and the third. The first are Heinrich Fähmel and Johanna Fähmell. Heinrich - is an architect who went on to help create a magnificent cathedral in the midst of his curious working habits including a taste for paprika in his morning breakfast; however his wife Johanna, as a result of personal trauma and hostility to the ongoing mania of World War I, openly starts saying anti-Kaiser sentiments in public causing social embarrassment. Whilst it is Heinrich's own son Robert who will help destroy his father's cathedral in his opposition to the Nazis, it is Johanna as an elderly woman who will take the only direct step in response to the collective trauma by acquiring an old gun at of a greenhouse. The second generation is Robert, the son who became a dissident, a trauma in his youth created due to persecution for his involvement with a religious group fixated on the lamb (and knitting) that led to him becoming a demolition expert against the Nazis, all whilst his history both involves having to smuggled to safety (by being wrapped up in a carpet and smuggled on a boat), and also the lost of a loved one as a result of the Nazis. The final generation is Robert's son Joseph, jaded from following on in his architectural studies, whilst in love with a girl, but traversing the site where the destroyed cathedral is with her, the destroyed environments left to be rebuilt and their scars left for us to glance over.
That's not, in the damndest, an
attempt at an accurate synopsis, Not
Reconciled a very dense and condensed take on Heinrich Böll's novel Billiards
at Half-Past Nine, but I will give Not
Reconciled so much credit that, like the perfect novella, once you figure
out what is exactly going on (even on another viewing) it grows in heft in
terms of its language and the emotional gravitas as you are finally able to
digest it. There's also the fact that, whilst of the older style of European
art cinema in terms of calm pace, a period in betwixt the French New Wave
setting a firework under techniques like editing where there were still calm
and mannered works like this, this film by completely subtlety is still
innovative in forcing the viewing on their toes in ingesting said information. The
director/writers would include even more overtly jarring techniques in other
work, such as Robert Bresson levels
of minimal acting and even having rules (to this day after Huillet's death) for the subtitles to drop out at certain points in
certain films, but it's fascinating how in spite of their legendarily po-faced
seriousness, to the point at a party thrown by the Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci people joked about hiding the booze
the moment the Straub-Huillets
appeared1, they were insanely modern and innovative in these films. This
type of precise and matter-of-fact way in cutting the chaff pointed in its
ideas, on the spectre of two World Wars on Germany, is entirely inspired the
more you think about it.
It's also exceptionally well
made, arguably an underappreciated virtue how a film like this was so carefully
made and, even here, insanely stylish in a subdued formalism, not a paradox if
you consider that, for Not Reconciled
to work, the director/writers would've have had to plan out, adapting from an
already experimental book no less rather than their own original ideas, what to
keep and how to tell it in dialogue and the combination of images. The
layering, to confuse one on the first viewing whether we're now in World War I
and World War II, is subtle but even that would've been a logistical nightmare
to edit together. Especially in lieu of the current day's extreme realism,
post-Dogma 95 which requested directors almost stripping away every piece of
artifice, this film also looks too stylised and carefully put together with
images in mind to NOT be anything by aesthetically styled.
Again, it this truly avant-garde
or, for here, even abstract? It's innovative, definitely. Abstract? Going to
have to be yes, but with complete knowledge that due to the fact it grows in
clarity if you watched it enough, a breeze at fifty three minutes, it's a low
mark on the scale as a penalty. Apt as
one of the scenes is on a sports field near the beginning and, like the title,
Robert tells his life story to a small boy over a personal game of billiards.
Including probably as violent a destroying of a piece of wooden sports
equipment as you could get, it's an act of sudden violence, stamping it and
pushing down until it breaks in twine, that is bookmarked by the end by what Johanna
Fähmell does with the old pistol, ending almost on a comedic note with the
matter-of-fact fallout to it.
Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
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| From http://sensesofcinema.com/assets/uploads/2017/06/ feature-Philippe-Image-1-750x400.jpg |
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1) HERE (Nice to know even high art European film makers can
take the piss out of each other in humour)
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