Not Reconciled

Not Reconciled

Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet / 1964 / 55 minutes

“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. New Digital Restoration.

  • "For all its difficulty and complexity as an integral narrative, Not Reconciled registers more simply and conventionally than Straub’s other works."

    — 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
Stills

Where to Watch