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.。大導演胡金銓早年傑作,改編自《警世通言》之〈玉堂春落難逢夫〉。故事講述吏部尚書幼子王金龍(趙雷)與名妓蘇三(樂蒂)真情相愛,無奈床頭金盡,被趕出富春院。其後蘇三被老鴇(紅薇)暗賣予富戶沈燕林(楊志卿)為妾,卻被沈妻皮氏(高寶樹)誣告毒殺親夫,判以死罪。此時金龍已考取功名,官封八府巡按,為救蘇三,決意開堂覆審……本片由「古典美人」樂蒂飾女主角蘇三,配合胡金銓一絲不苟的製作,乃黃梅調片不朽的經典。。