A rare opportunity to see two short works by French-born, Italian-based mavericks Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who made rigorous and intellectually stimulating films between 1963 and 2006. Tonight we will be showing their first film Machorka Muff (1963), and Not Reconciled (1965), which has been described as “maddeningly opaque and fragmented, yet abstractly intriguing and curiously resonant”.

A rare opportunity to see two short works by French-born, Italian-based mavericks Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (photo, left), who made rigorous and intellectually stimulating films between 1963 and 2006.

Tonight we will be showing their first film Machorka Muff (1963, 18 min), and Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht (1965, 55 min, translated to "Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where it Rules", most often referred to as Not Reconciled).

Machorka Muff 

Machorka Muff is an adaptation of a short story from German writer Heinrich Böll, Bonn Diary. A satirical story about the post-war rearmament of West Germany, the film follows the events of four days recorded in diary entries by character Erich von Machorka-Muff, a former major in the Nazi Wehrmacht who is to be rehabilitated and promoted to general. Mostly concentrated on the Tuesday after he arrives in the capital Bonn on Monday night, the story consists of a number of commemorations of milestones for Machorka-Muff.

Not Reconciled

Not Reconciled is based on another novel from Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half Past Nine. It concentrates a vigorous critique of German fascism and militarism, and fragments of German history and domestic life. Not Reconciled follows a family of Cologne architects: the men have repeatedly subordinated their architectural skill to military purposes, at great human cost, and the grandmother, Johanna, commits a "terrorist" act to force a confrontation with this legacy.

Born in France, Straub and Huillet moved to Germany in 1958 and then lived in Rome from 1969. Their work is internationally reknowned for its inventiveness, and in 2006, they won a Leone Speciale (Special Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival for their "innovation in cinematographic languages in the ensemble of their work".

This is a very rare opportunity to see the films of Straub and Huillet on a big screen, do not miss it.

A lot of the information on this page was taken from an excellent book written by Barton Byg on Straub and Huillet, Landscape of Resistance (1995, University of California Press), and the integrality of the book can be read on the internet.