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.

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加斯荷伯（布鲁诺·斯列斯坦 Bruno S. 饰）从小生活在不见天日的地下室里，仅靠稀少的水源和面包维持生命，直到数十年后，早已成年的他才被带离地下室，第一次亲眼看到了外面的大千世界。可是，噩梦并没有结束，他只不过是从一个地狱跌落到了另一个。在人们的眼中，加斯荷伯并非一个有血有肉的人类，只是一个可供研究和玩乐的部件罢了。刚开始，人们对加斯荷伯充满了好奇，并且，这些好奇里包含了某些恶意。渐渐地，对这个无趣而可怜的物体，大家都失去了兴趣，加斯荷伯被送进了马戏团。几经波折之后，被一名学者收留的加斯荷伯终于过上了平静安全的生活，学者教会了他读写，为他打开了了解世界的另一扇大门。没想到，加斯荷伯对于文明和文化有着异常敏锐和深刻的见解，面对他尖锐直白的语言，被戳到痛处的人类愤怒了。