Compositions resembling Puritan stocks, locking the un-actors in a Carl Dreyer hammergrip; wooden-faced line-readers, resembling Krupp Armaments executives and their wives, cannonading through dullish, classroom-style monologues; uber-Teutonic pauses for a stagy sip of coffee or stilted stare in the middle distance--staying awake through Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet's brush-clearing work of sixties-film-festival torment resembles the feeling of Hermann Goering falling on your head.

If you've read the book, the film makes pretty much sense. Then again, if you've read the book and didn't have a professor explain it to you, you probably didn't understand it anyway. I know I didn't until we discussed it in class. I can't imagine what you'd make of it if you'd never read the book though. There's a lot of symbolism that isn't really all that clear from the movie, I don't guess. You'd have no idea who anyone was or how they were related or what they were talking about if you hadn't read the book. I guess that's the thing, this movie won't make any sense if you haven't read the book, but I'm not altogether sure what it would add if you had. An interesting curiosity anyway.

"Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules" is a West German black-and-white film from 1965, so this movie already hast its 50th anniversary last year. It is a work by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, a French filmmaking duo that made many films in French and German language together. This one here is among the latter. And like some other of their works, it is not particularly long, only runs for 50 minutes approximately. There are several core messages and plot points in here, but one major aspect of the film (and also the somewhat only memorable to me) is about a father-son relationship. I have seen some works by Huillet and Straub and I must say I was not impressed at all. this film here does not change things for the better. The script and characters seemed uninteresting to me and it was virtually impossible to care for any of the protagonists. Apart from that, the line delivery was occasionally truly amateurish. I do not recommend the watch and 4 stars are actually somewhat generous for this movie. Thumbs down.