Metrograph

Straub and Huillet’s startlingly original experimental adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s 1959 novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine travels between the 1910s German of the strongman Kaiser and that of the Adenauer-era economic miracle, in the process identifying the seeds of Nazism in the traditional German bourgeois family. With Machorka-Muff, the pair’s first collaboration, based on a short story by Böll, and The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, a condensed, intricately shot version of Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play Pains of Love starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his Munich Action-Theater collaborators Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, and Peer Raben.

The subtitles on this film was overseen and approved by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. The subtitles follow two unorthodox principles: they are as literal as possible and certain sections are left un-translated. This represents a break within the film with the notion that the meaning of a text is in the words and their interpretation alone. Furthermore, the passages without subtitles allow audiences a chance to hear and see the film without reading.