Straub-Huillet’s adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s biting satire Bonn Diary presents the reflections of a reactivated officer who is summon ed to the West German capital by the Ministry of Defense to establish an Academy for Military Memories. Straub considered his film to be an intervention against German rearmament in the Adenauer era: "Machorka-Muff is the story of a rape, the rape of a country on which an army has been imposed, a country which would have been happier without one."　　In "Machorka-Muff," Mr. Straub, employing the cold, somewhat expressionistic but always loquacious approach of his other films, comes closest to underlining the almost subliminal irony of his themes. He briefly outlines, through the performance of Colonel Machorka-Muff, a former Nazi who is reinstated in the Adenauer regime, the unchanging thinking of the Nazi and/or the military mind. As the colonel of the title, Dr. Johannes Eckhardt is properly cold and convincing as the believer in the rights of the soldier. Although it is the shortest and earliest of Mr. Straub's films, it is both the most lucid of his works and the most clearly indicative of his potential as an imaginative filmmaker.

　　81-year-old master, Jean-Marie Straub, once again invents and surprises with his latest film. Kommunisten consists of six parts, five of which have been taken from his earlier works. Straub does not aim to be self-reverential, but instead wants to make different blocks (of text, time, and languages) clash so as to highlight invisible elements of feelings and politics. It is a film about human adventure, from the past century to the one ahead. In this project, all the things that the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet have been based on for the past fifty years, find their most raw and recent form.

　　法国导演情侣组合斯特劳布-于伊耶与1991年将索福克勒斯的希腊悲剧《安提戈涅》搬上银幕，文本上采用了德国浪漫主义诗人荷尔德林的著名翻译，版本上则依照布莱希特40年代的改编，拍摄地点是西西里岛上塞杰斯塔的一座古罗马剧院遗址，拍摄时阳光明媚。影片背后文本的多层厚度赋予了本片以极强的现时性：就在拍摄当年的夏天，美军对伊拉克发起了第一轮进攻。这是一部关于教育公民不服从的作品。

　　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.