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.

　　1968 年，在冷战时期的葡萄牙，一名享有特权的自由欧洲电台工程师兴风作浪，格洛里亚德里巴泰霍充斥着间谍、谎言和秘密。

　　

霍莉看似完美的生活的黑暗秘密暴露无遗，一个不受欢迎的入侵者让她的生活永远失控。

二次世界大战期间，拥有“马来之虎”称号的日本南方作战总司令山下奉文曾在东南亚叱咤风云，战时他在当地大肆搜刮钱财。随着日本投降，始终下落不明的“山下黄金”也成为寻宝者趋之若鹜的对象。这一天，某企业总裁的公子哥沃伦带着日本学者理绘（水野美纪 饰）、前英国军人斯坦利（Sam Hazeldine 饰）登陆印尼某小岛。此前他曾从苏门答腊搞到一张地图，地图上的标示令他确信“山下黄金”正藏在这座岛上。虽然有当地雇佣军的保护，可是他们突然遭到一伙不明身份军人的袭击。