劈剑

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.。祖母の駄菓子屋を継ぐため京都に引っ越してきた美大生･本天沼久美。だが、空き家だったはずの駄菓子屋には、ハラミ・Ｋ・舞の3人と犬一匹が住み着いていた！　なんと、ハラミたちは魔王を追って、剣と魔法の世界からこちらの世界へ転生してきた勇者達だった！　しかし転生の影響で力を失った彼女たちは無一文で路頭に迷うこととなり、しかもリーダーの姫騎士アーネリアは犬の姿に変わり果てていた。身寄りも常識もない彼女たちを追い出すこともできず、久美はおかしな仲間たちと同居をすることに。元の世界での使命感からも開放され、平和な世界にも馴染み始め、それぞれが自由気ままに暮らしていたが、唯一、犬となったアーネリアだけが元の使命感を抱え心労が続いていた。そんなある日、力を失い小学生となった、元魔王・らんが彼女たちの前に現れ…。。