Class Relations

(Klassenverhältnisse)

Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
West Germany, 1984
featuring

Christian Heinisch, Reinald Schnell, Mario Adorf, Harun Farocki,

Straub-Huillet’s brilliant distillation of Franz Kafka’s incomplete first novel Amerika is perhaps the most authentically German treatment of Kafka ever made. An ecstatic and haunted fever dream of the United States—the place where Kafka longed to disappear, if only in his imagination—Amerika is told from the perspective of a young German immigrant who encounters a strange new world, with its violent lies and quixotic optimism, like a modern-day Parsifal.

Joshua Siegel
MoMA
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Jean-Marie Straub
  • Danièle Huillet
Based On

  • the unfinished novel Amerika by Franz Kafka

Cinematographer
  • William Lubtchansky
Language
  • German
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • 130 mins
Source
  • Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
Preceded By

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on a Film Based on Franz Kafka's Amerika
(Jean-Marie Straub und Daniéle Huillet bei der Arbeit an einem Film nach Franz Kafkas Romanfragment Amerika)

Harun Farocki, West Germany, 1983

Critic/ filmmaker (and former UC Berkeley professor) Harun Farocki, who appears in Straub-Huillet’s Class Relations, shot this eye-opening look at the duo behind the scenes. 

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • German
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 26 mins
source
  • Harun Farocki GbR