“After working with Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais, Volker Schlöndorff released this astonishingly assured first feature (working with a mainly non-professional cast) to universal critical acclaim. Based on a novel by Robert Musil about one boy’s unwitting involvement in the rituals of sadism and suppression in a turn-of-the-century boarding-school, it is filmed in a stark, almost documentary style fitting to its subject, playing up the allegorical potential of a power game of activity and passivity in a totalitarian little-world. Törless, despite his distance and inactivity, finds himself an accomplice: ‘We are neither good nor bad, but defined solely in action’” (Richard Kwietniowski).