“Now ranked as a major international director after the huge success of the Academy Award winning The Tin Drum (1979), Volker Schlöndorff represents a quieter, more traditional side of contemporary German cinema which has been running concurrent with the so-called ‘new wave' of Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder, since the 1960s. After working with Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais, he released this astonishingly assured first feature (working with a mainly non-professional cast) in 1966 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