political writings. Their sources include writings by Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Elio Vittorini and Bertolt Brecht; two operas by Arnold Schoenberg; letters written by Friedrich Engels, Wassily Kandinsky, and J.S. Bach; and other films, including Rossellini's Europa '51. Many of their films, such as Klassenverhältnisse, stress the relationship between the original text and the film. Since their first films Machorka-Muff (1962) and Not reconciled (1964) were made in Germany, Huillet and Straub were at the time included in the New German Film, which was loudly announced in the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto. Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas wrote about Machorka-Muff: “One should read Böll's book because it has changed through Straub's film. It seems more naked and more serious because now with the last camera movement of the film it always points away from itself to Germany." If the choice of subjects - German post-war themes such as the continuity of fascist-nationalist thought patterns, broken biographies, rearmament - and a certain brittleness in the acting made the first two films typical productions of the time at first glance, the alienating, low-modulation language of the actors, alongside the non-chronological editing technique in Not Reconciled and the unconventional handling of the literary templates by Heinrich Böll, also instilled among colleagues an incomprehension and rejection. At the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1963 and the Berlin International Film Festival in 1965, the first two films were rejected by the selection juries and only shown in special events. The third film, Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), was made possible by an unprecedented "crowd funding", which was supported by Alexander Kluge, Heinrich Böll, Enno Patalas and the influential magazine Filmkritik. With this film, which had little in common with other German films of its time, Huillet and Straub entered new stylistic and dramaturgical territory. The sensual center of the film, lacking in conventional film plot, is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which is presented here live in front of the camera and partly in original locations - an uncompromising and elaborate appreciation of music in films that Huillet and Straub in the later films Moses and Aron (1974) and From Today to Tomorrow (1996), both based on operas by Arnold Schoenberg. The style of all Straub and Huillet's films is that they always play with political commitment in different ways ("toute révolution est un coup de dés" - based on Mallarmé's poem about the