With: Mathieu Carrière (Törless), Marian Seidowsky (Basini), Bernd Tischer (Beineberg), Fred Dietz (Reiting), Lotte Ledl (innkeeper), Jean Laubay (maths teacher), Barbara Steele (Bozena)
Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Producers: Franz Seitz
Production co: Franz Seitz Filmproduktion, NEF
Screenplay: Volker Schlöndorff. Based on the novel by Robert Musil
Photography: Franz Rath
Editor: Claus von Boro
Music: Hans Werner Henze
REVIEWS

Musil’s novel about ‘the fealty of blind obedience,’ set in an Austro-Hungarian military school where the anguished protagonist (Mathieu Carrière) witnesses the systematic abuse of a weak classmate, becomes, under Volker Schlöndorff’s classically restrained direction, a powerful allegory of German authoritarianism.

“As young Törless arrives at school, a new senior pupil shepherded by a fond mamma, he looks a likely candidate for persecution.  As it turns out, another boy – a Jew, as it happens – becomes the victim after being caught stealing; and Törless watches with clinical interest as the hapless boy is driven to despair by fiendish tortures and humiliations.  Only an accidental encounter during the holidays makes Törless realise that this is, after all, happening to a human being; he duly brings it to the attention of the school authorities as a matter of moral obligation, but remains chiefly concerned with justifying his position as an intellectual observer.  Beautifully acted, this bitter little anecdote is all the better in that Schlöndorff, sticking to the disturbing rites and mercurial friendships of the boarding-school world, resists the temptation to dress up its prophetic intimations of Nazism.”

— Tom Milne, Time Out
FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS*
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Wellington
Monday, 9 July, 6:15pm

Palmerston North
Monday, 16 July, 6:00pm

Hamilton
Monday, 23 July, 8:00pm

Auckland
Monday, 27 August, 6:30pm

Timaru
Tuesday, 11 September, 7:00pm

Dunedin
Wednesday, 26 September, 7:30pm

​*Non-members welcome by donation (notes only please)​
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German Cinema selection presented in co-operation with the Goethe Institut