Class Relations

Director: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet

1983 / 126min / DCP

One of the most ravishingly beautiful black-and-white movies of the ’80s, Class Relations is Straub and Huillet’s nightmare-vivid adaptation of Franz Kafka’s incomplete novel Amerika, which follows wide-eyed teenaged German immigrant Karl Rossmann as he arrives in the New World—in fact, the city of Hamburg—to find himself beset by con men and charlatans. “Kafka, for us, is the only major poet of industrial civilization.”—Jean-Marie Straub