KLASSENVERHäLTNISSE

With \"Class Relations\", the Straubs radically turn all previous films based on works by Kafka upside down - or rather bring them down to earth with a bump. Although set in some kind of no man's land, at some indefinable time, the things happening to the young Karl Rossmann are very specific ones. \"Well, that's the way it is\", we learn at some stage in the film, and \"there isn't always any choice in the matter\". Kafka drifts between the worlds of Stroheim and Chaplin in this film, which ranks among one of the Straubs' best. According to Straub, they tried to walk like Chaplin, taking one step into the fiction and the other into the documentary genre. So that one makes the most beautiful leap, as can be seen in \"Class Relations\".