Andreas von Rauch

Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature. (Arnaud Dommerc)

A companion piece to the earlier film ‘The Death of Empedocles’, 'Black Sin' is an adaptation of the third version of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play ‘Der Tod Des Empedokles’.

La obra inacabada del poeta romántico alemán Friedrich Hölderlin "Empedokles" cuenta la historia del filósofo griego y su exilio y muerte arrojándose a un volcán en activo. Huillet y Straub trasladan la acción a la Sicilia rural, colocando a sus actores frente a un entorno exuberante. Filmada casi exclusivamente en planos fijos, la película enfatiza la belleza de los versos de Hölderlin. (FILMAFFINITY)