Haven't seen "Not reconciled" but your review makes it seem very interesting to me. Had forgotten that some of the controversy concerned Heinrich Böll's novel. A friend of mine is a huge fan of Böll - maybe I can point him to the movie :-)
What I wanted to say with my statement that their aim was not to achieve maximum "realism" with the film is a bit difficult to explain (my native tongue is also not english, if that serves as an excuse)...
Of course they tried to make everything look and sound as accurately as possible (including music costumes, architecture, as you already pointed out in your review), BUT the film has a lot of stylization to it. The constant moving "in" and "out" of the camera from a fixed point of view (like in "Barry Lyndon") the deliberate choice of long uncut sequences featuring usually only music and no dialogue, and the very particular choice of scenes and moments from the life of Bach and his wife.
While the couple is sometimes "realist" with what they are doing, how they do it, their style (and the movies as a whole), can imo not be described as realist at all.
But other films confirm this impression even more: various adaptations of plays, or the deliberate contrast of fiction and reality in "Class Relations" are an example.
I would even go so far as to say that Straub probably wouldn't use the term "realism" in the usual way, as his realism concerns something deeper that always includes more than "just" scientific reality.
That's why all of their films have a very spiritual "feeling" for me.
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