The German New Wave gathers to dissect the nation's mood of breakdown following tensions between the
government and the left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction, which culminated in late 1977 with the death of a
magnate, the kidnapping of a jet and the alleged suicides of three of the movement's leaders. The resulting work is less digested commentary than free-floating meditation, veering from documentary to fiction and from blackly
comic to baldly despairing. Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff and Peter Schubert are
among the contributing directors, writers and actors, though the film's message, layered through many different artists,
remains remarkably consistent -- the supposedly liberal contemporary German authorities, in light of their actions in
the terrorist crisis, have more in common with Third Reich fascism than they care to admit. The most forceful segment
is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's opening sketch, "playing" himself reacting to the news -- fucking up his relationship with
his lover, doing blow, getting paranoid and throwing up in toilets. This remarkable segment crystallizes the notion
that revealing one's political opinions is no less confessional than revealing one's own naked body, and Fassbinder is
fearless about letting a national crisis bleed in and out of the personal (including exposing his own authoritarian streak,
as he bullies his mom into yearning for old authoritarian rulers). Other highlights: jailed RAF co-founder Horst Mahler
linking terrorists and revolutionaries within the common ground of moral indignation; a spoof of the elusiveness of the
political film in a student group's ardent mock-Eisenstein manifesto; a committee of suits tearing apart a production of
Antigone for subversive context. Bookending the arguments are the constrasting funerals, the industrialist's (solemnly
televised, reverently attended) and the three prisoners' (dumped into the ground, surrounded by fist-raised-in-solidarity
youngsters). The power of the material seesaws, though the impulse to open up discussion and raise consciousness
is valiant, infusing the bleakness of its final images -- violent police interventions, a woman and a little girl walking
down the road -- with a hint of battered hope. Can you imagine an American equivalent following 9/11?
--- Fernando F. Croce
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