'The Baader Meinhof Complex': Student Unrest
http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1619193/story.jhtml
From Germany, a fiery action film with lots more on its mind.
Aug 21 2009
By Kurt Loder
"The Baader Meinhof Complex" is a smart and explosively powerful
movie about a German student terrorist gang of the 1970s, and the
wave of arson, robbery, kidnappings and murder with which they shook
their country's government in the process triggering exactly the
sort of right-wing repression against which they claimed to be
crusading. The picture was a deserving Oscar nominee earlier this
year for Best Foreign Language Film, and in its weaving-together of
the intricacies of social ferment and the bullet-riddled reality of
what the gang wrought, it's a fascinating achievement.
The Baader Meinhof Group, as the gang was called in the press (they
styled themselves the Red Army Faction, or RAF), was actually led by
Gudren Ensslin (played here by Johanna Wokalek), a blonde parson's
daughter turned steely-willed Marxist revolutionary, along with her
highly charismatic boyfriend, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), a
petty thief and intellectual primitive with a taste for fast cars
(usually stolen) and guns, and a grand vision of himself as a
Brandoesque action-movie hero. Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck, of the
Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others") was popularly portrayed as the
group's other leader, but was essentially a subsidiary propaganda
minister a famous left-wing journalist who found herself drawn into
the group's violent orbit after being confronted with the hypocrisy
of her revolutionary rhetoric in print when measured against her
failure to join in armed action herself.
The picture takes us from Baader and Ensslin's first operation an
arson attack against two Frankfurt department stores through all
the subsequent bank robberies, kidnappings, shootings, bombings and
gun battles, and the group's training in the Middle East with
Palestinian terrorists (who didn't appreciate their casual attitude
toward sex and nudity). In a spectacular section of the film, we see
the capture of the RAF's top leaders in 1972, and their imprisonment
in Stuttgart's specially-fortified Stammheim prison, where, during an
uproarious trial (the dialogue in these scenes is taken from the
trial transcripts), they were all found guilty of various murders and
other depredations and sentenced to life in prison.
Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide in prison, and in 1977, the other
RAF leaders followed suit. (The guns that were found in their cells
had almost certainly been smuggled in to them by their lawyers, who
were fellow radicals.) By this point, the group had developed a large
national youth following, which formed a "second generation" RAF and
carried on the group's murderous legacy for years. These homicidal
successors didn't announce their disbanding until 1998.
Like similar political ideologues of the period in the Weather
Underground in this country, and the Japanese Red Army and the
Italian Red Brigades the Baader Meinhof Group forged early links
with Arab terrorist organizations, and helped fashion a Western
template for urban-guerilla action. Arising out of the worldwide
antiwar protest movement of the late 1960s, the group had justifiable
grievances: They were the children of the Nazi generation, appalled
by what their parents had done during the Hitler period and outraged
by the number of former Nazis who had insinuated themselves back into
positions of social power after the Second World War. But the RAF,
like the other national terror groups, operated under a fundamental
delusion that the proletariat they sought to lead into armed revolt
actually had any interest at all in following them.
"Baader Meinhof" is the most expensive German-language movie ever
made in that country (it cost $20-million), and the outlay is
apparent in the film's production values (parts of it were shot in
Rome and Morocco) and in the top-flight direction by Uli Edel, who
masterfully orchestrated a cast that included more than 120 speaking
parts and more than 6000 extras. The three lead actors are superb,
especially Wokalek, who's both sultry and very scary, and Bleibtreu,
who speaks the international language of movie-star magnetism.
The major force behind the picture, however, was producer Bernd
Eichinger, who also wrote the script, based on a meticulously
researched book by journalist Stefan Aust. Eichinger is a remarkable
figure in the German film industry. He's drawn to quality projects
(like the Oscar-nominated "Downfall"), but he also has an unerring
instinct for popular blockbusters (he's the man behind the "Fantastic
Four" and "Resident Evil" pictures). Here, packing his movie with a
wealth of vivid history while the guns keep blazing and bombs keep
going off, he's realized both ambitions, and scored a direct hit.
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Baader-Meinhof Complex, a New Film Based on True Events
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/regina-weinreich/baader-meinhof-complex-a_b_264194.html
Regina Weinreich
Posted: August 20, 2009
Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent left-wing journalist in '70s Germany
found the revolutionary spirit of the Red Army Faction so appealing,
she abandoned her children to join up with a counterculture much like
the U. S. Weather Underground in its terrorist tactics. Andreas
Baader was one of its leaders along with Gudrun Ensslin and other
young people who protested the policies of their elders during this
volatile period of the Vietnam War when Germany became America's accomplice.
The writer Stefan Aust's riveting Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of
the R.A.F. (Oxford) came out in the mid-'80's and now a film,
directed by Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn)--epic length, Oscar- and
Golden Globe-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film--opens on
Friday. All 150 minutes of it are mesmerizing thanks to the fine work
of the German actors: Martina Gedeck as Ulrike, Moritz Bleibtreu as
Andreas and Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun, with Bruno Ganz as the Head of
the German Police Force who brings them in.
A fast-paced action adventure that takes you from Meinhof's troubled
marriage through the current events of the time, the police taking
action against peaceful protesters through the group's bombings of
key government buildings, bank robberies, their schooling in
terrorism at an Al Fatah camp in Jordan, incarceration, solitary
confinement, trial (dialogue verbatim from actual transcripts), and
suicides. If you've been napping during this summer of economic woes,
this film will wake you up.
What makes the coming of this film in the present moment so
fascinating is that we have all but forgotten the intensity of that
period, the fervor of politics, here protesting the Vietnam war, in
Germany, resisting American imperialism supported by the contrite
German establishment of the post-World War II era. An audience as
interesting as this subject assembled for a private screening last
week, hosted by The Atlantic: Dick Cavett, Bob Jamieson, Morley
Safer, S. I. Newhouse, Lillian Ross, Susan Brownmiller, Alix Kates
Shulman, Dick Wittenborn, Tova Feldshuh, Albert Maysles, Julie
Taymor, among them. But oddly, Brooke Astor's son and his wife,
embroiled in a much-publicized trial for tampering with his mother's
will, sat in the third row. Fortunately those who stayed for the Q&A
with author and Der Spiegel editor, Stefan Aust, interviewed by
Boykin Curry, were more concerned with history than with the
tribulations of the super rich and greedy, however juicy the scandal.
Audience responses to the film were favorable: Several felt that the
film glamorized the revolutionaries who were essentially using acts
of terror to make their points. While it was hard to stay neutral,
the film made efforts to do so. Bernt Eichinger's screenplay, on
which Aust consulted, is careful to illustrate the loss of
revolutionary vision. Pointing out that terrorism is like a religion,
Aust spoke about the dilution of ideals: The second generation wanted
to get the first out of prison, but after the first generation
committed suicide, what did they have to do? They lost their focus, momentum.
As we filed out of the theater, a Harvard student, an intern at the
New York Observer stopped me to ask, Do you think this film is
specific to Germany? My response was an immediate, No. I replied by
recounting heady times in America: the tear gassing, and mace and
weapons used against college students of that time, of how an
American vice president declared war against the young, calling
college students, draft evaders, "Effete snobs." These were the
sentiments reflected in movies like "Easy Rider" and "Joe," that
eventually led to the tragedy of Kent State, of an older generation
so bewildered by the youth rebellion, they used violence as a
knee-jerk response. The more radical factions of Students for a
Democratic Society, the accidental blowing up of a townhouse used as
a bomb factory on West 11 Street, were some of the manifestations of
revolutionary zeal turned violent.
Everyone needs to see this movie to remember a time when feelings
were more aroused by ideologies than buried by the long sleep of
consumer culture. Wrong-headed, extreme in principles and procedures,
terrorism can never be condoned, glorified, or presented as an
option. How do you explain "The Baader Meinhof Complex?" As Aust
said, "They were in love with a myth, the myth of revolution."
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