Comments on: THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX

By: SSB

SSB — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:21:51 +0000

I loved the film, thought it was absolutely spectacular. I’ve reviewed it at: http://cherwell.org/content/8207.

By: del bhoy

del bhoy — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:42:55 +0000

more like pop-guns and corn. as a teenager during vietnam, paris,angry brigade, german autumn, IRA, PFLP,black panthers, black september,tupamaros,weather underground etc i saw the rotte armee fraktion as a glorious middle class attempt at creating a vanguard of the working class to fight the attempts to remove the person/community/class spirit and idealism which followed the end of the second great capitalist war. leninists and trotskyists might argue it was inappropriate. anarchists might argue it was middle class opportunism. the traditional left opposition can be ignored for their vacillation and class betrayal. but… comrades.. thousands took to the streets in the so-called developed states.. hundreds of thousands died in wars after the second war to end all wars in so-called undeveloped states and continue to do so. the memory of the RAF should be as important, given time and space, as che, ho chi minh, the portugese revolution of 1974, brazil, shining path, lutte ouvriere, RCP,irish republicans,red brigades, japanese red army, palestinians- all have a heroic dimension which refuses to cohabit with the deranged folly of acceptance of a system which dehumanises, brutalises and subjugates the majority of the human race in the interest of a parasitical, malevolent power-class. aust’s book and it’s cinematic interpretation speak volumes about aust, middle-class germans of his sort at that time and their vacillation, about their need to destroy baader, enslinn, raspe etc but to myth-make/qualify/explain meinhof as one of their own- not about the fact that ulrike was murdered in jail as were her comrades-that she disowned their middle-class ‘protests’- that she was fighting for the liberation of humanity from them as much as from capital.John Maclean Kommando

By: Celluloid Liberation Front

Celluloid Liberation Front — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:06:54 +0000

The greatest flaw of a film dealing with terrorism (or shall we use the more appropriate term ‘armed struggle’?) is to do not make the audience understand the sense of what is being narrated. Not to decide which uniform to wear (red or black, good or bad), but to understand the political perspective of he who the film has written, directed and perhaps even produced. In the case of Edel’s film the oscillation between spectacularization of the events and historical pretence (I would not speak of factual reconstruction) constitutes the structural cipher of the whole project. As if there was an implicit commercial desire (panis et circenses) to miraculously please both, RAF sympathizers and law enforcers aficionados, as well as pop-corn eaters waiting for the nipples of Johanna Wokalek and Moritz Bleibtreu’s empty boasts. To be honest, the spectacular aesthetic dimension seems to be the most original and accomplished element of the film, at least in the shoot-outs, where the camera’s dynamics, the stalwartness of the editing and a musical comment never to invasive nor didactic manage to capture the improvised ardency, the rage and feverish excitement of the first generation, the one jailed and massacred by the state, or did they commit synchronized suicide? The guns, the bombs and the breaching of road blocks at the law enforcers’ expenses represent the mutinous gesture – ethically motivated for some and unacceptable for others – of David against Goliah.
But the director hastily reduces the German armed struggle as a cranky answer to police brutality, the government’s intransigent need for order meets the hard up communiques (ideologically spectacular) of Ulrike Meinhof, was that it? No, there was much more than that, it is just that these days we do not seem to care that much about historical accuracy especially when it comes down to terrorism…
The film is also didactically and narratively informed by a BBC documentary directed by Ben Lewis titled “In Love with Terror”. Being ‘informed’ in this case means, not only reproducing entire sequences belonging to the collective imaginarium (the detail of a Baader-Meinhof adhesive on the dashboard of a car is framed as the original black and white picture), also to follow chronologically the mentioned facts and reproduce them as they really occurred (the arrest of Badeer’s naked accomplice is identical to the real one). The necessity of a mnemonic mimesis to facilitate the German spectator viewing experience, which present numerous narrative clarifications, or mere stylistic laziness?
The film does not answer one very important question: what kind of persons were these terrorists? Tobias Kniebe, from the daily newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, notes that: “Some say that the terrorists were turned into heroes in a perverse way, others say that they were reduced to mere criminals without any morality. In fact, this political and ideological ambiguity of the film is astutely intended, and it is a strategy taken from Hollywood blockbusters”. Sharp observation. Guns and pop-corns. The heroic dimension happily cohabits with the deranged folly of fanaticism.
All in all the film entertains while confusing those who do not know or enraging the few that still care about history and how it ‘really’ unfolded.

By: russilliams_uk

russilliams_uk — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:53:03 +0000

I enjoyed it and thought it worked well. I’ve reviewed it at: http://www.urbanlandfill.co.uk/2008/11/film-the-baader.html

By: Obama byn lyin'

Obama byn lyin' — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:02:06 +0000

Historical accuracy!?

Then why, didn’t they mention the tortures suffered in prisons by all the RAF members; why didn’t they mention the killing of the filmmaker Holger Meins, at the times ‘sold’ to the public as a pitying therapy. Why didn’t they mention the brain cancer paining Ulrike Meinhof and the way they ‘cured’ it: lobotomy. Why?
Since we have the incommensurable luck to live in terrorizing (unless we want to consider De Palma’s ‘Redacted’ as Al-Quaeda’s propaganda) and terrorized democracies we should opt (at least at the movies) for the enlightening practice of doubt leaving the simplistic rhetoric of (dis)order and (in)security to our governments, pardon, the terrorists.