Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008)

July 1, 2019 11:38 AM

A movie about Germany's far left terrorist group, The Red Army Faction (RAF), which organized bombings, robberies, kidnappings and assassinations in the late 1960s and '70s. An amazing german movie about the very dangerous german terrorists.
posted by jouke (5 comments total)

It’s an odd movie — a not-exceptionally long ( ~150 minute) but sprawling docudrama, it’s sloppy edges are both a strength and a weakness. A weakness in that, while the large cast do a lot of acting, the characters, with the exception of Meinhof, don’t really have character arcs, and the film makes no efforts to provide them, so it feels flat as a drama, and it makes watching the film perplexing to eyes trained on conventional drama. This is also the film’s strength — there seems to be a real effort to dramatize without fictionalizing, and the actors rise to that intent. I might have been happier with a film that focused more intently on the inner lives of central characters, but that would have a very different film.

Like the RAF itself, the film is very much a a mirror to the viewer. Those broadly sympathetic to the RAF’s motives will see young people struggling with the frustrations of a conservative state bursting out into exciting action. Those in opposition will see the easy and facile slide into violence increasingly for the sake of violence rather than any clear revolutionary goal. I’ve read the book the film is based on as well as Tom Vague’s Televisionaries, and I think both takeaways have merit — the film builds a palpable sense of frustration but also shows the group never building a particularly coherent plan, focusing on flashy and somewhat random events driven, at least toward the beginning, by Baader’s useless but charismatic ego.

It’s a fascinating and frustrating film about a fascinating and frustrating group.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:19 AM on July 2, 2019 [2 favorites]

I liked this movie a lot. It's especially interesting to watch it in sequence with other movies about the same period/events, like the Carlos miniseries.

Those broadly sympathetic to the RAF’s motives will see young people struggling with the frustrations of a conservative state bursting out into exciting action. Those in opposition will see the easy and facile slide into violence increasingly for the sake of violence rather than any clear revolutionary goal.

I agree, the movie shows both at the same time.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:53 AM on July 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

Reading your comment, Genji&Proust, I can see how the story is sprawling, characters don't have an arc.

Somehow that didn't register for me.
I guess a major reason this movie made such in impression is that it resonates very much with what I remember from that time. Living close to the German border. Reading the graffiti on walls about Baader while going to school.
How we had very violent extreme left terrorists. In Germany and the NL, where I live, left ideology got rather far from the common sense I'd say. It's perplexing to see how extreme the violence was that it turned into. I'd forgotten that.
I'd never realized how close Andread Baader was to being a petty criminal. And how Ulrike Meinhof came out of a eucumenist Lutheran family. The step from that kind of rather progressive milieu to her militantism is on the one hand really unexpected, and on the other hand 'sounds' so true from what I remember from that time.
I remember how the reverberations WWII dominated all notions of good and bad. In a very polarised way.

Anyhow, I could go on and on. I guess it's a relief to see reality told not from an anglo saxon viewpoint for a change.
posted by jouke at 8:04 AM on July 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Tx for the Carlos reference Dip Flash. I'll check that out.
posted by jouke at 8:04 AM on July 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think the reason the characters don’t have arcs is that the film tried its best to depict the real actions of real people — who tend not to have neat fictional arcs. It makes watching the film weird for people trained to watch drama, but I don’t think it’s wrong; just a specific decision by the filmmakers.

Reading about the RAF, I was struck by how millenarian their thinking was; they seemed to undertake missions based on what occurred to them, with the vague belief that enough action would, almost magically, lead to vast changes in society. There didn’t seem to be a lot of throughlines to their revolutionary plans, except, maybe from Meinhof, who was always overshadowed by Baader, who I sort of think was, at heart, a charismatic grifter without a real plan.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:49 AM on July 4, 2019 [2 favorites]