Cold War-Era Film Thread

I was watching a pretty good BBC documentary on Krautrock, where they talk about the Ammon Duul commune, where members of Baader Meinhof were members, plus Herzog, Fassbinder and Wenders hanging around filming.

What a strange time in Germany.

I saw Baader-Meinhof about a year ago thinking I'd enjoy it but honestly, I thought it was shit. The pacing was bad and it was too melodramatic and meandering.

For a much, much better treatment involving much of the same material, I highly recommend Carlos , a 5.5 hour French production about the life of Carlos the Jackal that was formatted into a miniseries. Among other things it covers his relationship with the Baader Meinhofs and the acting, suspense, character dynamics etc are all much better than in Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex .

The main takeaway you get from Carlos is that he was basically just a bandit. Through decades of self-examination even he seems to realize that the Marxist ideological claptrap was a facade to facilitate his inner need to be an outlaw. By the end he grows tired of all authority-- even his sympathetic Red backers-- perhaps revealing himself if anything to be simply an anarchist in the great hispanic tradition.

I give Carlos a

I went into this movie thinking it would be a romantic action movie about the RAF but I ended up severely disliking the protagonists and couldn't wait for the cops to kill and/or capture them. When I was a teenager I was quite enamored with the Red Army Faction for the way they encapsulated radical chic with stupidly voluntarist terror. I even have a book of photographs by Gudrun Ensslin.

The Red Army Faction, while generally a mix of wide eyed collegiate ideologues and half wit criminal adventurers, sought to uncover the "Nazi bedrock" of postwar German state through their terror campaigns. In other words, they wanted a worthy authoritarian enemy, not the faggy social-democratic malaise that they were used to. This reminds me of a quote from a film whose title I can't immediately recall (it was either a Godard or Fassbinder film) where a character states that, "Capitalism created terrorism so the state would protect it better."

Founding RAF member, Horst Mahler is now a idiosyncratic far rightist who operates this website where he envisions a Fourth Reich and makes comparisons between Rudi Dutschke and Hitler.