Highly controversial film made during the 2nd Generation of the violent left-wing West German group, Red Army Faction, speculates on what lay behind increased security and domestic terrorism in Germany. The first third of the movie plays as a comedy of the inside shenanigans of how such a group would behave. The movie's tone turns grim and critical when the group playfully kills a low-level banker in a robbery. Especially controversial was the fictional film's showing cooperation between German terrorists and industrialists. Fassbinder premiered the movie at Cannes, 1 month before the real RAF tried to assassinate NATO head Alexander Haig. At a later showing at a German film festival, outraged audience members stormed the projection booth and stopped the film.

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According to what R.W. Fassbinder said in an interview, the first generation of "terrorist" acted out of idealism, paired with a great sensibility and an almost insane despair about their own powerlessness regarding the state as a system and its representatives. The second generation were those who acted out of their understanding and compassion for what the first generation fought; thus, several of them were lawyers who used to defend the "terrorist" of the first generation.

However, around the middle of the 70ies, in Germany, a "third generation" arose, but her motives were neither idealistic nor solidaric, but allegedly legitimated by their actions. Therefore, this hard to understand movie circles around the metaphysical question if actions can be self-legitimating or not, and their political consequences. The montage of Fassbinder's film suggests an almost total loss of coherence, the scenes are connected rather hazardly by abrupt cuts. Moreover, Fassbinder uses one of his favorite media of style: the sound-collage. In "The Third Generation", he combines three and more sound levels and in addition TV-broadcasting, video-registrations and more, so that the omnipresent media have started a life of their own: we understand nothing anymore. Obviously, according to the film director, only when this stage of despair is reached, our actions are self-legitimating, but mostly because all sense is gone.

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By Unknown on 6:21 AM. Filed under Western . Follow any responses to the RSS 2.0. Leave a response