[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.A large part of the film is taken up by Rainer Werner Fassbinder,whom we see walking naked, talking to his lover, taking cocaine andinterviewing his mother about her views on the RAF and her life dur-ing the Second World War.This part renders Fassbinder as a decadentwho breaks the law, and both he and his mother as unable to clearlyarticulate their position in relation to the RAF.Moreover, the film ismade according to a formula which prescribes that in order to under-stand one phenomenon, such as terrorism, we have to look at anotherone, occurring in a different place or time, such as Marshal Rommel ssuicide and the Bolshevik Revolution.We also see the police arresting aTurkish man for possessing a gun, although he protests that he wanted Representations of Terrorism 105to use it only to shoot a bird for his lunch.Although the film presentsdifferent opinions about the RAF, the strongest rhetorical power lies inthe contrast of images.The juxtaposition of the formal state funeral ofSchleyer, part of which is a lavish reception, with Ensslin s father search-ing for a place where she, Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe can be buried,and an interview with a couple who out of pity agreed to serve theirfuneral guests, underscores the immense power of the state and politicalelites against the weakness and marginalisation of the ordinary citizens(Hoerschelmann 2001: 91 4).The films about the RAF started to change in the 1990s, in what JulianPreece describes as a second cluster of films about the RAF (Preece 2008).They were more likely to take the side of the state and the victims of theterrorists, as in the documentary Todesspiel (Death Game, 1997), directedby Heinrich Breloer (Elsaesser 1999), or, as in Black Box BRD (2001),directed by Andres Veiel, show propinquity between the terrorists andtheir victims.They were also more likely to draw on the tradition offilm or television genres.Yet, both clusters tended to use a subjectiveapproach, which can be interpreted as a sign of acknowledging thecontentious character of the RAF s deeds and, consequently, the impos-sibility of creating a satisfactory (grand) narrative of its history.The Baader Meinhof Complex reveals some important points of corre-spondence with the second cluster, due to its use of genre conventions,yet, due to its scale and ambition, it is unique in the history of the RAFcinema.As the film producer and co-author of the script Bernd Eichingeradmits, it is made from a detached perspective.He even claims that20 or so years previously he was unable to shoot a film like The BaaderMeinhof Complex because he was too involved in the story to be able topresent it objectively (Eichinger, quoted in Huffman 2009).Of course, ashistorians, especially of the postmodern type, teach us, one should nottake any claims to objectivity at face value. Objective usually meansbeing able to hide one s emotions towards one s subject rather than with-draw a critical judgement.This is also the case with The Baader MeinhofComplex.It is worth adding that the 20 or so years Eichinger mentionspoint both to his political transformation as testified by a differencebetween the films he produced in the 1970s, such as Hitler, and thosefrom the 2000s, such as Downfall (see Chapter 1) and to the changes inthe German film industry and political climate in Europe at large.The film draws on two principal sources.One is a book of the sametitle by Stefan Aust which was used for the script.Although Aust basedit on first-hand knowledge of the characters, his book functions not asa (subjective) memoir but as an objective, even definitive version of the 106 European Cinema and Intertextualityhistory of the Baader-Meinhof Group.This status has as much to dowith the book s content as with its form.It is long, detailed and writtenin a matter-of-fact style, in short sentences, which at first sight seem tohold no personal judgements.However, Aust tends to choose his factsso as to undermine his characters and presents his views as if they werealso objective facts.Take two sentences from the last pages of the book: Although without Grams and Hogerfeld [the RAF leaders] the RAF wasnow hardly able to operate, it took the organisation another five yearsto take final leave of its madness (Aust 2008: 436) and The horrors thathad begun with the springing of Andreas Baader from jail on 14 May1970 had come to an end twenty-eight years later (ibid.: 437).One canthus assume that if Edel and Eichinger planned to be faithful to Aust s original , they would also attempt to juxtapose facts from the RAF sbiography in order to criticise the group, while appearing objective.As I will argue in due course, this indeed happened.The film s mainstructuring device is ironic juxtaposition , whose purpose is bringingtogether two historical facts or features of one person to illuminate theircontradiction and in this way undermine the RAF.The word Complex , which is used both in Aust s book and in Edel sfilm, has two principal meanings.One is a whole made of many dif-ferent parts; using this word thus points to the complexity of the RAF.Secondly, complex means obsession , mania , pertaining both to themembers of the group and to German society at large.Aust s aim was toovercome this complexity and complex: to show what the RAF was reallyabout and in this way cure the German psyche of its fascination withtheir most famous terrorists.Its adaptation has the same objective.The second inspiration for the film was American genre cinema:action and road movies (and, indirectly, Becker s book, who also usedBonnie and Clyde as her models) and American music associated withroad cinema and American counterculture: Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan.Edel s film also draws on what Linda Williams described in 1993 as a new documentary : a genre collapsing fact with fiction (Williams 1993).The Baader Meinhof Complex can be described as an action film in anepic form.Rather than presenting a narrow fragment of the history ofthe RAF, it depicts the whole decade of its greatest activity, beginningin 1967, during a visit of the Shah of Iran and his wife, and finishingwith the execution of Hanns-Martin Schleyer in October 1977.The epicambition of providing a definitive version, a master narrative, is alsoconveyed by the frequent use of bird s-eye-view shots.The American influence is signalled by the choice of the film s direc-tor, Uli Edel, who is one of the most Americanised postwar German Representations of Terrorism 107directors.In his portfolio he has films such as Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989),Body of Evidence (1993) and even an episode of Twin Peaks (1991)
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]