15.10.2008
Substitute for mass action
This year's London Film Festival, the 52nd, kicked off on October 15 and will run at the National Film Theatre until October 30. As usual, it has some of the past year's best offerings gathered from around the world, including these highlights reviewed by Jim Moody
Baader-Meinhof
First off, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (The Baader Meinhof complex). Getting to grips with the intensity of feeling of the late 1960s to early 1970s among radicalised youth is always problematic these days. Here we get a glimpse of one element of the revolutionary politics around at that time, in the form of the Baader-Meinhof Group, aka Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction). RAF considered itself a communist urban guerrilla group and at its height in the 1970s, polls showed that up to 25% of West Germany’s population sympathised with it to one degree or another.
Uli Edel’s film is based on the seminal book of the same name by Stefan Aust (sub-editor of the leftwing monthly konkret from 1966-69). It starts with the shah of Iran’s visit to West Germany in 1967, during which demonstrators are attacked by Iranian monarchists and the police, and an undercover cop shoots and kills student Benno Ohnesorg. At the time, his murder was denounced in very specific terms at a Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund meeting by Gudrun Ensslin: “This fascist state means to kill us all ... Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz generation, and there’s no arguing with them.”
Certainly it was true that West Germany in the 1960s was a revanchist and virulently anti-communist state, whose bureaucracy included ex-Nazis. Ensslin (played in the film by Johanna Wokalek) and Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) act on her words at the SDS meeting and subsequently diverge from most of the rest of the revolutionary left, deciding on direct, armed action. Their first act in this way is to launch an arson attack on a department store in 1968 in protest against the Vietnam war, additionally bolstered by such ideas as those of critical Marxist student leader Rudi Dutschke, who wrote in Gewalt (Violence): “So long as capitalism exists, violence will not disappear.”
Following a vilification campaign by the Springer press, the near-assassination of Dutschke (Sebastian Blomberg) by fascist Josef Bachmann (Tom Schilling) puts iron in the direct actionists’ souls. So when Baader and Ensslin get sentenced to three years in prison, in 1969 they go on the run after their appeal is rejected.
While underground, Baader meets konkret journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck); she joins Ensslin and others in helping him to escape custody after he is arrested in 1970. Thus is the RAF born. However, Meinhof’s seeming spur-of-the-moment decision to run off with the fugitives is unsatisfactorily explained. No doubt reflecting the lack of theorisation by the RAF (and without the late Meinhof to ask) the filmmakers have been forced to leave this gap in our understanding.
Leading RAF members troop off for military training at a Fatah camp in Jordan, but under Baader’s authoritarian control their indiscipline and disrespect for their hosts means they get kicked out by the Palestinians after two months. Underlying the group’s trouble with Fatah is the claim of Baader and Ensslin that group member Peter Homann (Jan Josef Liefers) is an Israeli spy and they want him shot; revoltingly, this is their method of resolving what is in fact a purely factional dispute.
Returning to West Germany, the RAF carries out bank robberies that net it DM 200,000, but four members are subsequently arrested. Two more bank robberies, in early 1971, result in a further DM 110,000 and the arrest of Astrid Proll (Katherina Wackernagel). Police action steps up, resulting in their shooting Petra Schelm (Alexandra Maria Lara), the first RAF member to die. When Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz) is made president of the federal criminal investigation agency (BKA) and brings in computer technology, among other modern methods, the writing is on the wall for the RAF.
Further attacks continue in 1972, including bombings of a US military facility in Frankfurt/Main, the police HQ in Augsburg, the Munich CID, federal judge Buddenberg’s wife, the Axel Springer publishing house, and the US army’s European HQ. By the end of summer that year, West Germany’s most massive police operation ever, Aktion Wasserschlag, has led to the capture of the RAF’s leaders, including Baader, Holger Meins (Stipe Erceg), Jan-Carl Raspe (Nils Bruno Schmidt), Ensslin, Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl) and Meinhof. More arrests follow, while those imprisoned go on successive hunger strikes; Meins dies in late 1974 during the third hunger strike.
In 1975, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe go on trial in Stammheim; they are eventually sentenced to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, the second generation of the RAF attacks and bloodily occupies the German embassy in Stockholm in the name of the Kommando Holger Meins. Following lengthy periods of solitary confinement and Baader and Ensslin’s haranguing and ostracism, Meinhof hangs herself.
Further generations of RAF urban guerrillas continue to take up arms. But when the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane by four Palestinians in late 1977 fails to produce the release of the convicted RAF leaders, Baader, Ensslin and Raspe kill themselves. Irmgard Möller (Annika Kuhl) survives the suicide bid.
While the revolutionary sentiments that inspired members of the RAF to give even their own lives for the cause of red revolution, their project was foredoomed. They had no inkling that putschist, adventurist action was elitist and anti-democratic in the sense that Marxists need to understand democracy. Much as today’s economistic left holds that strikes can in themselves lead to a revolutionary movement, what the Baader-Meinhof group and the RAF hoped for was that their actions would somehow spark revolution in a similar spontaneous fashion. While large numbers of West Germans may have shown some support for their general stance against the post-war regime, those millions had, as far as Baader et al were concerned, but to follow their unilateral lead and carry out the revolution under their instructions. No ifs, no buts.
The idea that a band of revolutionaries can carry out a putsch or coup d’etat or even kindle the spark for wider involvement was trounced ideologically in the Marxist movement in the 19th century. Indeed, Marx and Engels dealt decisively with it when countering the ideas of Baboeuf, Bakunin and, most importantly, Blanqui.
If you see no other film before new year, see this one. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is at the Odeon West End on October 26 and 28 and on general release from November 14.
Post-velvet revolution
More politics of a quite different kidney pop up in Obcan Havel (Citizen Havel). As documentaries go, this one by Pavel Koutecký and Miroslav Janek gives a critical account of Václav Havel’s time as the first president of the new Czech republic from 1992.
In thrall to conservative - not to say reactionary - forces, Havel is unable to act as the old ‘velvet revolution’ person he wants to be and his supporters expect. Instead, he becomes a glove puppet of aspirations, a pressure release that helps rightwing governments govern. It is a realisation of post-‘official communist’ regime awfulness and a poverty of the soul that suck in even the well-intentioned.
Obcan Havel is at the Tricycle on October 26.
Education . . .
Imagine a Connecticut private boarding school. Antonio Campos’s Afterschool does. Unexceptionally, reclusive student Robert (Ezra Miller) likes such unsavoury websites as NastyCumHoles.com - in fact, almost anything nasty and/or violent. But he is, like the other pampered adolescents at the school, isolated and protected from the world outside, so the images are a two-dimensional mélange, real or not.
Although his roommate deals drugs, there seems nothing really amiss. Until one day, that is, when Robert and Amy (Addison Timlin) are filming after school proper in a corridor - death bursts in grotesquely. The school’s gorgeous sisters, the Talbert twins, dying from rat poison-adulterated narcotics. Nothing or, more importantly, no-one is ever the same again. Robert’s multimedia fixation sure isn’t. And when his humanity protests at the school’s inhumanity and bourgeois respectability, he is the one who is punished.
Afterschool is showing at NFT1 on October 25 and Odeon West End on October 27.
Thumping good times
Pat Holden’s Awaydays will be familiar to those who have read Kevin Sampson’s novel of the same name, upon which this is based. Punk is gone - long live post-punk renaissance. Late 70s ‘casual’ (anything but), Liverpool United, and time to exercise those Adidas - in a pack attack on some lesser football club supporter’s ribs.
Paul Carty (Nicky Bell) wants in, but the pack leader has to be persuaded first. We join him on a journey of excitement that depends on physically damaging others, only to turn on its travellers.
Awaydays is at NFT1 on October 20. On general release March 2009.
Band stand
In 1234, which is also the name of the fictitious featured band, the difficulty of finding ways of expression is treated with a sprinkling of comedy and a dollop of pathos.
This is about band dynamics. What happens to individuals who want to make music together? How does humans’ creativity blossom? Some would even like to give up the day job if the music takes off (who would not in our alienated society?). But there is not much chance of that. Especially when music producers mostly never respond to the demos that Stevie (Ian Bonar) so diligently keeps sending out. Then one day, someone is interested. And Stevie is not so sure what he wants any more.
1234 is fully booked at the LFF.
To be avenged
Sadik Ahmed’s The last Thakur bows to Hollywood westerns. In the middle of nowhere, Bangladesh, a man with a gun, Kala (Tanveer Hassan), walks into town. A feud has pitted the ruthless Chairman (Ahmed Rubel), power-fuelled and hungry for more, against the last remaining Hindu landlord or Thakur (Tariq Anam Khan), who is manically buying up defaulted land to build a temple. Both want Kala and his gun on their side.
But Kala is looking for vengeance, spawn of a local rapist that he is. The question is whether and how he will get the rapist in his sights, and how he can be sure that he has the right one. Brilliantly envisioned, the film tackles high themes of righteous feeling and the hubris of the powerful, the nadir of the fall.
The last Thakur is at NFT1 on October 25 and at Odeon West End on October 28.
London Film Festival: www.bfi.org.uk/lff
