| Author | Message | ||
     Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 88.111.142.82 |
Watched this earlier today for a story I'm going to write. Anyone else seen it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Baader_Meinhof_Komplex | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
I have it on DVD, but am yet to watch it. Nor am I going to write a story.  | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.17.252.126 |
Ally, the theme of how a bunch of disgruntled pseudo-intellectual dead-enders can justify turning to cruel and pointless violence against the State (i.e. innocent civilians) is also brilliantly portrayed in Dostoevsky's 'The Devils' which I'm reading at the minute and finding as fresh as the day it was published. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 88.111.142.82 |
It was a quite well balanced view of the whole situation. Well worth watching. And I hate those little faces with tongues sticking out. Fucking stupid they are. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 88.111.142.82 |
I don't agree with what they did but the first few minutes of the film show how it all started with the police going in heavy handed to a peaceful demonstration and breaking skulls. I'll look into it further. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
 I might watch it this week. I've had the DVD on the shelf for months... | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 88.111.142.82 |
'The Filmbewertungsstelle Wiesbaden, Germany's national agency which evaluates movies on their artistic, documentary and historical significance, gave the movie the rating "especially valuable". In their explanatory statement the committee says: "the film tries to do justice to the terrorists as well as to the representatives of the German state by describing both sides with an equally objective distance." The committee asserts: "German history as a big movie production: impressive, authentic, political, tantalizing".' | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
I'm slightly obsessed with films about 1970s european radicals with big sideburns. It's a minor fetish. :-/ Anyone remember that TV show in the 1970s - was it Rock Follies? - where a boy was kidnapped and the urban terrorist kidnappers send his finger through the post to prove they had him? I had nightmares about that for years (and have probably remembered it all wrong). | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 91.110.184.158 |
Very strong film I thought. The same director made Nightfall. The Baader-Meinhof Complex shows both how logical it can appear for a revolutionary party to adopt terrorist methods in order to break the stranglehold of the ruling class on public consciousness, and (as Trotsky had observed decades earlier) how futile that strategy is in the long term since it isolates the terrorist group from the everyday struggles of the millions still living in the world of work. The Baader-Meinhof organisation inspired Fassbinder's brilliant satire The Third Generation, which in turn probably influenced Chris Morris' recent film Four Lions. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 220.138.160.234 |
A classmate of mine had his dad murdered by these thugs in the '70s. Bauhaus wrote a song about it, in fact. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 88.111.142.82 |
I think the film will stay with me for a very long time. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.17.252.126 |
Also when violent methods are adopted by a group they inevitably attract the most extreme elements in society who attach themselves to the CAUSE with the ulterior motive of expressing their sociopathic tendencies with a level of support and pseudo-justification they could never have enjoyed in any other walk of life (other than the police perhaps). I've seen it time and time again in Northern Ireland - revolutionary violence begets nothing but the suffering of the innocent and descent into organised criminality. 'Four Lions' was brilliant but too heartbreaking and disturbing to be properly classed a laugh riot. I left it feeling slightly depressed but in awe of Chris Morris's sheer guts. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 220.138.160.234 |
Sorry, I meant the IRA in my post above. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 88.111.142.82 |
The whole discussion opened out a little more on my facebook page and I think if we are ever to work towards a 'peaceful' society we need to understand more about how and why people become terrorists. Yes...I know about the people who will join any cause to cause trouble but I still have to ask the question if I was on a peaceful demonstration and 'someone' caved my head in how would that change my family's views on 'society.' | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.17.252.126 |
What drives young people to become terrorists is a mixture of impetuous rage at real injustice, either witnessed or experienced (e.g. Bloody Sunday or Black Friday in NI), and emotional manipulation by older extremists who know exactly how to use, and sometimes even instigate, such outrages to their best advantage. Once an individual has stepped over the line to committing violence or murder for a cause there is no going back and self-justification creates a vicious circle where they in turn become the manipulators of the next generation. It's a tragedy that led to 30 years of pointless mass murder on all sides in this poor little statelet and that a tiny body of "never say die" lunatics and criminals bereft of their former cover would still plunge us back into if they could. The reason the Provisional IRA finally wised up and renounced violence in the 1990s was because the spiral of atrocity and counter atrocity had grown so insane and unjustifiable that even their own supporters started to say "enough is enough, this isn't working, lads... time to swallow your fucking pride, put down the arms and talk!!". Revolutionary violence is always wrong and ultimately counter-productive. If we had let the Civil Rights movement have its way in the late 60s, and weathered the storm of fear-driven Loyalist retaliation (which the soldiers originally came in to protect us from), then we would have been saved decades of violence and the loss of thousands of lives. |