A cool look back at the RAF radicalization

Six years ago I reviewed a long flashy dramatic film by Uli Edel called The Baader Meinhjof Complex. This is something very different, Jean-Gabrial Périot, who was previously known for his well-edited shorts, being a skillful documentarian of the cool-assemblage-of-found-footage school. Périot conveys the rise and fall of the Red Army Faction (RAF)-Baader-Meinhof almost entirely with period news footage, with a few other kinds of clips judiciously thrown in. Amusingly some of the founders of these Seventies German activist, later "terrorist" groups were film students, so we get their own didactic black and white footage, and we can feel them having fun with it. Some of it's memorable, if tasteless, like the shots of a naked young man sitting on the john who wipes himself with a piece of a Che Guevara poster. These youthful cineastes included the provocateur Holger Meins.

The Périot approach suits the present taste for neutral fly-on-the-wall (or in this case fly-in-the-film-library) documentaries, the non-fiction equivalent of the muddling-along Romanian school of film narrative whose cornerstone is The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. He gives us the period in an acid bath, taking no stand. Radicalism came on gradually. Ulrike Meinhof could sit around tables in TV studios with old men in suits and get their polite attention. Quite a contrast to the shrill, even hysterical, tone adopted by German government leaders addressing the public after the provocations had begun.

The way the young German idealists were slowly pushed to violence as seen in Périot's carefully edited version reminded me of what River Phoenix tells his younger brother in Running on Empty about why their parents blew up a weapons research lab: "Because they didn't stop when we asked them politely." Meinhof and the others asked politely. The just weren't heeded. And then they got beaten with big sticks when they demonstrated against the Shah -- and Axel Springer's own footage showed how the police (whom Ulrike Meinhof, we see, was one of the first to call "pigs"), moved in not to protect the demonstrators but to support the Shah's goons. That wasn't nice. It made peaceful demonstrators look like a bunch of patsies.

We can see how postwar Germany was open to democracy and at the same time not quite prepared for it. They didn't like Hitler or the Gestapo (any more, or weren't supposed to), but maybe extremism was all they knew. When Eli Edel's swashbuckling violent re-creations -- like Assayas' juicy, engrossing Carlos seem a little too involving, we want something cooler, more analytical. It's good to let us draw our own conclusions. It's true as Jay Weissberg says in his Variety review of Périot's film, that we can see parallels with today. And indeed why in the furor over fear of ISIS attacks in Europe is there so little mention of the Lufthansa 181 incident, the IRA, and the Red Brigades in Italy, all in the Seventies? Something in between Uli Edel's and Assayas' too-engrossing fantasy identifications and Périot's flat sequences of visual documents is in order, holding the conclusions or the side-taking but providing more overt analysis and drawing of analogies. He might have at least pointed to the strange case of the RAF's lawyer, Horst Mahler. Something incongruously nerdy, in such a hip group, made me look him up, and I discovered that he has now become a member of the extreme right, shifting from socialist to Maoist to of late, a Holocaust denier jailed for giving the Nazi salute. He's his own strange bedfellow.

A German Youth/Une jeunesse allemande, 92 mins., which begins with some French narration but is mostly in German, debuted as a documentary sidebar at Berlin 6 February 2015. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. See schedule.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.