The Baader Meinhof Complex DVD 2010As the 1960’s fade further from view, and the images of an unquestionably important decade in world history are sanitized to the point of parody, it’s imperative to remember that not everyone can look back with the benefit of rose-colored glasses. With the hippie wigs in mothballs, the music re-packaged again and again to the point of irrelevance, the soaring speeches now sound bites and the recalled memories increasingly dubious, the Time-Life version of ‘The 60’s’ has become a cliché, a tiresome re-hashing of an idealized moment in time daubed in day-glo colors. What people need to remember is how ugly much of the 1960’s were.

The rise of ‘revolutionary’ groups throughout the world, fueled by a potent mix of neo-Marxist rhetoric, resentment of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam and in the Middle East, racial strife, poverty, and a cult of personality which made, for a time, men like Black Panther leader Huey Newton a household name and martyrs like Che Guevara worldwide celebrities are the ghost in the machine of the romanticized 1960’s. In France, the students staged a riot against the government in 1968, exorcised by the sort of skewed worship of Chairman Mao, which Jean-Luc Godard documented in his ‘Dziga Vertov’ movement films. In West Germany, a terrorist group was formed from the shards of other movements, a loosely bound collective tied together by a pair of charismatic leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

In this exceptional film, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2008, we are treated to a decidedly unglamorous examination of what was, between 1968–1974, a group that caused untold chaos towards what it considered a corrupt West German government. Meinhof, a leftist journalist (played without sympathy by Martina Gedeck), had railed against the German support of the world’s oppressive regimes, particularly America, but also Israel and Iran. Baader (a magnetic Moritz Bleibtreu) and his lover, Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) shared her anger, but were also more free-form in their violence, seemingly at times without a true point of view beyond ‘dope, guns & f**king in the street.’ Circumstance eventually brought Meinhof, who was in some ways the equivalent of the ‘limousine liberal’ slumming with the downtrodden, together with Baader‘s wayward outlaws, and they in time directed the group towards bank robberies to finance their efforts, justifying their actions with the words of Guevara and Mao. Meinhof was the intellectual rationalizer, Baader the passionate leader who made words into deeds, often with tragic consequence. It was doomed to fail in the end.

As was the case with the Panthers, an inability to properly formulate what exactly they wanted to accomplish caused the pedestal on which they’d placed themselves to topple over, accentuated by increased police pressure which eventually led to the arrest, or death, of all the group‘s members. If the first half of the film is, in many ways, compellingly streamlined action entertainment, it is in the second half where we see the consequences for their actions. Much like the exceptional Irish film Hunger, wherein revolutionaries are literally starved to death, we see the rotting away of the Baader Meinhof group behind prison walls, as solitary confinement leads to paranoia and suicide.

More telling, as associated members on the outside commit kidnapping and murders unbeknownst to the jailed leadership, we see their will slip away. They could no longer comprehend what it was that they believed in. Theirs was no ‘come to Jesus’ moment; instead, it is ‘What have we wrought?’

The design of the film is outstanding, with the periods evoked naturalistically, and the inclusion of actual news footage helps enormously when the passage of time is necessarily evoked. What is most important, and what seems to be the underlying message of the film, is the lack of any sort of nostalgic glorification of the group’s actions. Much like the oft-maligned Guevara t-shirts, time has diluted the horrific actions the protagonists of the film undertook into a sort of soft-focus moment, no matter their intent. (Guevara helped Cuba replace a dictator with a dictator. Nice work.) There is no need for history to be remembered if it’s only remembered as we wish it to be. – [DVD]

Action/Biography/Crime/Drama/History

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 3/30/10

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