Germany in Autumn

Exception overlooked masterpiece. This film is a blend of documentary, fictional dramatic vignettes and archival historical footage. On the surface, it involves how intellectuals, media, and other elites reacted to the political terrorism brought about by the Red Army Faction (RAF)in Germany during the late 1970s. It touches also on why the RAF elicited sympathy from sections of society. The film espouses no political or economic philosophy. The gifted directors who collaborated on this word shed light on the workings or society and its institutions without, even subtly, guiding the viewer to conclusions. Fassbinder once commented that, unlike Freud or Marx, he has no solutions and wants his films to compel the viewer to undergo a personal revolution. This view is embodied in this vivid, engrossing, beautiful, and incomparable film.

Deutchland in Herbst is the long-unavailable anthology film consisting of 11 members of the New German Cinema's reactions to the 1977 state of siege in West Germany in the wake of the Red Army Faction's final wave of terror (the kidnapping and murder of industrialist Schleyer, the hijacking of a jet plane to Somalia, subsequently stormed in a shootout by German commandos,the institution of martial law, the mass suicide of the leaders of the Baader Meinhof crew in the supermax prison at Stannheim) is due on DVD next month; while luminaries such as Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlondorff contributed film essays, and there's an abundance of bone-chilling documentary footage on display,
the entire enterprise is overwhelmed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's segment: a mind boggling piece of literal self exposure, an ersatz documentary wherein he gets drunk and coked out on camera, strips naked, abuses his mom and boyfriend Armin (who killed himself shortly thereafter, precipitating In a Year with 13 Moons, which is a sort of sequel to this piece), and listens in shock as his mother reminisces fondly about life under Hitler. All this happens in RWF's flat, while the bad news getting worse concerning incipient martial law and terror blares on the TV in the background. I suspect this seeming reality-TV precursor freak show was tightly scripted, and it stands as one of the most transgressive moments in a very transgressive career -- at a moment where the German intelligensia feared Germany was sliding into fascism via a demented and violent terroristic left wing and an opportunistic right wing erasing civil liberties, RWF used his own body to point the finger at himself, as an authoritarian bully in his personal life, rather than at strawmen in the government or the audience, an act of pretty much unparalleled courage for a filmmaker. After seeing the ghastly mental and physical state RWF exposed to the camera here, RWF's fatal overdose in 1982 came as no surprise -- it actually is a wonder he made it through another four years and more than half a dozen more masterpieces, including the BRD trilogy, 13 Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz. In a weird way, I think the parallel crises in his personal life and in Germany's political landscape galvanized him, and gave him a renewed creative energy and may actually have arrested his self destructive spiral for a time.

The other reviewers here capture the essence of this film Suffice to say, a film made with a sense of urgency by the film makers horrified by the direction of their society, with a simple message "When a things become horrific enough, it doesn't matter who started them, all that matters is that they stop"

So... what's the problem? Its a $20+ DVD, which contains a 4:3 image which is pillarboxed all the way through on a 16:9 TV. Unfortunately, the 4:3 image was a letterboxed version of the original film, so what you end up seeing is a small movie image surround by a black frame. Not good enough.

Perhaps its just my setup, but....

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