The Third Generation

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1979 / 105min / DCP

Fassbinder’s caustically comic, media white noise-saturated burlesquing of what he saw as a “third generation” of domestic terrorists who, unlike their predecessors of May ’68 and Baader-Meinhof, operated without the ballast of a coherent political program, and so were easily made unwitting pawns by capitalist interests who could use the spurious threat posed by direct action groups to strengthen the security state and spur product sales. Volker Spengler, Udo Kier, Bulle Ogier, Margit Carstensen, and Harry Baer are the bourgeois members of the sleeper cell who gather at one of their number’s apartment to bicker endlessly, play Monopoly, and deal with the occasional overdose, all the while unwitting to the fact that their every move has been choreographed by puppetmaster industrialist Eddie Constantine.

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of Fugitive Days