Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation). 1979. West Germany. Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Harry Baer, Hark Bohm, Margit Carstensen, Bulle Ogier. DCP courtesy Janus Films. In German, English, French; English subtitles. 111 min.
In this blackest of anarchical comedies—a riot of sound and image—a group of impotent bourgeoisie play at being terrorists; Bulle Ogier is the history teacher who secretly reads pornographic potboilers and whose feminist pretentions are exposed as “middle-class bullshit” in the most violent and degrading of ways. When asked in 1978 about the meaning of the film’s title, Fassbinder replied, “It refers to the three generations of terrorism, a theme that unfortunately is very fashionable. The first generation was that of ’68. Idealists who wanted to change the world and told themselves they could do it with words and demonstrations. The second, the Baader-Meinhof group, went from legality to armed struggle and to total criminality. The third is that of today, which simply acts without thinking, which has neither ideology nor politics and which, without knowing it, lets itself be controlled by others like a bunch of marionettes.”