The Baader Meinhof Complex · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera doesn't watch the anti-Shah demonstration. It's inside it, shoved between shoulders, jostled, when the shot cracks and Benno Ohnesorg drops onto a Berlin pavement. No establishing master to orient us, no reverse angle to compose our verdict. The hand holding the lens is breathing hard. That tremor is the whole film's argument — and most of its problem.

From that proximity Uli Edel and his cinematographer Rainer Klausmann build the next two and a half hours: riots, bank jobs, the department-store firebombing, the Stammheim trial, all strung on Alexander Berner's headlong montage, which sprints from one dated waypoint to the next and barely lets you breathe between them. Critics called the speed a flaw. It is the key to what the film is doing.

Start with Deleuze's most basic unit, the action-image. In classical cinema a person perceives a situation and acts to change it; the act closes the gap; situation becomes action becomes a new situation. The Red Army Faction believed in this circuit with their lives. They saw a global situation — a state they called fascist, the Springer press, the unrepented Nazi past — pressing down, and they answered with the deed meant to transform it. That is the large-form action-image in its purest faith: an encompassing milieu calling forth a decisive act, force meeting counter-force in a clean binomial, militant against state. Their bombs were a grammar of cause and effect. Plant the charge, change the world.

But history is the wrong genre for that faith, and the film knows it. Watch what the form does. It gives the militants the velocity of agents while showing acts that resolve nothing. Each bombing summons not a new society but the next arrest, the next safe house, a second generation taking up the gun. This is what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image, staged here as tragedy rather than theory: people who can no longer act adequately on what they perceive, mistaking acceleration for transformation. Berner's breathless cutting — the thing reviewers distrust — is exactly right. It is the sound of a sensory-motor circuit revving with nowhere to land. The splices keep promising arrival. Nothing arrives.

Underneath the politics runs a darker slope. Moritz Bleibtreu plays Baader as profane, magnetic, almost a rock star — less an ideologue than an appetite, his machismo a symptom of a drive the slogans only dress. Deleuze had a name for this register: the impulse-image, where drives erupt beneath the social surface and a world slides toward its own ruin along a line of slope. The arc here bends that way without quite admitting it — from the kinetic glamour of the early robberies down into the regimented austerity of the prison, the disintegration of Gedeck's Meinhof, the Stammheim deaths. Revolution as entropy. The line goes one direction only, and it ends in a cell.

There is a hard fact at the center that Deleuze put at the heart of all modern political cinema: the people are missing. The RAF's catastrophe is precisely this. They claimed to act for a people who never ratified them. The German public did not rise; it recoiled. The militants were forging the very constituency they insisted they already served — and the film, by refusing to supply the cheering crowd their rhetoric assumed, lets that absence become the loudest thing in the room.

Against all this stands Bruno Ganz's Horst Herold, the police chief, the film's quiet counter-image. While the militants act, he reads. He insists on understanding their logic instead of merely crushing it, and in doing so he becomes the relation-image — Deleuze's knowing third, the figure who holds a chain of deeds together as a meaning the actors inside it cannot see. His scenes are where the film thinks. He has already crossed into the world the RAF can't perceive: one where the act is something to be deciphered, not delivered.

Place it in the discourse and the lineage sharpens. The handheld-reenactment contract descends straight from Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers — terror shot 'from inside' the cell with newsreel grain. The propulsive investigative tempo comes from Costa-Gavras's Z. From Eichinger's own Downfall the film inherits reconstruction-as-argument: marshaled German stars, obsessive period fidelity, a still-raw national wound (Ganz crosses both casts). And it defines itself sharply against the older German answer — the reflective, accusatory distance of Germany in Autumn and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Where they interpreted, Edel reconstructs and pointedly declines to explain.

That refusal is the whole gamble, and it sits on a contract André Bazin named long ago: the recorded world vouches for itself, the camera doesn't lie. But immediacy is not neutrality. The same handheld nearness that says this happened also lends the militants a charged, you-are-there glamour, the camera's vision fusing with theirs — a free-indirect speech of the lens that can read as endorsement. The film's honesty is to leave that charge unresolved. It shows what was done and hands you the weighing.

So here is what it accomplished, and the better eyes to take back to it. The Baader Meinhof Complex is a movement-image film whose true subject is the bankruptcy of the movement-image. Next time, watch the cutting. Every accelerating splice is a bomb that changes nothing, a circuit closing on air. The film races because its people believed the decisive act would finally arrive. It never does. That is not a failure of the film. It is the film.