The Third Generation is anything but an accessible film. It's story is relatively simple - a group of rather middle-class young radicals set off bombs, hold up banks and kidnap an industrialist, whilst a police net closes in around them. There is a traitor in their midst, and little do these bumbling terrorists know that the person holding the purse strings for their organisation is the rich industrialist himself, who has begun the film by pontificating how the lack of terrorist activities in Germany makes it difficult for he and his political friends to move Authoritarian measures into place. A topical film then. What is striking about it is Fassbinder's extraordinary approach to both narrative - made up of stark, elliptical scenes veering between polemic, realism and surrealism - and mis-en-scene. Most of the sets are domestic interiors, and these are filmed from such odd angles, and lit with a strange plasticity, so that the environments become as much characters in the film as the human figures. One scene, a long and fairly talky piece in which the cell go over their plans and review their situation, is filmed with such choreographic virtuosity that it takes the breath away - a single long pan around the room catches snatches of dialogue and interaction, as the characters themselves crisscross the screen, rising or sitting as the camera moves onto them, each piece of the conversation picking up as its speakers encounter the screen. It must have taken a great deal of minute rehearsal and a perfectly mathematical mind to carry off this exceptional sequence, which is truly bravura.
The film looks and sounds like no other. Besides the weird visual quality of the interiors, the soundtrack has a constant backing of TV speak, mood music, a strange din which is always competing for the viewer's attention against what is being said by the characters on the screen. This has a two-fold purpose: it both emphasises the way in which these people encounter a world mediated by broadcasters; and also does the Brechtian trick of emphasising the phoniness of the cloak-and-dagger noir/spy thriller situations the film places its characters in. These are emphatically people caught in someone else's plot, or in their own, it's hard to tell.
The Third Generation is scabrous about the bourgeois values of the industrialist and his associates (these values are condemned as the same values the Nazis cherished - hard work, obedience to authority, family life) and about the terrorists, who are bunglers, dreamers, chaotic buffoons whose "war" against the bourgeoisie is merely a carnival arranged by the elite class to promote itself. The terrorists, for all their bravado and antics, are pretty good for nothing, and trapped in a paradigm of male domination of the female, as if being a male chauvinist pig were a radical, anti-bourgeois move. Fassbinder's view of then contemporary Germany was bleak - it was a country being punished for the sins of the fathers "even unto the third generation". I doubt whether, if Fassbinder were alive and turning his vision on our present situation, he would consider that those sins had been expiated yet.
The film looks and sounds like no other. Besides the weird visual quality of the interiors, the soundtrack has a constant backing of TV speak, mood music, a strange din which is always competing for the viewer's attention against what is being said by the characters on the screen. This has a two-fold purpose: it both emphasises the way in which these people encounter a world mediated by broadcasters; and also does the Brechtian trick of emphasising the phoniness of the cloak-and-dagger noir/spy thriller situations the film places its characters in. These are emphatically people caught in someone else's plot, or in their own, it's hard to tell.
The Third Generation is scabrous about the bourgeois values of the industrialist and his associates (these values are condemned as the same values the Nazis cherished - hard work, obedience to authority, family life) and about the terrorists, who are bunglers, dreamers, chaotic buffoons whose "war" against the bourgeoisie is merely a carnival arranged by the elite class to promote itself. The terrorists, for all their bravado and antics, are pretty good for nothing, and trapped in a paradigm of male domination of the female, as if being a male chauvinist pig were a radical, anti-bourgeois move. Fassbinder's view of then contemporary Germany was bleak - it was a country being punished for the sins of the fathers "even unto the third generation". I doubt whether, if Fassbinder were alive and turning his vision on our present situation, he would consider that those sins had been expiated yet.