greektzon
10-24-2008, 09:28 PM
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-971259.html
The Baader-Meinhof gang, IRA hunger-strikers, ETA and Che Guevara: terrorists or freedom fighters? At the London Film Festival, you decide. Nick Hasted reports.
When the Twin Towers fell seven years ago, the expectation was that cinema screens would soon be swamped by yet more of the jabbering Arab madmen Hollywood already favoured as villains. Instead, the theme of this year's London Film Festival springs from a series of films which show sympathy for the terrorist, humanising those who commit inhuman acts.
It is the first great wave of 1970s terrorism that is mostly being examined. Downfall writer-producer Bernd Eichinger turns his attention from the Nazis to the violent backlash among their children in The Baader-Meinhof Complex. United Red Army takes us to Japan, and the titular, armed anti-US movement which tortured and killed "backsliders" and trained for rebellion in remote mountains, where the army besieged and killed them in 1972. Bullet in the Head takes a coolly objective look at the 2007 killing of two Spanish Civil Guards, allegedly by the ETA.
Finally, Steve McQueen's Hunger takes us inside the excrement-smeared cells of Bobby Sands and his fellow, fatal IRA hunger strikers.
Hunger's failure to provoke the usual outrage in the UK press at IRA films shows the safely historical nature of most of these tales. But their relevance to our post-September 11 world is implicit.
"Pictures are suddenly being made about this period's terrorism now because we needed time to reflect," Eichinger believes.
"I did The Baader-Meinhof Complex not because the time is right, but because the time is right in me.
It took that long to realise what really happened. It's like Hollywood making Vietnam films in the 1980s.
I met Oliver Stone in 1978, and he had already written Platoon. Later I told him it was a blessing it had taken 10 years."
After the appalled shock at the September 11 carnage, and the outrage in mainland Britain as one splintering of limbs by IRA bombs followed another barely a decade ago, what feels new about these films is the unflinching stare into the human faces who commit such acts.
There have been sympathetic IRA members in British cinema before. But no film has spent quite so long in their world as Hunger.
After 90 minutes inside the cold grey violence of the Maze prison, watching Michael Fassbender's Sands explain the political rationale for willing his body agonisingly to waste away, you find yourself understanding.
"That's what cinema does," says Hunger's co-writer, the playwright Enda Walsh. "We're allowed the time to bond with people we initially think are absolute monsters. With terrorism we only see the terrible violence being wrought.
I want people to feel the extraordinary dysfunction of that period. And hear a man who was incredibly articulate and funny, and was alive.
He was a human being, and he had warmth and attitude and dreams, and a belief. But his belief was a political belief, and his life began to circle around that one tiny belief, and he became willing to die for that, and kill for that. Giving someone a voice is an important thing.
Then we can respond to such men, and who they killed themselves."
The Baader-Meinhof Complex shares Walsh and McQueen's devotion to research, and adds a panoramic sense of the historical moment from which Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof launched their decade-long onslaught against the West German state, ending in hunger strike and suicide in 1977. These terrorists begin as hippie free-lovers fighting what they saw as a fascist German regime.
Like United Red Army, and Marco Bellochi's extraordinary 2003 requiem for Aldo Moro and his Red Army murderers, Good Morning, Night (an Italian trauma revisited in another LFF highlight, Il Divo), there is nostalgia for a lost world of left-wing ideals.
We have been drawn into this titillating company when the first dead banker is tossed like garbage from a car.
"You can be very human and a very big monster at the same time," Eichinger says. "Ulrike Meinhof was a very respected journalist, she had a husband and two kids and was 35. She had very bourgeois taste. And Baader was not without charm.
That's what I wanted to show.
These people were not demons.
They were middle-class with an education.
They're human, and then they did inhuman things.
People who say they are driven by idealism are sometimes the cruellest around.
They think they are entitled to kill, as long as it serves the purpose. They acted like their Nazi parents."
It is the careful fairness of these films that gives awful weight to the moments when ideals are put into bloody action.
During Sands's almost saintly martyrdom, Hunger shows an IRA gunman walk into the old people's home where a warder is visiting his feeble mother and blow his brains out.
Can Walsh find sympathy even for this murderer?
"You see that, and think: what an extraordinarily cold act," he says. "What's his history? What's making him do that?
Those men are aware of and feel all the history, the hardships of Irish people, it's in the DNA.
But some people would think they're bloody animals – terrorists. As soon you put something on screen, you feel you could be glorifying these men. That's why Hunger withholds emotion.
You don't want to make pornography out of a historical disaster."
You can tease a narrative from this year's LFF, starting with Steven Soderbergh's Che, in which Benicio Del Toro's charismatic freedom fighter Che Guevara outwits a superior, US-backed oppressive army and helps liberate Cuba.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex sees Che invoked and deadly force used in the context of central Europe, petering out in a 1977 hunger strike, the year Bobby Sands entered the Maze.
The missing next chapter is a film daring to humanise an al-Qa'ida member while doing justice to their monstrous acts.
Eichinger knows his film has contemporary relevance. "There was a certain chord, a tune already coming up when the Baader-Meinhof people explained why they were making terrorist acts. They said it was because of the domination of capitalism and especially the United States. And it's the same feeling we now face in the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist scene. Pandora's box has been opened."
"That is why all these films are coming up," agrees Walsh. "Maybe we have to have a conversation with ourselves about what our notion of terrorism is. What we initially thought about al-Qa'ida after September 11 is probably very different, more complicated and more real now.
We have to look at the people's backgrounds. But I'm sitting here talking in a Soho coffee shop.
I'm not in Israel, so it's obnoxious and glib of me to say that. All we're doing is making cinema.
But we're doing it for hopeful reasons.
There's nothing so strange as feeling empathy in a cinema for someone you initially thought you couldn't connect with, and understanding, a tiny bit, how they got to such a point.
Then they become human. That's the only way out of this impasse we're in."
London Film Festival screenings: 'Bullet in the Head', tonight at 6.30pm and tomorrow at 4.30pm, Brixton Ritzy; 'The Baader Meinhof Complex', 26 October and 28 October, Odeon West End.
'Hunger' opens on limited release on 31 October, and 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' on 25 November
The Baader-Meinhof gang, IRA hunger-strikers, ETA and Che Guevara: terrorists or freedom fighters? At the London Film Festival, you decide. Nick Hasted reports.
When the Twin Towers fell seven years ago, the expectation was that cinema screens would soon be swamped by yet more of the jabbering Arab madmen Hollywood already favoured as villains. Instead, the theme of this year's London Film Festival springs from a series of films which show sympathy for the terrorist, humanising those who commit inhuman acts.
It is the first great wave of 1970s terrorism that is mostly being examined. Downfall writer-producer Bernd Eichinger turns his attention from the Nazis to the violent backlash among their children in The Baader-Meinhof Complex. United Red Army takes us to Japan, and the titular, armed anti-US movement which tortured and killed "backsliders" and trained for rebellion in remote mountains, where the army besieged and killed them in 1972. Bullet in the Head takes a coolly objective look at the 2007 killing of two Spanish Civil Guards, allegedly by the ETA.
Finally, Steve McQueen's Hunger takes us inside the excrement-smeared cells of Bobby Sands and his fellow, fatal IRA hunger strikers.
Hunger's failure to provoke the usual outrage in the UK press at IRA films shows the safely historical nature of most of these tales. But their relevance to our post-September 11 world is implicit.
"Pictures are suddenly being made about this period's terrorism now because we needed time to reflect," Eichinger believes.
"I did The Baader-Meinhof Complex not because the time is right, but because the time is right in me.
It took that long to realise what really happened. It's like Hollywood making Vietnam films in the 1980s.
I met Oliver Stone in 1978, and he had already written Platoon. Later I told him it was a blessing it had taken 10 years."
After the appalled shock at the September 11 carnage, and the outrage in mainland Britain as one splintering of limbs by IRA bombs followed another barely a decade ago, what feels new about these films is the unflinching stare into the human faces who commit such acts.
There have been sympathetic IRA members in British cinema before. But no film has spent quite so long in their world as Hunger.
After 90 minutes inside the cold grey violence of the Maze prison, watching Michael Fassbender's Sands explain the political rationale for willing his body agonisingly to waste away, you find yourself understanding.
"That's what cinema does," says Hunger's co-writer, the playwright Enda Walsh. "We're allowed the time to bond with people we initially think are absolute monsters. With terrorism we only see the terrible violence being wrought.
I want people to feel the extraordinary dysfunction of that period. And hear a man who was incredibly articulate and funny, and was alive.
He was a human being, and he had warmth and attitude and dreams, and a belief. But his belief was a political belief, and his life began to circle around that one tiny belief, and he became willing to die for that, and kill for that. Giving someone a voice is an important thing.
Then we can respond to such men, and who they killed themselves."
The Baader-Meinhof Complex shares Walsh and McQueen's devotion to research, and adds a panoramic sense of the historical moment from which Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof launched their decade-long onslaught against the West German state, ending in hunger strike and suicide in 1977. These terrorists begin as hippie free-lovers fighting what they saw as a fascist German regime.
Like United Red Army, and Marco Bellochi's extraordinary 2003 requiem for Aldo Moro and his Red Army murderers, Good Morning, Night (an Italian trauma revisited in another LFF highlight, Il Divo), there is nostalgia for a lost world of left-wing ideals.
We have been drawn into this titillating company when the first dead banker is tossed like garbage from a car.
"You can be very human and a very big monster at the same time," Eichinger says. "Ulrike Meinhof was a very respected journalist, she had a husband and two kids and was 35. She had very bourgeois taste. And Baader was not without charm.
That's what I wanted to show.
These people were not demons.
They were middle-class with an education.
They're human, and then they did inhuman things.
People who say they are driven by idealism are sometimes the cruellest around.
They think they are entitled to kill, as long as it serves the purpose. They acted like their Nazi parents."
It is the careful fairness of these films that gives awful weight to the moments when ideals are put into bloody action.
During Sands's almost saintly martyrdom, Hunger shows an IRA gunman walk into the old people's home where a warder is visiting his feeble mother and blow his brains out.
Can Walsh find sympathy even for this murderer?
"You see that, and think: what an extraordinarily cold act," he says. "What's his history? What's making him do that?
Those men are aware of and feel all the history, the hardships of Irish people, it's in the DNA.
But some people would think they're bloody animals – terrorists. As soon you put something on screen, you feel you could be glorifying these men. That's why Hunger withholds emotion.
You don't want to make pornography out of a historical disaster."
You can tease a narrative from this year's LFF, starting with Steven Soderbergh's Che, in which Benicio Del Toro's charismatic freedom fighter Che Guevara outwits a superior, US-backed oppressive army and helps liberate Cuba.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex sees Che invoked and deadly force used in the context of central Europe, petering out in a 1977 hunger strike, the year Bobby Sands entered the Maze.
The missing next chapter is a film daring to humanise an al-Qa'ida member while doing justice to their monstrous acts.
Eichinger knows his film has contemporary relevance. "There was a certain chord, a tune already coming up when the Baader-Meinhof people explained why they were making terrorist acts. They said it was because of the domination of capitalism and especially the United States. And it's the same feeling we now face in the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist scene. Pandora's box has been opened."
"That is why all these films are coming up," agrees Walsh. "Maybe we have to have a conversation with ourselves about what our notion of terrorism is. What we initially thought about al-Qa'ida after September 11 is probably very different, more complicated and more real now.
We have to look at the people's backgrounds. But I'm sitting here talking in a Soho coffee shop.
I'm not in Israel, so it's obnoxious and glib of me to say that. All we're doing is making cinema.
But we're doing it for hopeful reasons.
There's nothing so strange as feeling empathy in a cinema for someone you initially thought you couldn't connect with, and understanding, a tiny bit, how they got to such a point.
Then they become human. That's the only way out of this impasse we're in."
London Film Festival screenings: 'Bullet in the Head', tonight at 6.30pm and tomorrow at 4.30pm, Brixton Ritzy; 'The Baader Meinhof Complex', 26 October and 28 October, Odeon West End.
'Hunger' opens on limited release on 31 October, and 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' on 25 November