"Germany in Autumn"
1978
Various German Directors

Eleven leading filmmakers collaborated on this protest against Fascist tendencies in West Germany by reflecting on the tragic events of Autumn, 1977, when public official Hanns Martin Schleyer was kidnapped and murdered by the Baader-Meinhof group, whose members mysteriously died in prison. The film's contents range from an elegiac sequence of the burial of the prisoners to newsreel clips of Rommel's cortege and a fictitious argument among TV executives about a controversial production of Antigone. In the amazing Fassbinder sequence, he interviews his mother, who first endorses the dictatorship and then physically abuses her boyfriend. The contradictions in the film "belong to one nation: only if all the country's contradictions are together, can you accept this history and understand it" (Alexander Kluge). Screenplay by Heinrich Boll and Peter Steinbach. Directed by Alf Brusellin, Bernhard Sinkel, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Maximiliane Mainka, Peter Schubert, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupe, Hans Peter Cloos and Volker Schloendorff.  134 minutes.