About

When The Third Generation premiered, the responses were violent: Fassbinder received death threats, a projectionist at one screening was beaten unconscious, and people attacked a screen with acid at another. An acerbic comedy about terrorism, the film was Fassbinder's response to the RAF's kidnapping and murder of an industrialist and the subsequent deaths of the Baader-Meinhof Gang (which he touched upon earlier in his segment for Germany in Autumn).The title refers to a third generation of urban terrorists in Germany, a cell of ineffectual bourgeois activists plotting to kidnap a wealthy mogul. Preoccupied with guns and outlandish costumes, the chic revolutionaries are oblivious to the fact that they are being manipulated for profit by the very forces they seek to destroy. The Third Generation explores Fassbinder's assertion that "terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defence measures to safeguard capitalism." The exceptional cast is comprised of Fassbinder stock players (Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Günther Kaufmann) as well as Eddie Constantine, Udo Kier and Jacques Rivette veteran Bulle Ogier (who did not speak a word of German).

MA15+ | Strong violence, drug references, coarse language and nudity

MA15+